A Short History of Greek Philosophy

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[181]

He also, like Protagoras, published a treatise in which he expounded
his fundamental principles, and like Protagoras, he preceded it with a
striking if somewhat ironical title, and an apophthegm in which he
summarised his doctrine. The title of his work was _Of the
Non-Existent_, that is, _Of Nature_, and {93} his dictum, "Nothing
exists, or if anything exists, it cannot be apprehended by man, and
even if it could be apprehended, the man who apprehended it could not
expound or explain it to his neighbour." In support of this strange
doctrine, Gorgias adopted the quibbling method of argument which had
been applied with some success to dialectical purposes by Zeno,
Melissus, and others (see above, pp. 44 _sqq._)

[185]

His chief argument to prove the first position laid down by him
depended on a double and ambiguous use of the word _is_; "That which is
not, _is_ the non-existent: the word _is_ must, therefore, be
applicable to it as truly as when we say That which is, _is_;
therefore, being is predicable of that which is not." So conversely he
proved not-being to be predicable of that which is. And in like manner
he made away with any possible assertions as to the finite or infinite,
the eternal or created, nature of that which is. Logic could supply
him with alternative arguments from whatever point he started, such as
would seem to land the question in absurdity. Hence his first position
was (he claimed) established, that 'Nothing is.'

To prove the second, that even if anything is, it cannot be known to
man, he argued thus: "If what a man thinks is not identical with what
is, plainly what is cannot be thought. And that what a man thinks is
not identical with what is can be {94} shown from the fact that
thinking does not affect the facts. You may imagine a man flying, or a
chariot coursing over the deep, but you do not find these things to
occur because you imagine them. Again, if we assume that what we think
is identical with what is, then it must be impossible to think of what
is not. But this is absurd; for we can think of such admittedly
imaginary beings as Scylla and Chimaera, and multitudes of others.
There is therefore no necessary relation between our thoughts and any
realities; we may believe, but we cannot prove, which (if any) of our
conceptions have relation to an external fact and which have not."

[187]

Nor thirdly, supposing any man had obtained an apprehension of what is
real, could he possibly communicate it to any one else. If a man saw
anything, he could not possibly by verbal description make clear what
it is he sees to a man who has never seen. And so if a man has not
himself the apprehension of reality, mere words from another cannot
possibly give him any idea of it. He may imagine he has the same idea
as the speaker, but where is he going to get the common test by which
to establish the identity?

Without attempting to follow Gorgias further, we can see plainly enough
the object and purport of the whole doctrine. Its main result is to
_isolate_. It isolates each man from his fellows; he cannot tell {95}
what they know or think, they cannot reach any common ground with him.
It isolates him from nature; he cannot tell what nature is, he cannot
tell whether he knows anything of nature or reality at all. It
isolates him from himself; he cannot tell for certain what relation
exists (if any) between what he imagines he perceives at any moment and
any remembered or imagined previous experiences; he cannot be sure that
there ever were any such experiences, or what that self was (if
anything) which had them, or whether there was or is any self
perceiving anything.

Let us imagine the moral effect on the minds of the ablest youth of
Greece of such an absolute collapse of belief. The philosophic
scepticism did not deprive them of their appetites or passions; it did
not in the least alter their estimate of the prizes of success, or the
desirability of wealth and power. All it did was to shatter the
invisible social bonds of reverence and honour and truth and justice,
which in greater or less degree act as a restraining force upon the
purely selfish appetites of men. Not only belief in divine government
disappeared, but belief in any government external or internal; justice
became a cheating device to deprive a man of what was ready to his
grasp; good-faith was stupidity when it was not a more subtle form of
deceit; morality was at best a mere convention which a man might cancel
if {96} he pleased; the one reality was the appetite of the moment, the
one thing needful its gratification; society, therefore, was universal
war, only with subtler weapons.

Of course Protagoras and Gorgias were only notable types of a whole
horde of able men who in various ways, and with probably less clear
notions than these men of the drift or philosophic significance of
their activity, helped all over Greece in the promulgation of this new
gospel of self-interest. Many Sophists no doubt troubled themselves
very little with philosophical questions; they were 'agnostics,'
know-nothings; all they professed to do was to teach some practical
skill of a verbal or rhetorical character. They had nothing to do with
the nature or value of ideals; they did not profess to say whether any
end or aim was in itself good or bad, but given an end or aim, they
were prepared to help those who hired them to acquire a skill which
would be useful towards attaining it.

But whether a philosophy or ultimate theory of life be expressly stated
or realised by a nation or an individual, or be simply ignored by them,
there always is some such philosophy or theory underlying their action,
and that philosophy or theory tends to work itself out to its logical
issue in action, whether men openly profess it or no. And the theory
of negation of law in nature or in man which underlay {97} the
sophistic practice had its logical and necessary effect on the social
structure throughout Greece, in a loosening of the bonds of religion,
of family reverence and affection, of patriotism, of law, of honour.
Thucydides in a well-known passage (iii. 82) thus describes the
prevalent condition of thought in his own time, which was distinctively
that of the sophistic teaching: "The common meaning of words was turned
about at men's pleasure; the most reckless bravo was deemed the most
desirable friend; a man of prudence and moderation was styled a coward;
a man who listened to reason was a good-for-nothing simpleton. People
were trusted exactly in proportion to their violence and
unscrupulousness, and no one was so popular as the successful
conspirator, except perhaps one who had been clever enough to outwit
him at his own trade, but any one who honestly attempted to remove the
causes of such treacheries was considered a traitor to his party. As
for oaths, no one imagined they were to be kept a moment longer than
occasion required; it was, in fact, an added pleasure to destroy your
enemy if you had managed to catch him through his trusting to your
word."

These are the words not of Plato, who is supposed often enough to allow
his imagination to carry him beyond his facts about the Sophists as
about others, nor are they the words of a satiric poet such as {98}
Aristophanes. They are the words of the most sober and philosophic of
Greek historians, and they illustrate very strikingly the tendency,
nay, the absolute necessity, whereby the theories of philosophers in
the closet extend themselves into the market-place and the home, and
find an ultimate realisation of themselves for good or for evil in the
'business and bosoms' of the common crowd.

It is not to be said that the individualistic and iconoclastic movement
which the Sophists represented was wholly bad, or wholly unnecessary,
any more (to again quote a modern instance) than that the French
Revolution was. There was much, no doubt, in the traditional religion
and morality of Greece at that time which represented obsolete and
antiquated conditions, when every city lived apart from its neighbours
with its own narrow interests and local cults and ceremonials. Greece
was ceasing to be an unconnected crowd of little separate communities;
unconsciously it was preparing itself for a larger destiny, that of
conqueror and civiliser of East and West. This scepticism, utterly
untenable and unworkable on the lines extravagantly laid down by its
leading teachers, represented the birth of new conditions of thought
and action adapted to the new conditions of things. On the surface,
and accepted literally, it seemed to deny the possibility of knowledge;
it threatened to destroy humanity and {99} civilisation. But its
strength lay latent in an implied denial only of what was merely
traditional; it denied the finality of purely Greek preconceptions; it
was laying the foundations of a broader humanity. It represented the
claim of a new generation to have no dogma or assumption thrust on it
by mere force, physical or moral. "_I_ too am a man," it said; "_I_
have rights; _my_ reason must be convinced." This is the fundamental
thought at the root of most revolutions and reformations and revivals,
and the thought is therefore a necessary and a just one.

Unfortunately it seems to be an inevitable condition of human affairs
that nothing new, however necessary or good can come into being out of
the old, without much sorrow and many a birth-pang. The extravagant,
the impetuous, the narrow-minded on both sides seize on their points of
difference, raise them into battle-cries, and make what might be a
peaceful regeneration a horrid battlefield of contending hates. The
Christ when He comes brings not peace into the world, but a sword. And
men of evil passions and selfish ambitions are quick on both sides to
make the struggle of old and new ideals a handle for their own
indulgence or their own advancement; the Pharisees and the Judases
between them make the Advent in some of its aspects a sorry spectacle.

A reconciler was wanted who should wed what {100} was true in the new
doctrine of individualism with what was valuable in the old doctrine of
universal and necessary truth; who should be able to say, "Yes, I
acknowledge that your individual view of things must be reckoned with,
and mine, and everybody else's; and for that very reason do I argue for
a universal and necessary truth, because the very truth for you as an
individual is just this universal." The union and identification of
the Individual and Universal,--this paradox of philosophy is the
doctrine of Socrates.

{101}

CHAPTER XI

SOCRATES

_The crisis of philosophy--Philosophic midwifery--The wisest of
men--The gadfly of Athens--Justice, beauty, utility--Virtue is
knowledge_

The sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to descend into the
practical interests and personal affairs of men, it followed that any
further step in philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could
only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy, as an analysis of
the data of perception or of nature, had issued in a social and moral
chaos. Only by brooding on the moral chaos could the spirit of truth
evoke a new order; only out of the moral darkness could a new
intellectual light be made to shine. The social and personal anarchy
seemed to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophy of nature; if
ever the philosophy of nature was to be recovered it must be through a
revision of the theory of morals. If it could be proved that the
doctrine of individualism, of isolation, which the analysis of a
Protagoras or a Gorgias had reached, was not only _unlivable_ but
unthinkable,--carried the seeds of its own destruction, theoretical as
well as practical, within {102} itself,--then the analysis of
_perception_, from which this moral individualism issued, might itself
be called to submit to revision, and a stable point of support in the
moral world might thus become a centre of stability for the
intellectual and the physical also.

By a perfectly logical process, therefore, the crisis of philosophy
produced in Greece through the moral and social chaos of the sophistic
teaching had two issues, or perhaps we may call it one issue, carried
out on the one side with a less, on the other side with a greater
completeness. The less complete reaction from sophistic teaching
attempted only such reconstruction of the moral point of view as should
recover a law or principle of general and universally cogent character,
whereon might be built anew a _moral_ order without attempting to
extend the inquiry as to a universal principle into the regions of
abstract truth or into physics. The more complete and logical
reaction, starting, indeed, from a universal principle in morals,
undertook a logical reconstruction on the recovered universal basis all
along the line of what was knowable.

To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point of stability in the
world of morals, and by a system of attack, invented by himself, to
deal in such a manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare the
way for his successors, when the time was ripe for a more extended
exposition of the new point of {103} view. Those who in succession to
him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in
the world of morals, only were called the _Incomplete Socratics_.
Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the
knowable, the _Complete Socratics_, were the two giants of philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle.

Greek philosophy then marks with the life of Socrates a parting of the
ways in two senses: _first_, inasmuch as with him came the reaction
from a physical or theoretical philosophy, having its issue in a moral
chaos; and _second_, inasmuch as from him the two great streams of
later philosophy issued--the one a philosophy of law or universals in
_action_, the other a philosophy of law or universals in _thought_ and
_nature_ as well.

Socrates, son of Sophroniscus a sculptor and Phaenarete a midwife, was
born at Athens in or about the year 469 B.C. His parents were probably
poor, for Socrates is represented as having been too poor to pay the
fees required for instruction by the Sophists of his time. But in
whatever way acquired or assimilated, it is certain that there was
little of the prevalent culture in cultivated Athens with which
Socrates had not ultimately a working acquaintance.

Among a people distinguished generally for their handsome features and
noble proportions, Socrates was a notable exception. His face was
squat and {104} round, his eyes protruding, his lips thick; he was
clumsy and uncouth in appearance, careless of dress, a thorough
'Bohemian,' as we should call him. He was, however, gifted with an
uncommon bodily vigour, was indifferent to heat and cold, by
temperament moderate in food and drink, yet capable on occasion of
drinking most people 'under the table.' He was of an imperturbable
humour, not to be excited either by danger or by ridicule. His vein of
sarcasm was keen and trenchant, his natural shrewdness astonishing, all
the more astonishing because crossed with a strange vein of mysticism
and a curious self-forgetfulness. As he grew up he felt the visitation
of a mysterious internal voice, to which or to his own internal
communings he would sometimes be observed to listen in abstracted
stillness for hours. The voice within him was felt as a restraining
force, limiting his action in various ways, but leaving him free to
wander about among his fellows, to watch their doings and interpret
their thoughts, to question unweariedly his fellows of every class,
high and low, rich and poor, concerning righteousness and justice and
goodness and purity and truth. He did not enter on his philosophic
work with some grand general principle ready-made, to which he was
prepared to fit the facts by hook or by crook. Rather he compared
himself to his mother, the midwife; he sought to help others to {105}
express themselves; he had nothing to tell them, he wanted them to tell
him. This was the irony of Socrates, the eternal _questioning_, which
in time came to mean in people's minds what the word does now. For it
was hard, and grew every year harder, to convince people that so subtle
a questioner was as ignorant as he professed to be; or that the man who
could touch so keenly the weak point of all other men's answers, had no
answer to the problems of life himself.

In striking contrast, then, to the method of all previous philosophies,
Socrates busied himself to begin with, not with some general
intellectual _principle_, but with a multitude of different _people_,
with their notions especially on moral ideas, with the meaning or
no-meaning which they attached to particular words,--in short, with the
individual, the particular, the concrete, the every-day. He did not at
all deny that he had a purpose in all this. On the contrary, he openly
professed that he was in search of the lost universal, the lost _law_
of men's thoughts and actions. He was convinced that life was not the
chaos that the Sophists made out; that nobody really believed it to be
a chaos; that, on the contrary, everybody had a meaning and purport in
his every word and act, which could be made intelligible to himself and
others, if you could only get people to think out clearly what they
really meant. Philosophy {106} had met her destruction in the busy
haunts of men; there where had been the bane, Socrates' firm faith
sought ever and everywhere the antidote.

This simple enough yet profound and far-reaching practice of Socrates
was theorised in later times as a logical method, known to us as
_Induction_, or the discovery of universal laws or principles out [195]
of an accumulation of particular facts. And thus Aristotle, with his
technical and systematising intellect, attributes two main innovations
in philosophy to Socrates; the _Inductive_ process of reasoning, and
the establishing of _General Ideas_ or Definitions upon or through this
process. This, true enough as indicating what was latent in the
Socratic method, and what was subsequently actually developed out of it
by Aristotle himself, is nevertheless probably an anachronism if one
seeks to represent it as consciously present in Socrates' mind.
Socrates adopted the method unconsciously, just because he wanted to
get at the people about him, and through them at what they thought. He
was the pioneer of Induction rather than its inventor; he created, so
to speak, the raw material for a theory of induction and definition; he
knew and cared nothing about such theories himself.

A story which may or may not be true in fact is put in Socrates' mouth
by Plato, as to the cause which first started him on his "search for
definitions." {107} One of his friends, he tells us, named Chaerephon,
went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and asked whether there was
anybody wiser than Socrates. The answer was given that there was none
wiser. This answer was reported to Socrates, who was much astonished,
his own impression being that he had no wisdom or knowledge at all. So
with a view to prove the oracle wrong he went in succession to various
people of eminence and reputation in the various walks of
life,--statesmen and poets and handicraftsmen and others,--in the
expectation that they would show, on being questioned, such a knowledge
of the principles on which their work was based as would prove their
superior wisdom. But to his astonishment he found one after another of
these men wanting in any apprehension of principles at all. They
seemed to work by a kind of haphazard or 'rule of thumb,' and indeed
felt annoyed that anything more should be expected of them. From which
at the last Socrates came to the conclusion that perhaps the oracle was
right in this sense at least, that, if he himself knew nothing more
than his fellows, he was at least conscious of his own ignorance,
whereas they were not.

Whether this tale may not itself be a specimen of Socrates' irony we
cannot tell, but at all events it illustrates from another point of
view the real meaning of Socrates' life. He, at least, was not content
{108} to rest in haphazard and rule of thumb; he was determined to go
on till he found out what was the law or principle of men's acts and
words. The ignorance of others as to any such law or principle in
their own case did not convince him that there was no such law or
principle; only it was there (he thought) working unconsciously, and
therefore in a way defencelessly. And so he compares himself at times
to a gadfly, whose function it is to sting and irritate people out of
their easy indifference, and force them to ask themselves what they
were really driving at. Or again, he compares himself to the
torpedo-fish, because he tried to give people a shock whenever they
attempted to satisfy him with shallow and unreal explanations of their
thoughts and actions.

The disinterested self-sacrificing nobility of Socrates' life, thus
devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the
enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and
pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends,
the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested
enemies, the satires of poets; and lastly, the story of the final
attack by an ungrateful people on their one great teacher, of his
unjust condemnation and heroic death--all this we must pass over here.
The story is in outline, at least, a familiar one, and it is one of the
noblest in history. What is more to {109} the purpose for us is to
ascertain how far his search for definitions was successful; how far he
was able to

Take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them;

how far, in short, he was able to evolve a law, a universal principle,
out of the confused babel of common life and thought and speech, strong
enough and wide enough on which to build a new order for this world, a
new hope for the world beyond.

We have said that Socrates made the individual and the concrete the
field of his search. And not only did he look to individuals for
light, he looked to each individual specifically in that aspect of his
character and faculty which was most particular to himself. That is to
say, if he met a carpenter, it was on his carpentering that he
questioned him; if a sculptor, on his practice as a sculptor; if a
statesman, on his statesmanship. In short, he did not want general
vague theories on subjects of which his interlocutors could not be
supposed to have any special experience or knowledge; he interrogated
each on the subject which he knew best.

And what struck him, in contrast to the confusion and uncertainty and
isolation of the sophistic teaching 'in the air,' was that when you get
a man to talk on his own trade, which he _knows_, as is proved by the
actual work he produces, you find invariably two {110} things--_first_,
that the skill is the man's _individual_ possession no doubt, the
result of inborn capacity and continuous training and practice; but
_second_, that just in proportion to that individual skill is the man's
conviction that his skill has reference to a _law_ higher than himself,
outside himself. If the man whom Socrates interviewed was a skilful
statesman, he would tell you he sought to produce obedience to _law_ or
right among the citizens; if he was a skilful sculptor, he produced
_beautiful_ things; if he was a skilful handicraftsman, he produced
_useful_ things. Justice, beauty, utility; these three words in
different ways illustrated the existence of something always realising
itself no doubt in individuals and their works, but nevertheless
exercising a governing influence upon these to such a degree that this
ideal something might be conceived as _prior_ to the individual or his
work; or secondly, as _inherent_ in them and giving value to them; or
thirdly, as coming in at the end as the _perfection_ or completion of
them. This law or ideal then had a threefold aspect in its own nature,
being conceivable as Justice, as Beauty, as Utility; it had a threefold
aspect in relation to the works produced in accordance with it, as the
cause _producing_, the cause _inhering_, the cause completing or
_perfecting_.

We may therefore conceive Socrates as arguing thus: "You clever
Sophists, when we let you take {111} us into the region of abstract
talk, have a knack of so playing with words that in the end we don't
seem to know anything for certain, especially on such subjects as we
have hitherto thought the most important, such as God and right and
truth and justice and purity. We seem to be perfectly defenceless
against you; and what is more, any smart youth, whose opinion on any
practical matter no one would think of taking, can very soon pick up
the trick from you, and bewilder plain people really far wiser than
himself by his clever argumentation; all going to prove that there is
nothing certain, nothing real, nothing binding; nothing but opinions
and conventions and conscious or unconscious humbug in the universe.

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