Part 6

Another notable peculiarity of the Socratic method is, that, while in the majority of cases the discussion seems to end in unveiling the ignorance of pretenders to knowledge, and, as we express it, taking the conceit out of them, in other cases the young examinee, instead of being convicted of ignorance, is pleasantly surprised at finding that he knows more than he suspected, and goes home with the comfortable assurance that he needs not to sink his bucket into any foreign shaft, but really possesses a well of living waters in his own soul, if he will only work it faithfully, and be careful to remove obstructions. The unveiling of this hidden fountain of knowledge to the humble and thoughtful inquirer is the famous obstetric process of which Socrates humorously boasted himself a practiser. As his mother’s profession was to help nature to bring her physical births easily and happily to the light, so her son’s business was to practise intellectual obstetrics, and help people to deliver themselves of their intellectual offspring. In this method of talking there is involved the whole philosophy of the best art of teaching; even as the word _education_ by its {67} etymological affinities plainly indicates, in so far as it signifies to “draw out,” not to “put in.” We see here again the practical issue of that fine erotic passion for human beings, that divine rage for humanity, which was the inspiration of his life, and put into his hands the golden key to the hearts of all teachable men. While he was the most exact and scientific, he was, at the same time, the least dogmatic and egotistic of moral teachers. He did not desire so much that men should placidly submit to receive his dogmas, as that they should be trained to the grand human function of shaping out the universal divine idea, or at least some part of it, each man for himself, according to his capacity. He wished to be no more than the trencher of the moral soil, not the planter of the seed; the seed lay already in the clod, which being broken, the outward influences of sun and air and dew excited, from within the growth of an essentially divine germ.

Let it be noted under this head, in conclusion, that it was essential to the reformatory mission of Socrates that he should teach without a fee. The man who practises a trade or a profession may justly demand the wages of his labour; but to preach moral truth, to protest against public sins, and convert sinners, is no profession for which the world can be expected to pay. Those who practise remunerative trades and professions supply the immediate wants of the world, and are paid in the world’s coin; but for this payment they become the slaves of the masters who employ them, and must give the rightful value for the stipulated reward. But a prophet, or an apostle, or a teacher of moral truth in any shape, knows that he is bringing an article to the {68} market for which there may be no demand; he knows further that, by his mere attitude as a preacher, he is assuming a superiority over his brethren which is inconsistent with the equality of position and right which the act of buying and selling supposes in the parties concerned. He must, above all things, be free in his function; and to accept money from no one is the first condition of moral independence. Of this the father of the faithful, as we read in the Book of Genesis, gave an illustrious example, when he refused to take any of the booty offered to him by the king of Sodom, “lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich.” And for the same reason manifestly, neither the Hebrew prophets nor the apostle Paul were paid for their preaching, nor indeed in the nature of things could he. Savonarola was not paid for publicly preaching against the vicious lives of the Popes; Luther was not paid for his manly protest against the prostitution of Divine grace in the sale of pardons for tinkling silver; and in the same way Socrates was not, and could not be, paid for his mission of convincing the cleverest persons in Athens of ignorance, shallowness, and all sorts of inadequacy. In fact he did not come forward as a professional teacher at all. He issued no flaming advertisements. He only said that he was a man in search of wisdom, and would be glad of any honest man’s company and co-operation in the search. The Sophists in this and in so many other respects were altogether different. They made large professions and accepted large fees.

It remains now, in order to complete our sketch, that we give some indication of the theological {69} opinions and religious life of Socrates; then that we point shortly to his political opinions and public life; and lastly, that we attempt a just estimate of the circumstances and agencies which led to his singularly notable and noble exit from the brilliant stage where he had for so many years been the prominent performer. That Socrates because he was a moralist should have been also a theologian is not absolutely necessary; it is natural, however; so natural, indeed, that when a great popular teacher, like Confucius, though not theoretically an atheist, practically ignores religion, we cannot but accept this as a sign of some mental idiosyncrasy alike unfortunate for the teacher and the taught. For to deny a First Cause, or not to assert it decidedly, is as if a man, professing to be a botanist, should describe only the character of the flower and the fruit as what appears above ground, while either from stupidity or cross-grained perversity, he ignores the root and the seed, without which the whole beauty of the blossom and the utility of the fruit could not exist; or, to take another simile, it is as if a man should curiously describe the cylinders and the pistons and the wheels, the furnaces, the boilers, and the condensing chambers of a steam-engine, and while doing so studiously avoid mentioning the name of James Watt. One would say, in such a case, that, while the describer deserved great praise for the clearness and consistency with which he had set forth the sequence of mechanical operations that make up the engine, he had left an unsatisfactory impression on the mind, by omitting the grand fact which rendered the existence of such an engine possible, viz., a creative intellect. We should say that he was a good mechanician and an {70} eloquent expounder of machinery, but we could not call him a philosopher; he had stopped short, in fact, at the very point where philosophy finds its thrill of peculiar delight at the vestibule of ultimate causes. To the scientific man, in the same way, who is either a speculative atheist or who studiously avoids any allusion to an original plastic Intellect as the Ultimate Cause of all things and the Primary Force of all forces, the universe is merely a vast unexplained machine, performing a closely concatenated series of unintelligible operations, tabulated under the name of Laws; and to the moralist, who is only a moralist, society is a machine of another kind, whose wheels and pulleys and bands may be curiously described, and must be kept in nice order, but of whose genesis he can give no intelligible account. It follows, therefore, that a philosophical moralist must be a theist, and that not only on speculative grounds, but from this practical consideration also, that from no source can the Moral Law derive the unity and the authority which is essential to it, so efficiently as from the all-controlling and unifying primary fact which we call GOD. Any other keystone contrived by ingenious wits to give consistency to the social arch is artificial; this alone is natural.[70.1] Accordingly we find that from the days of Moses and the Hebrew prophets, through Solon and Pythagoras to Socrates and Plato; from Socrates and {71} Plato through the Apostles and Evangelists and the grand army of Church Fathers, to Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the other great Reformers of the sixteenth century; from the great Churchmen of the Reformation through Leibnitz and Spinoza, and Locke and Butler and Kant, down to the very recent and low platform of Paley and Austin, the foundation of Morals has been laid in Theology. And of all great theological moralists there is none who is at once more theoretically distinct and more practically consistent than Socrates. To him is to be traced the first scientific expression of the great argument from design,--an argument, no doubt, which is as old as the human heart, and exists in all unperverted minds without being formulated, but which, in a logical age and among a critical people, not the less demands to be set forth, link by link, and illustrated in detail as Socrates does in the following dialogue, a dialogue which we shall translate at length, at once as a notable landmark in theological literature, and as a good illustration of the philosopher’s favourite method of bringing out a grave truth from a familiar colloquy.

“There was one Aristodemus, a little man, well known in Athens, not only as one who never either sacrificed to the gods or used divination, but as laughing and jeering at those who did so. This man Socrates one day happened to meet, and knowing his tendencies addressed him at once thus. Tell me, Aristodemus, are there any persons whom you admire particularly for their wisdom? That there are, he replied. Well, said Socrates, let me hear the names of a few. Homer, said the other, for epic poetry; Melanippides for dithyrambs; for tragedy, Sophocles; {72} for sculpture, Polycleitus; for painting, Zeuxis. Then tell me this, which is worthy of the greater admiration, the artist who makes figures which have neither life nor intelligence, or He who makes animals that have both life and intelligence? This artist, of course, said Aristodemus; for such animals would not be made by chance, but by calculation. Well then, of two classes of things, whereof the one has manifestly been constructed for some useful end, and the other, so far as one can see, for no end at all, which would you call the product of calculation? Of course the things made for some useful end. Now answer me this,--He who made men at first, and gave them senses to bring them into contact with the outward world, eyes to see and ears to hear, did He furnish them with these organs for a useful purpose or for no purpose at all? and as for odours and smells, if we had not nostrils, so far as we are concerned they might as well not have existed; and how could we have had any perception of sweet and sour, and all agreeable tastes, had we not been furnished with a tongue to take, cognisance of such sensations? Observe further, how the eye, being naturally a tender organ, is supplied with eyelids as a house with a door, which may be opened to receive pleasant guests, and closed when danger approaches; the eye-lashes also manifestly serve as a sort of sieve to prevent the passage of any injurious particles which the wind might drive against the pupil, while the eyebrows form a sort of coping or fence which prevents the sweat from the forehead flowing into the organ of vision. Not less wonderful is it that the ear is so formed as to be able to take in an uncounted number of various sounds, and {73} yet is never filled; and in the mouth we are instantly met with the remarkable fact in all animals, that, while the front teeth, which take up the food, are formed for cutting, the back teeth, which receive it from them, are adapted for the after operation of grinding; observe also the situation of the great organ of nourishment, close to eyes and the nostrils, which keep a watch against the approach of unhealthy food; while on the other hand, that part of the food which is useless for nutrition, being naturally offensive, is carried off by ducts and passages placed at as great a distance as possible from the organs of sensation. All these contrivances, so manifestly proceeding from a purpose, can we doubt whether we should call works of chance or of intellect? Looking at the matter in this light, certainly, said the little man, I can have no hesitation in saying these are the contrivances of a very wise and benevolent designer. Consider further, continued Socrates, how there is implanted in all animals a desire of continuing their species, how the parents have a pleasure in breeding, and the offspring are above all things distinguished by the love of life and the fear of death. These also, he said, seem to be the contrivances of some Being who wished that animals should exist. Then, continued Socrates, consider yourself--do you believe that there is something in you which we call Intelligence? and, if in you, whence came it? is there no intelligence in the world outside of you? Your body, you perceive, is made up of certain very small portions of solid and liquid elements, of which vast quantities exist beyond you, and of which your body is a part; and if your body is taken from such a vast storehouse of matter, is your mind the only {74} part of you which is underived from any source, and which you seem to have snapped up somehow by good luck? and is it possible, or in any way conceivable, that all this gigantic and beautifully ordered form of things which we call the world should have jumped into its present consistency from mere random forces without calculation? Scarcely; but then I do not see the authors of the world as I do of works which men produce here. As little do you see your own soul, said Socrates, which yet is the lord of your body, so that, taking your own logic strictly, you must conclude that you do all things by chance and nothing by calculation. Well then, said Aristodemus, the fact is that I do not despise the Divine Power,[74.1] but I esteem all Divine natures too mighty and too glorious to require any service from me. For this reason rather they justly claim our regard, said Socrates, their might and their glory being the natural measure of the honour which they ought to receive from us. Well, be assured, Socrates, that if I could only imagine that the gods had any concern for us, I should not neglect them. And do you really mean to affirm that they actually have no concern for us? Why, consider what they have done for you; in the first place giving you an erect stature, which they gave to no other animal, a stature by virtue of which you not only see better before you, but can look upwards also, and defend yourself in many ways which with downcast eyes were impossible; and in the next place, not content with giving you feet, like other animals, they have furnished {75} you with hands also, the organs by which we practise most of those acts which manifest our superiority to them;[75.1] and, to crown all, while other animals have a tongue, man alone possesses this organ of such a nature that by touching the hollow of the mouth with it in various ways he can mould the emitted voice into articulate speech, significant of what thought wishes to communicate to thought. Again, the love which is a passion that stirs other animals only at certain seasons of the year, man is capable of enjoying at all seasons; and not only do our capacities of bodily efficiency and enjoyment so far surpass those of other animals, but God (ὁ Θεός) has implanted in man a soul of the most transcendent capacity. For what other animal, I ask, has a soul which enables it to own and to acknowledge the existence of the gods, who have disposed all this mighty order of things of which we are a part? What race of animals except man pays any worship to the gods?[75.2] What animal possesses a soul so fit as that of man to guard against the inclemencies of the weather, to prevent or cure disease, to train to bodily strength or to intellectual acuteness? and what animal when it has learned anything can retain the lesson with equal tenacity? Is it not rather plain that, compared with other animals, men live really as gods upon the earth, so strikingly superior {76} are they both in bodily and intellectual endowments; for neither could a creature with man’s reason, but with the body of an ox, have been able fully to execute its purposes; nor, again, could a creature with human hands, but without human intellect, be able to go beyond the brute stage of animal life; and after all this, heaped up as you are with bounties and blessings from all sides, will you still persist in thinking that you are a creature neglected by the gods? What, I ask, do you expect them to do for you before they shall have any just claim to your regard? I shall expect them, replied Aristodemus, to do for me what you say they do for you, to send me advisers as to what I ought to do and what I ought not to do. Be it so; and do you think that your case is not already provided for, when the gods on being consulted through divination give an answer which concerns all Athenians? or do you imagine when the Greeks, or the whole human race, are warned of coming evil by a portent, that you are specially excluded from the benefit of that divine indication? Do you imagine that the gods would have implanted in all human breasts the feeling that they are able to do us good or evil, if they did not possess this power, or that men constantly being deceived by this notion would not by this time have discovered the delusion? Have you not observed also that the wisest nations and the most stable governments are those which are the most religious, and that individual men are then most piously inclined when their reason is strongest and their passions most under control? Believe me, my dear young friend, that as your soul within you moves and manages the body even as it wills, so we ought {77} to believe that the Intelligence which indwelleth the whole of things makes and designs all things according to its good pleasure, and not to imagine that while our human eye can reach many miles in vision, the Divine eye should not be able to see all things at a glance, nor that, while your soul can manage matters not here in Athens only, but in Egypt and Sicily, the intelligence of the Divine Being (τοῦ Θεοῦ) is not able to exercise a comprehensive care at once over the whole and each individual In the same way therefore as by performing acts of kindness to men you come to learn those who are disposed to show kindness to you in return, and as by conferring with men on important matters you know who are able to give sound advice on such matters, if with this disposition you approach the gods, making trial of them if belike they are willing to reveal to you any of those things which are naturally unknown to men, then you will certainly learn by experience that the Divine nature (τὸ θεῖον) is of such a kind as to be able to see all things, and to hear all things, and to be everywhere present, and to have a providential care of all things.”

So concludes this interesting dialogue, and the sympathetic reporter in winding it up adds, “The tendency of such discourses appears to me plainly to induce men to abstain from unholy and unjust and foul deeds, not only when they are seen of men, but also in a lonely wilderness, living constantly under the conviction that whatever men do, and in whatever place, they can in nowise escape the eye of the Omniscient.”