Part 2

“The kingdom of heaven is within you” is a pregnant Socratic maxim as well as a profound evangelic text, and, in reference to our present subject, simply means that, while the most brilliant discoveries of physical science only minister to our comforts, our conveniences, and our furnishings, moral science alone can teach us to be men; for we are men by what we are, not by what we have. Gas-pipes, and water-pipes, spinning-jennies, steamboats, steam-coaches, submarine telegraphs, photographs, oleographs, oxyhydrogen, blowpipes, and the thousand and one devices for using and controlling nature which we owe to advanced physical science, may adorn and improve life in many ways, may multiply production of all kinds infinitely, and facilitate the diffusion of intellectual as well as material benefits; but they have no originating power in what is highest; they can create neither thought nor character; they are the most useful of ministers, but the most unmeaning of masters. And there can be little doubt that, if Socrates were to rise from the grave at the present moment, while, with his, strong {21} common sense and keen eye for the practical, he would joyfully recognise all the wonderful material progress of which England and America make their boast, he would not the less feel himself constrained to utter an emphatic warning against the danger of estimating our national grandeur by the visible pomp of gigantic machinery and complex apparatus rather than by the invisible power of noble purpose and lofty design.

Such was the attitude of Socrates to the great teachers who since Thales downwards had preceded him in leading the intellectual advance of the most intellectual people of the ancient world. He stood forward as a teacher of moral science, as a preacher and philosophical missionary also; for in morals, the separation of theory from practice is an inconsistency of which only a feeble and imperfect nature is capable. Who, then, and of what quality, were his antagonists in the great regenerative work which he undertook? Not so much the physical philosophers, who might still pursue their researches or pamper their imaginations in their own speculative corners without disturbing the busy world, except in so far as they now and then might come into collision with theological orthodoxy, but the great untrained mass of the people themselves, and the pretentious array of a class of men who put themselves forward as their instructors,--the famous SOPHISTS. The word Sophists signifies professors of wisdom, in which sense Lucian calls our Saviour τὸν ἀνεσκολοπισμένον ἐκεῖνον σοφιστήν--that crucified Sophist--because He came forward as a public instructor professing to teach men wisdom. But as wisdom is a vague word (in fact σοφός in Greek signifies clever, and even {22} cunning as often as wise), we must consult the circumstances of time and place to know what it exactly meant in any particular instance. The generation immediately preceding Socrates, when the Sophists first became prominent, was the era of the great Persian wars, and of the notable uprising of national spirit and of popular power which that memorable struggle called forth. How fiercely the strife between the old aristocratic and the new democratic element in Greek society had been raging in the immediately preceding epoch, the poems of Theognis may serve sufficiently to indicate; and now that by the battle of Salamis the political importance of the middle and sub-middle classes had been blazoned forth before universal Greece in glowing characters, the democracy in great commercial cities like Athens at once started into an attitude of hitherto unsuspected significance. New aspirations had been created, new pretensions were put forth, and new guides were required for a large class of people who felt themselves as it were suddenly shooting up from pupilage into majority. Now what guides had a people, circumstanced as the Athenians then, were, to look to for direction? The Church in those days--if we may call it a Church--was not a teaching body; its moral efficacy was exercised through sacred ceremonial and pious hymns; its intellectual agency was almost null. And though gymnastics and music, including a certain amount of the most popular literary culture, were common, there were no institutions like our Universities, for the severe and systematic discipline of the thinking faculties. A cry went up from the heart of the people for prophets to enlighten them; but there were no schools {23} of the prophets. This state of things was the natural soil from which a class of self-constituted popular teachers would grow up; and these teachers were the Sophists. And if we ask further in detail what they taught, the answer will be furnished from the same sources that explain their existence. As the democracy brought them into existence, the demand of the democracy would be the measure of the kind and quality of the article which they were expected to supply; and the article which a democracy demands for the use of its public spokesmen is always the same,--a certain practical knowledge and shrewdness in the conduct of affairs, a certain ready sympathy with, popular prejudices and passions, a certain superficial dexterity in argument, and above all, a fluent and effective style of popular oratory. To supply these wants the acceptable teachers of the people would require to profess a knowledge of the great leading principles of law, a familiarity with political forms and the best methods of controlling masses of men into habits or fits of co-operation, a practical command of logic, so as to be able to turn the point of an argument, or entangle in a net of subtleties an inexperienced jury, and, as the crowning accomplishment, a faculty of speech, alert and unscrupulous, which might never lack a shift to give plausibility to a bad case, and should ever be ready to confound, overwhelm, and dazzle where it was hopeless to refute. Now it is easy to perceive that the lessons delivered by the professors of this wisdom, however acceptable to clever and ambitious young gentlemen eager to enter upon the arena of public life, could not, in the nature of the case, be conceived in any very exalted tone of morals or be framed so as to inculcate the formation {24} of any strictly honourable rules of conduct. The Sophists were mere tradesmen; they were paid for the furnishing of a certain article, and they had to supply that article, of the quality and in the way and manner which might be most agreeable to those on whose patronage they depended. They were therefore, as Socrates constantly pointed out, the slaves of the parties by whom they were paid; and if what their employers wanted was the show of wisdom rather than the substance, a ready command of words and arguments in preference to an earnest and severe search after truth, it was not to be expected that the majority of them would give themselves much concern to inculcate a severer wisdom. Tradesmen are seldom found acting upon principles which have a direct tendency to frighten customers from their shops. Not that there was anything necessarily bad or immoral in the profession or teaching of a Sophist; some of them, evidently, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, even on the witness of their great adversary Plato, were very proper and respectable gentlemen; few of them, perhaps, grossly immoral; and with those of them who, like Gorgias of Leontium, confined themselves strictly to the teaching of the rules of pure rhetoric and elocution, no fault could justly be found any more than with Quinctilian among the later Romans, or Principal Campbell of Aberdeen among ourselves. But it is plain, from the very nature of the case, that the Sophists, so far as they went a step beyond the province of strict rhetoric, were placed in a position which rendered their moral and philosophical teaching a matter of just concern to all who were interested in the education of the youth of Athens, and in the {25} character of her public men. Besides, among an impressible and excitable people like the Athenians, fond of display, and ambitious of popularity, the mere methodized art of talking, apart from any solid knowledge, and without any high moral inspiration, was a very dangerous engine to put into the hand of ambitious young politicians. And the fact unquestionably is, according to the concurrent testimony of Xenophon, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle,--in fact, of all antiquity,--that these public teachers generally did dispense very shallow and often very dangerous doctrine. They were the natural birth of an age of movement and innovation; and in such an age, along with much that may operate as a healthy stimulant to progressive thought, there is always present a drastic admixture of the merely analytic, sceptical, and destructive element, a negative force, strong to impugn the validity of ancient foundations, but weak to establish anything equally stable and effective in their place. By the negative and sceptical teachings of these men, Socrates found the youth of Athens shaken from their old moorings, and tossing about amid seas of perplexing doubt on the one hand, and unprincipled libertinism on the other. Every great principle of social order and human right that formerly had been received from venerated tradition, and believed by the co-operation of a healthy instinct with a hoary authority, was now denied; and the field was waiting for the appearance of a great constructive prophet, who should bring people back through steps of scientific reasoning to a living faith in those maxims of immutable morality which they had originally inherited with the blood from their fathers’ veins and the milk from their mothers’ breasts. {26} Such a great prophet now appeared, and his name was Socrates.[26.1]

We have now clearly before us the battle-field in which Socrates had to appear, and the opponents with whom he had to contend; we see also the cause for which he had to fight. This was nothing {27} less than the establishment of a firm philosophy of human life, a sure guide for human conduct, and a strong regulator of society. The way now lies open to inquire what special doctrine he taught in order to achieve victory in this struggle; and a careful perusal of Xenophon’s book, which we regard as the {28} only safe authority in the matter, leads to a generalized statement of the Socratic moral philosophy, comprised in the following two propositions:--

(I.) Man is naturally a sympathetic and a social animal. He has, no doubt, strong, self-preserving, self-asserting, and self-advancing instincts, which, if left without counteraction, would naturally lead to isolation or mutual hostility, and ultimate extermination; but these instincts of isolated individualism are met by yet stronger instincts of sympathy, love, and fellowship, in the ascendency of which the true humanity of man as distinguished from tigerhood and spiderhood consists.

(II.) Man is naturally a reasoning animal, and is only then truly a man when his passions are tempered and his conduct regulated by reason. The function of reason is the recognition and the realization of truth; truth recognised in speculation is science; {29} truth realized in action is a moral life and a well-ordered society.

These two propositions may appear to many persons now-a-days to contain nothing that is not very vague and very cheap; nevertheless, when looked into accurately and followed out unconditionally, they lead to most important practical consequences; in fact, while their consistent assertion under all circumstances necessarily leads up to a noble and a heroic life, their habitual denial as necessarily leads down to a base and a brutish life. Let us look at them therefore sharply in detail.

The first proposition, as the reader will readily perceive, is levelled directly against the selfish theory of morals which was advocated with more or less openness by many of the Greek Sophists, and was prominently put forth in this country, as is generally known, at the time of the great Civil War, by the celebrated Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. That stout speculator, in his treatise on “the Philosophical Elements of a True Citizen,” lays it down with a distinctness which admits of no qualification, that “all society is either for gain or for glory; that is, not so much for love of our fellows as for love of ourselves;” and again, a few pages further on in the same treatise, he puts forth the famous dictum that “the natural state of man is a war of all men against all men.” Against such a one-sided, unhuman, unworthy, and altogether false assertion, Socrates comes armed, not only with the whole force of a sympathetic, a social, and a benevolent nature, but with that healthy instinct and practical good sense, which in him was prophetic not so much of his immediate disciple Plato as of his great successor Aristotle. {30} In one of the conversations of the Memorabilia of which the subject is φιλία--a much wider word, let it be well noted, than the English “friendship,”--Critobulus, one of the young followers of the philosopher, is introduced as lamenting over the difficulty of making friends; and the views of Socrates follow in reply. We extract the whole passage:--

“What perplexes you, my young friend, said Socrates, seems to be that you have frequently seen even the best men, and of the most noble quality, quarrelling with one another, and fanning themselves into hostility, even more fierce than that which divides the most worthless members of society. Just so, said Critobulus, and not only this, but the best-ordered societies, and those States which seem to possess the most delicate sense of public honour, are often found to plunge into the most unjustifiable wars. Where, then, shall we find a place for social sympathy and true friendship? If the bad by their very nature cannot know what love means, if betwixt the bad and the good there can be no fellowship any more than betwixt fire and water, and if finally the good, who practise virtue most severely, in the ambitious contests of human life are still found for the most part envying one another and hating one another, among what class of men, I ask, are fellowship and good faith possible? But, said Socrates, this is by no means such a simple matter as you seem to think. Nature here as elsewhere has two sides. There is naturally implanted in men a social and sympathetic element; for they naturally need one another, and feel for one another, and help one another by co-operation; and alongside of this there exists also an element of hostility; for wherever a {31} great number of persons find their affections fixed on the same object, which they cannot all enjoy, opposition and war in reference to that object will naturally ensue. Hence strife and wrath and the passion for aggrandizement, and feelings of envy and dislike toward those who in the great competition of life are more successful than ourselves. Nevertheless, so strong is the sympathetic principle in nature, that it penetrates through all these barriers, and joins in bonds of brotherhood all the noble and the good.”

This passage deserves special prominence in every estimate of the philosophy of Socrates, not only on account of its own strong practical good sense--a leading quality of the philosopher’s mind--but on account of the complement which it supplies to the other part of his doctrine, that virtue is practical reason. How true this doctrine of rational morality is, and how comprehensive, we shall endeavour to show immediately; but in the first place, before applying reason to the actions of a social being, we must postulate the existence of a sympathetic instinct, without whose impulsive and attractive power reason could never be induced to exercise itself in any social direction. To prove to a man who has no love in his nature that he ought to love his neighbour, and that without such love no society is possible (a proof by the way which Hobbes leads very triumphantly), is all very well as a piece of reasoning; but it could lead to no practical consequences if the person to whom it was addressed was root and branch made up of pure selfishness. It would be like arguing to a tiger that it should become a lamb. In all moral questions, therefore, the motive powers must be supposed {32} as a fact; they belong to the nature of a moral being as steam belongs to a steam-engine; and therefore Socrates, whose whole teaching breathes the earnest conviction of the great truth that moral philosophy has no meaning as a theory, but exists only as a fact, is everywhere exhibited as a great lover of men. Love of his kind, indeed, was the main inspiration of his life, as in fact it must be that of all men who aspire to the noble position of social reformation in any shape; therefore it was that he was seen constantly in the streets and in the market-places, and in the public shops, and the ateliers of the sculptors, and in festal and convivial celebrations of all kinds; therefore it was that he professed himself on all occasions μάλα ἐρωτικός--a passionate admirer of everything beautiful and excellent whether in man or woman; and from this quick and ready sympathy with all human excellence it was that, while he spoke the truth on all occasions without fear, there was so little generally of harshness in his reproof; nay, he would carry his human forbearance and sympathetic complaisance so far on occasions as to visit a beautiful ἑταῖρα, and converse with her on the philosophy of dress, and the most scientific manner of spreading the net and baiting the hook for her admirers.[32.1] How incongruous would it not be to figure John Calvin or any modern theological doctor relaxing his gravity in this region so far; and yet Socrates was as veritable a saint as Calvin, only the men were constitutionally not only different, but adverse; besides, Socrates was a Greek, and, so far as impressibility by mere physical beauty is concerned, this {33} implies much. What the modern Protestant theologian would have thought it a sin to look at in the ancient philosopher might have excited an innocent and pious admiration. But the tolerant universality of large human sympathy in Socrates, however difficult it may be for some men to understand, was in fact much less an anomaly in a severe moralist than the selfish theory of Hobbes is in a man pretending to be a man at all. To explain such a perverse phenomenon we must bear in mind that the love of singularity in some minds is greater than the love of truth; that some men of great intellectual capacity are deficient in some of the finer instincts that stir heroic breasts, and fail to recognise in others what they have no experience of in themselves; that in the common characters whom one meets in daily life an essentially selfish motive can often be traced beneath the gracious surface, where to the public eye only benevolence, philanthropy, humility, and self-denial shine out with genial radiance; that the scientific mind has a peculiar pleasure in tracking out such inconsistencies; that the speculative mind in its eagerness to embrace various phenomena under one law is apt to run a-muck against Nature, delighting, as she does sometimes, more in the compromise of various principles than in the triumph of one; and finally, that men trained principally in the political and legal world often have a tendency to transfer the selfish principles which are most considered in their domain to other spheres of the social system, where more free scope is given to the exercise of the benevolent and unselfish propensities. These considerations may perhaps account for the genesis of such an incomplete moralist as Hobbes,--it is only {34} the common instance of a meagre plant growing up in a bad climate. Socrates, on the other hand, surprises and puzzles us by his sheer redundancy of ethical sensibility; as a tropical vegetation seems sometimes to smother with the exuberance of green life the sober demands of an eye educated in a temperate climate.

Let us now turn to the second proposition: MAN IS A REASONING ANIMAL;--trite enough, but what does this imply? and how far does it bring us when we attempt to answer the question started by Dr. Paley, Why am I bound to keep my word? Let us see how Socrates would have answered this question. Through the memoirs he stands forward in no character so strongly as in that of the exposer of unrealities. Himself the most truthful of all men, throughout a long life he can find nothing better to do than to help others, first to draw the real truth out of themselves, and then, by the touchstone thus acquired, to distinguish the true man in the actual course of life from the fake pretender. Truth therefore, unadulterated truth in thought and in act, was the pole-star of his navigation. But the recognition and realization of truth is the distinctive function of reason; therefore truthfulness under every form of thought or action is the grand law of reasonableness, and in virtue of this the grand rule of human conduct. For no creature can be called upon to act at variance with its own nature; and if it should attempt to do so, it will either fail utterly--as if a worm should essay to fly--or, succeeding so far in the experiment, as when a bear dances or a man speaks lies habitually, the creature will make itself either ridiculous or contemptible. As therefore you expect {35} your dog to nose well, your cat to mouse well, your horse to race well, and your cow, when well grassed, to give good milk, so expect yourself on all occasions to think and to act reasonably, that is truthfully or in conformity with the reality of things; and know for certain on each occasion that your thought or your act deviates from right reason, that thus far you are not your proper self, you are not, in the full sense of the word, a man; you are, in fact, in reference to this matter, acting like a madman. For, as Socrates in his familiar way puts it, if a man, imagining himself twelve feet high, should bow his head whenever he entered a door eight feet high, in order to avoid fracture of the skull, would we not call such a person mad? And if he is justly esteemed insane who in such an exorbitant way takes a false measure of his bodily height, why should one be esteemed sane who habitually makes an equally false estimate of his mental stature? If a person were to imagine that he knew Greek, but whenever he opened his mouth poured forth a mere swallow-twitter of inarticulate jargon, could he possibly be held to be of sound mind? or if a man should push himself forward into the van of any great undertaking, such as the building of bridges or the cutting of tunnels, conceiving himself to be able to do these things, when he was known to be ignorant of the simplest practical elements of architecture and engineering, should we not say truly that such a person is labouring under a delusion, which, if not madness, is something very closely allied to it? From such considerations as these Socrates deduced, with all the certainty of mathematical demonstration, that the most imperative duty, and the most binding {36} obligation of every man--the postulate, in fact, of all reasonable and fruitful activity in life--is γνῶθι σεαυτόν, KNOW THYSELF! and this maxim does not mean, of course, that a man is to go into a corner, and by a series of probings to take the measure of his own capacity; it means rather that we shall know our relation to that outer world in which our active powers are to be spent; it means that we shall know the world by free intercourse and by cautious trial, and that we shall make it our business with conscientious care to discover what we are fit for on this stage of things on which the drama of our life is enacted, and what we are not fit for. And always in every work, reasonably undertaken, if the execution is to be enduringly successful, let the reasonable and true man study, as the one thing needful, TO BE THE THING THAT HE WOULD SEEM TO BE.

From this statement, taken directly from the report of Xenophon, the reader will perceive that we have got in Socrates fundamentally only a very modern Scotch friend with a very ancient Greek face, viz., the excellent laird of Craigenputtoch and venerable prophet of Chelsea on the Thames, the burden of whose preaching has always been the unveiling of SHAMS. Mr. Ruskin’s Lamp of Truth in Architecture shines also manifestly with a kindred light; and in fact it is quite certain, and the most important of all truths to be implanted in the youthful mind when starting on the career of life, that we live in a world of most grave and earnest and stiff realities, that must be dealt with in a real and honest way--that is, neither in a superficial nor in a false way, nor in an absurd way, nor with any sort of random strokes, but only in a calculated and a reasonable {37} way, and according to the unchangeable nature of things--if not, the penalty is sure. If we will mistake a granite rock for a gigot of mutton, we shall find that we have dined on something that no culinary art can make at all digestible. Let us examine in rapid detail how far the general Socratic principle of acting, reasonably and truthfully will bring out the individual virtues which are the most necessary and the most esteemed, whether in the common concerns of life or in those seasons of rare culmination when manhood rises into heroism. Now, here we see plainly enough, in the first place, that all the so-called intellectual virtues--that is, those that depend on the vigorous and well-directed use of the intellectual faculties--are, by the Socratic principle, at once provided for in the most effective way. These virtues are foresight, calculation, prudence in every shape, trained talent, professional expertness, and substantial work on scientific principles in all trades and occupations. The man who does any kind of work in a careless, bungling, or superficial way is not acting as a reasonable being; for the first demand of reason, as the truthful faculty in the world of action, is to realize its idea completely and thoroughly; and this no hasty and superficial handiwork can pretend to do. Again, if a man, as happens only too often, undertakes a long walk, and having miscalculated the distance, or carried with him confused ideas of north and south, finds himself under the veil of night wandering about in a boggy waste when he ought to have been snug in his bed, he has himself to blame: he acted unreasonably in undertaking an unknown expedition without exact information or wise calculation; and it is only reasonable {38} that he should be overtaken by the necessary consequences of all unreasoning procedure in a world where Reason is the only law and Truth the unerring judge. In the same way, from want of accurate knowledge, wise foresight, and comprehensive survey, Crimean campaigns are bungled, and Reform Bills of most serious consequence are huddled or juggled through a house of fretful or feverish senators, and Acts of Parliament are patched up with clauses that contradict one another, and make the preamble look like a bridegroom who finds he has promised eternal fidelity to a mistaken bride. All this is unreasonable work, and the men who did it were not exercising their reason at the time of the perpetration; for any practical purpose they might as well have been blind, furious, fatuous, or asleep. ’Tis plain, therefore, that all the efficiency of every kind of work done in the world depends on its reasonableness, that is, on its truthfulness; and in full view, so to speak, of the importance of this intellectual virtue Nature has furnished man with a moral excellence closely akin to it. The recognition of truth in the strictly intellectual world becomes, in the world of propulsive passions and inspiring emotions, the love of truth. This virtue shows itself in frankness, openness, and simplicity of character, and in an imperious disdain of all sorts of equivocation, dissembling, falsehood, and disguise, according to the well-known type of the heroic character in Homer:

“That man within my soul I hate, even as the gates of hell, Who speaks fair words, but in his heart dark lies and treachery dwell.”

Here Achilles, every one feels, is speaking like a man; and, though all truth is not always everywhere {39} to be proclaimed, yet on great occasions, where to strike the just mean is difficult, he who in an impulse of fearless fervour vents a little too much truth, is always more admired than the man who from a surcharge of cautious reticence speaks too little. For a lie, in fact, as Plato says in the Republic, is a thing naturally hateful both to gods and men; nor indeed could it be otherwise; for what is all nature but a manifestation in visible forms of a grand army of invisible forces? and an untruthful manifestation is no manifestation at all, but rather a concealment, as if a man should use words to say the very contrary of what he means, which words, certainly, whatever effect they might have, could not possibly be any exhibition of his real nature. It is plain therefore that a lie is on every occasion a contradiction to the essential truthfulness, and an obstacle thrown in the way to the direct purpose, of nature; and whenever lies are told, it will be found that they proceed either from a fundamental feebleness, that is, an inherent lack of assertive and demonstrative force, or from fear, that is, a comparative feebleness in respect of some external threatening force, or finally from a systematic perversion or inversion of nature in individual cases or unfavourable circumstances, which operate as an obstruction to the free expression of the essential truthfulness of things. In this way individuals whose social sympathies have been frosted in early life, may grow up into a monstrous incarnation of selfishness, living by the practice of systematic falsity, of which we have examples enough in the professional swindlers of whose achievements almost every newspaper contains some record; and whole classes of men, as slaves and helots, kept in a {40} state of unnatural bondage and subjection, may learn, or rather must learn, to practise lies as their only safety from injustice. Every slave is naturally a liar; for his nature is a false nature, and has grown up into a contradiction to all nature, as trees by forceful artifice are made to grow downwards seeking the earth, instead of upwards to find the sun. And we may say generally, that ninety-nine out of every hundred lies that are told in society are lies of cowardice; lies of gigantic impudence and unblushing selfishness, like the lies of Alexander the false prophet in the second century, and other gross impostors, being comparatively few; though of course, when they do occur, they excite more attention and figure more largely in the newspapers. And from these considerations we see plainly how it is that the world places such a high value on the virtue of courage; for courage arises mainly from the possession of that amount of physical or moral energy which enables a man truthfully and emphatically in a real world to assert himself as an effective reality; and in fact there is no character that in the general judgment of mankind, and in a special degree to the British feeling, appears more contemptible than the man who, on the appearance of any petty danger, or the prospective emergence of a possible difficulty, forthwith sneaks out of his position, gives the open lie to his own professions, and the cold shoulder to his best friend. So deep-rooted and so wide-spread, so woven into the living fibres of the very heart of things, is the virtue of truth and truthfulness in nature and life, which again, as we have said, is the mere utterance of reason; the necessary utterance consequently of an essentially reasonable being, and not at all the artificial product of a selfish compact {41} or calculation of any kind, as Hobbes and the other advocates of selfism, more or less modified, affirm. We speak the truth therefore, and we are bound to keep our promise, not because experience proves that society could not exist for a single day under the pervading influence of all sorts of falsehood, nor again because it can be proved by a formal induction that to speak the truth, as a general rule, is the best way to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number--though there can be no harm in a man fortifying his virtue by these very true and very philanthropic considerations, if he chooses,--but the root of the matter lies deeper and more near to the heart of the individual man, springing, as we have said, directly out of the essential truthfulness and reasonableness of nature, according to the prime postulate not of the philosophy of Socrates only, but of Plato and Aristotle also, and all the great teachers of practical wisdom amongst the Greeks.

It does not seem necessary, after what has been said, to expatiate largely on the obvious deduction of the other cardinal virtues from the Socratic principle of Reason or Truth. Wherever we turn our eyes it will require little perspicacity to perceive that to do the right is on all occasions to do the true thing,--as an apostle has it, ποιεῖν τὴν ἀλήθειαν, to do the truth; or, in the words of a great son of the Porch, not to demand that things shall be as we wish, but to wish that things shall be as they are. The great virtue of Justice, for instance, which, in its widest and well-known Platonic sense, signifies giving to every person and thing that which properly belongs to it, is nothing but the assertion in act of the truth in reference to their concurrent or adverse claims; for how can a man realize in any {42} relation of life the beautiful Stoical definition of Right given in the Institutes of Justinian--Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas suum cuique tribuendi--how can a man assign to each person that which is properly his, unless he knows truly the nature and natural claims not of that person only, but of all persons with whom his claim may come into competition? It is plain therefore that Justice is merely knowledge or reason;[42.1] and as the claims of different parties in reference to the same thing are often very various and complicated, hence it is that to be a just judge a man does not require to have a benevolent nature--though in cases of equity the kindly feelings also must come into play--so much as to have an intellect of large range, of firm grasp, and of subtle power of discrimination. And if anybody, with special reference to legal decisions, chooses to ask not only what qualities constitute a good judge, but on what principles the idea of property is founded--how he is to know the exact boundaries of MEUM and TUUM in particular cases,--the answer here also, on the Socratic postulate of truth and natural reasonableness, will be obvious enough. That is mine by the law of nature and truth and God, which is either a part of me, or the natural and necessary, fruit and product of that vital energy which I call ME; or, more simply, the product of my labour and the issues of my activity are mine; and no man can have a right or a claim consistent with the truth of things, to appropriate the fruit of that growth whereof the root and the stem and the living branches {43} and the vital juices are a necessary part of me.[43.1] But it is not mere legal justice and a true apportionment of the Mine and Thine that flow as a plain corollary from the obligation of acting the truth, but the wider equities of Christian charity and toleration; yea, and the very constraining power of the Golden Rule itself is evolved unmistakeably from the same principle. For what is it that from the time of Greeks and Romans down to very recent days has tainted the whole laws of European countries with such harsh declarations of intolerant dogmatism and merciless persecution? Simply the fact that men, from defect of sympathy and defect of knowledge, had never been trained to realize the truth of things as between the natural right of a majority to profess a national creed, and the equally natural right of a minority to entertain doubts and to state objections as to the whole or any part of such a creed. Intolerance proceeds either from narrowness of view or from deficiency of sympathy; and in either case it blinds the bigot to the fact that the right which he has to his own opinions never can confer on him any right to dictate opinions to others; the moment he does that he invades a dominion that does not belong to him, and transgresses the truth of Nature; nor will this transgression be less flagrant when it is made by ten millions against one man, than if it {44} were made by one against ten millions. In the same way all those superficial and inadequate, too often also harsh and severe, judgments which we see and read daily amongst men in the common converse of life, are the result of a habitual carelessness as to truth, of which habit only too efficiently conceals the grossness. And under the bitter inspiration of ecclesiastical and political warfare, men, when speaking of their adversaries, will not only lightly excuse themselves from using any special care in testing the facts which it suits their purpose to parade, but they will even consciously present a garbled statement constructed upon the principle of pushing into prominence everything that is bad, and keeping out of view everything that is good in the character of the person whom it may suit the use of the moment to vilify. And in this way even the sacred-sounding columns of an evangelical newspaper may become a systematic manufactory of lies, against which most gross abuse of the truth of Nature the son of Sophroniscus, if he were to appear on earth now, would assuredly lift his protest with tenfold more emphasis than he ever did against the sham knowledge of the most superficial of the Sophists.

One or two short paragraphs will enable us now to say all that remains to be said on the great principles of the Socratic philosophy of Ethics.

In the first place, nothing that has been said here in endeavouring shortly to epitomize the leading idea of Socrates with regard to practical reason and acted truth, assumes to settle definitively that much-vexed question, How far is a man at any time, from any motive, and for any object, entitled to tell or to enact {45} a lie? In a dialogue of considerable length, which Socrates holds with Euthydemus, a raw and conceited young Athenian, who, because he possessed a great library, imagined himself to possess much wisdom, the philosopher is represented as puzzling the young gentleman with such questions as the following: Whether is it lawful for a general, with the view of raising the drooping spirits of his soldiers, to give out an unfounded report that friends are coming up to help them? Whether, if a father, whose sick son refuses to take a necessary medicine, shall disguise this medicine under the aspect of food, and by the ministry of this drugged aliment restore his son to health, this act of deceit is right or wrong? Or again, if a friend whom we love is given to fits of melancholy, and may be apt in an evil moment to meditate suicide, is it an act of culpable theft privately to purloin or forcibly to abstract the sword or other lethal instrument of which he may avail himself to commit the fatal act? In such and similar cases, though the point is rather raised than settled, Socrates plainly seems to imply that lies are both natural and beneficial, and therefore ought to be tolerated. And in truth, though the extreme dogmatism of certain of the Church Fathers lays down the doctrine that the obligation of truth-speaking and truth-doing is absolute, and admits of no exception, yet the common sense of mankind, and the universal practice of saints and sinners in all ages and in all countries, goes along with Socrates (and we may add Plato here, Rep. ii.) in the assertion, that where violence is done to Nature in one way by an unnatural overwhelming force, such as occurs in war, then Nature defends herself by a {46} violence to her habitual principles in an opposite direction; that is to say, it will be justifiable, on certain occasions, and within certain limits, to defeat force by fraud; or, as Lysander the captor of Athens used to say, where a man may not show the lion’s hide he must wrap himself in the fox’s skin. But the very suspicion with which the general moral sentiment guards the extension of this motive, which in extreme cases it allows, shows that all deviation from truth is looked upon as the result of a force upon Nature; and, if it may in certain cases be excused or even imperatively commanded, it never brings with it the natural aliment of our better nature, which breathes freely only in the wide and pure atmosphere of truth. The general obligation of truth, therefore, according to the doctrine of Socrates, is not at all weakened by the occasional necessity of deceit; for while the one rests firmly on the foundation of the eternal constitution of things, the other is the mere shift of the moment, the sudden dictate of an expediency, which in noble natures is half ashamed of itself when it succeeds.

Another well-known dogma of the Socratic philosophy is, that not only is Science as the product of Reason the supreme legislative authority in all questions of morals, but in point of fact also, that to know what is right is to do what is good, for no man with his eyes open will perpetrate an act which demonstrably leads to his own destruction. Of this assertion, so contrary to the universal experience of mankind, and so ably refuted by Aristotle and his school in the Nicomachean ethics, it need only be said that it is one of those paradoxes in the garb of {47} which all philosophies are apt to clothe themselves occasionally, partly for the gratification of the teacher, who delights to push his principle to an acme, partly for the benefit of the scholar, whose attention is excited and his imagination pleased by the startling novelty of the dictum. The proposition of Socrates therefore, that knowledge is virtue, and vice not only folly but ignorance, is of the same nature with the paradox of the Stoics, that the virtuous man can have no enemy, or that pain is no evil, or with the precept in the Gospel, which no man ever thinks of obeying in the letter, that when a thief takes your cloak you should thank him, like a benign Quaker, for his kindness, and give him your coat into the bargain. But it is possible to defend the paradox of Socrates taken strictly, by saying that when a man does a thing which demonstrably leads to his ruin, he either never had this demonstration vividly present to his mind, or, at the moment when the self-destroying act was committed, his knowing faculty was blinded and sopited, dosed and drugged by his passions, and so; at the time when his knowledge was most required, he was virtually ignorant of what he was about. But there is little profit in puzzling about such paradoxical maxims, as, like Berkeley’s theory about the non-existence of matter, they are constantly open to be corrected by common-sense and the daily experience of life. A Calvinist preaches Fatalism in the pulpit to-day, but to-morrow flogs his slave or his son for abusing his free-will. So a smart twitch of the toothache answers the Stoics when they assert that pain is no evil: and the lives of Solomon, King David, and Robert Burns prove that great men in all ages have, in {48} their cool moments, been as nobly sagacious as Socrates, but not therefore at all moments as consistently virtuous.

The last point which demands notice here is the relation which virtue bears to happiness, and to the much-bespoken utilitarianism of the most recent ethical school in this country. Now the truth with regard to this stands patent on the very face of the Socratic argument, and can escape no man who goes through the Memorabilia with ordinary sympathy. The happiness of every creature consists in the free and unhindered exercise of its characteristic function; the happiness of a horse in racing well, of a dog in nosing well, of a cat in mousing well, of a man in reasoning well, that is, in thinking and acting reasonably. For the opposite state of things to this could only exist on the supposition that the Author of Nature or the Supreme Artificer (ὁ δημιουργός, as Socrates and Plato loved to phrase it) delighted in inspiring creatures with a desire, and providing them with a machinery, to do things the direct effect of which is to make them miserable; that is to say, if the demiurge were a demon; of which demoniacal government of the world, however, happily there is no sign; for not even the most tortured victim of toothache, as Dr. Paley observes, has yet found himself warranted in drawing the conclusion that teeth in general were made for no other purpose than that people might be tormented with such excruciating pangs. Happiness, therefore, and the reasonable exercise of his faculties by a reasonable creature, are identical. No creature can deliberately desire to make itself miserable, and no rational creature can escape misery except by acting reasonably. And if, {49} in the language of the schools, any person, from this point of view, shall call Socrates a eudæmonist,[49.1] a eudæmonist unquestionably he was. But we must bear in mind that, while he was the warm advocate of all sorts of happiness and enjoyment, and himself at the same time a living picture of vital joy and geniality, he never allowed himself to be carried away by the perverse and perilous subtlety of a certain school of philosophers, both in ancient and modern times, who thought to do honour to the eudæmonistic principle by confounding the good with the pleasurable.[49.2] For the distinction so broadly established in all languages between Pleasure as an affair of momentary excitement or titillation, and Good as the source of lasting and permanent enjoyment, is not to be obliterated by the arbitrary terminology of men who write ethical systems in books. According to the established use of language, from Socrates and St. Paul down to the present hour, Pleasure cannot be the good of man,--it may be the good of a brute; for as pleasure is momentary happiness, without reason, or it may be often in the teeth of reason, so the Good is reasonable and permanent happiness, accompanied, it may be, with a little momentary pain, but productive of lasting satisfaction. So much for eudæmonism. Then, as for utilitarianism, whether it be a different thing from eudæmonism, or only a different aspect of the same thing, {50} there is nothing more certain than that Socrates was a utilitarian. The word useful (χρήσιμον or ὠφέλιμον) is constantly occurring in his conversations; utility in fact was the starting-point of his whole movement, and gives the key-note to all his discussions; for his grand objection, as we saw above, to the physical speculations of his predecessors, was that they were useless, as opposed to which the doctrine which he preached was recommended on the ground of its practical utility. Of this utilitarian principle he was indeed so fond, that, like his doctrine of virtue being founded on knowledge, he was inclined to push it too far, and certainly did run it, in some cases, to absolute falsity. This appears most strikingly in two dialogues in the Memoirs, where, in opposition to the idol-worship of mere beauty, so dear to the Greeks, he flatly lays down the counter proposition that nothing can be beautiful except in so far as it serves the purpose for which it was intended; in other words, that beauty consists in that suitability or fitness of an article to effect its purpose which makes it a useful article. But every one sees that there is a jump in the logic here, which, if Socrates had been as anxious to establish a scientific theory of beauty as he was to present rational morals, he certainly could not have made. For though every article, as the imperative condition of its existence, ought to answer the purpose for which it was made, and the article which answers this purpose best is the best article; and though beauty of structure is a something superadded, and which will always offend if it is plainly at war with the design, fitness, and utility of the structure--for which reason, as architects say, the ornamentation {51} ought always to grow out of the construction,--it is quite a different thing to say that beauty and fitness or utility are identical. The railway companies in our day have thrown across not a few beautiful rivers and picturesque gorges the ugliest iron bridges that can be conceived; but no doubt they are as useful, and perhaps may be more permanent, than stone structures of a more elegant and graceful design. We shall therefore say that Socrates, in his remarks on the τὸ καλόν, pushed his utilitarian principles and the extreme practicality of his nature into the domain of the absurd and the false. But within his proper province of morals, one cannot see that he was led by his doctrine of utility into any speculative or practical mistake. For the word useful in itself is a word which really has no meaning; it is always only a stepping-stone to something beyond itself, and receives significance only when from some independent source the end is exhibited which the useful object subserves. When, therefore, Socrates talks about morality being identical with utility, he is not asserting a philosophical principle like the modern writers who use that term; he only means to say that a certain course of conduct founded on reason, or certain maxims deduced from reason, are useful to a man to enable him to obtain the end of his existence, that is, a certain happiness according to his opportunities and capacities. And if the advocates of the so-called utilitarian philosophy, finding the utter unmeaningness of their favourite shibboleth as a distinctive term, shall tell us that utility means something absolute (which however it can do only by interpolating into itself an altogether foreign idea), if, however, they shall say, as they are {52} in the habit of doing, that that course of action is useful which tends to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” then here they say nothing which either Socrates or Plato or the apostle Paul, or Dr. Wollaston or Immanuel Kant or in fact any sane man, ever dreamt of contravening. In virtue of his faith in the innate sociabilities of man as opposed to the selfism of Hobbes, Socrates could not but believe that it was his duty, after having made his own life reasonable in the first place, to help other people to get out of the limbo of unreason as speedily as possible. This he says again and again in his conversations; in fact, his whole missionary exertions meant nothing else; and the philanthropic power of the missionary impulse which impelled him to seek the rational happiness of his fellow-men having once full sway in his heart, the wish for the greatest happiness of the greatest number followed as a matter of course. Every missionary estimates his success and feels his moral enjoyment increased by the number of his converts. The man who desires the happiness of his fellow-beings at all, whether as Epicurus or Plato, must desire that happiness to the greatest number of human beings that can comfortably enjoy it within certain given limits of space and time.

The next great division of our subject leads us to consider, what is by no means a matter of secondary importance, the peculiar and characteristic manner in which Socrates inculcated the lofty principles of his ethical philosophy--the so-called Socratic method of teaching and of preaching. Now, with regard to this, in the first place, what lies on the surface is that the Socratic method of inculcating the principles of morals consists in a sort of catechising or cross-questioning {53} such as is practised by lawyers in Westminster Hall, a method which is generally considered not the most pleasant of operations even there, and which if practised now-a-days by private persons, whether in West-end saloons or in East-end parlours, would certainly be considered extremely ill-bred. And that this should be the general feeling of all classes of mankind with regard to the matter is natural enough; for the object of the operation being generally to convince the person operated on that he knows nothing about what he professes to know, and to do this by publicly entangling him in the web of his own arguments, and forcing him into a self-contradiction, it is obvious that self-esteem and love of approbation will, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, be strong enough to stir a certain degree of resentment in the breast of the sufferer. Nay, sometimes will he not feel like a poor fish cleverly hooked by an expert angler, and played about perhaps more to show the skill of the captor than from any consideration of the feelings of the captive? All this is very true; and no doubt Socrates made not a few enemies by this extremely personal method of exposing the manifold superficialities and incompetencies of the persons with whom he conversed. But, upon the whole, that he was rather a popular man, or more correctly, an extremely popular man, in Athens, during a long lifetime, notwithstanding the catastrophe of the hemlock, seems pretty plain both from Xenophon and Plato. This popularity, in the face of what certainly was a rather odious mission, arose both from the kindly sympathetic nature of the man, and from the admirable tact which the philosopher constantly displayed in dealing {54} with those whom he submitted to the operation of his ethical probe. Though in the majority of cases he was found to end in a direct contradiction of the original position of his adversary, he always commenced by agreeing with him; and if he saw nothing absolutely to agree with in the way of argument, he took care to launch him in a good humour by praising some excellence in him or about him. Thus, in the case of Euthydemus, mentioned above as the possessor of a large library, he gives prominence to the praiseworthy ambition shown by the young man to spend his money rather on the sentences of the wise than on the vanities of external pomp and pernicious dissipation; and thus, though the young book-fancier departs at the end of the dialogue altogether shorn of his conceit, and thinking the best thing he can do hereafter to prove his learning is to hold his tongue, yet he leaves the philosopher with no rankling ill-will, but rather disposed towards him as one feels towards a kind and considerate physician who has been forced to administer to his patient a nauseous drug. And thus the mild manner of the teacher removed, in a great measure, the offence of the lesson; for it is, as an apostle says, “the wrath of man which worketh not the righteousness of God,” in most cases, not the mere speaking of the truth, if the truth be spoken in love. Let us inquire now more particularly how the cross-examination went on. Aristotle, in a well-known passage of the Metaphysics, tells us that there were two inventions to which Socrates might justly lay claim--the defining of general terms (τὸ ὁρίζεσθαι καθόλου), and inductive reasoning (ἐπακτικοὶ λόγοι). A modern instance will enable us to understand {55} what this means. Suppose I get into an argument with any person as to whether A. or B., or any person holding certain opinions, manifesting certain feelings, and acting in a certain way, is a Christian. I say he is; my contradictor says he is not; how, then, shall we settle the difference? Following the example of Socrates, the best procedure certainly will be to ask him to define what he means by a Christian. Suppose then he answers, A Christian is a religious person who believes in the Nicene Creed, I immediately reply, The Nicene Creed was not sent forth till the year 325 after Christ; what then do you make of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of Christians who lived before that? To this objection the answer of course will be that the Nicene Creed, though not set forth in express articles, did virtually exist as a part of the living faith of all true Christians. Then, if I doubt this, I say, Was Origen a Christian, was Justin Martyr a Christian? are you sure these two Fathers believed every article of that Creed? My opponent now, in all likelihood, not being profoundly versed in patristic lore, is staggered; and I proceed, we shall suppose, to cite some passages from some one of the ante-Nicene Fathers, which imply dissent from some of the articles of the orthodox symbol. He is then reduced to the dilemma of either denying that this Father was a Christian, or (as that will scarcely be allowable) widening his original definition so as to include a variety of cases which, by the narrowness of the terms, were excluded. I then go on to test the comprehensiveness of the new definition in the same way; and if I find that it contains any elements which belong to the species and not to {56} the genus, any peculiarities say of modern Calvinism, or of mediæval Popery, that do not belong to the general term “Christianity,” I push him into a corner in the same way as before, till I bring out from his own admissions a pure and broad definition of the designation Christian, as opposed to Heathen, Jew, or any other sort of religious professor. Now the example here given was purposely chosen, to make manifest by a familiar example, what everyday experience must teach us, that the principal cause of difference of opinion amongst men is, that people start in argument with some general term, with respect to which they do not know, and have in fact never thought of seriously inquiring, what extent of ground it covers. So that when the inadequate notions with which the minds of untrained persons are possessed have to be replaced by adequate ones, the process always resolves itself into a making of definitions, and a strict scrutiny of some general term, which had hitherto passed current without special interrogation. A teacher therefore, who would be practically useful to mankind, and not merely make brilliant oratorical displays to tickle and to amuse, must before all things make it his business to see that they have clear ideas, not on matters of profound and remote speculation, but on the common currency of general terms which the necessities of social life require. Such a teacher was Socrates; and hence the logical form which his practical teaching by cross-examination, among a people passionately fond of arguing, naturally assumed. A less argumentative people than the Greeks, such as ourselves,--English and Scotch and Irish,--will often look on a Socratic dialogue in Plato, or even Xenophon, {57} as curiously pedantic, which to the Athenians was only amusingly subtle. Even Socrates, the most practical, and, in the sense explained above, the most utilitarian of men, loved to have his little logical play out of the discussion, in a fashion which to a broad practical Briton, unaccustomed to speculation, and impatient, often incapable of grappling with a principle, would appear impertinent. So much for the Socratic hunt after definitions. As to the other point mentioned by Aristotle, that Socrates deserves praise as the inventor of inductive reasoning, there is really no cause for surprise in the matter. Lord Bacon was not the inventor of this method of dealing with facts; neither indeed, if we look beneath the surface, was Socrates; both induction and deduction exist in a state of constant action and reaction in every normally developed human mind; but the praise which belongs to Bacon is that of having pressed the inductive method, with strong adjurations and a special machinery, into the service of physical science; while the praise, no less important, belongs to Socrates, of having taught men four hundred years before Christ, to be as scrupulously exact in testing by experience their moral ideas, as they now are in proving by experiment their physical theories. Let us take a well-known instance of induction in physical science, and then see how, under certain obvious modifications, the same method of procedure must be adopted in the successful cultivation of the moral sciences. We know, for instance, that there exists a marvellous, almost miraculous, force pervading the universe, called Electricity; this is now one of the widest of general terms in the vocabulary of physical science, and arrived at, like {58} all other such terms, by the carefully weighed steps of a long induction. Certain phenomena of attraction are first observed, in reference to amber, wax, and other bodies, when rubbed, free from the influence of humidity; the same phenomena are then observed in other bodies, and accompanied with the emission of sparks of light and tiny explosions; by an ingeniously contrived apparatus the force which causes these sparks and these explosions is accumulated, and the effects produced by this higher potency of the same force become of course more noticeable, and some of these experiments lead a thinking man irresistibly to the notion that what we call electricity, as elicited by us from our electrical machines, is only a sort of mimic thunder and lightning, as crackers with which boys play on the Queen’s birthday are in principle the same as big cannons and Lancaster guns. This idea, once entertained, is tested in many different ways, till the conclusion is certainly arrived at that electricity and lightning are identical. By and by other forces, such as magnetism and galvanism, being considered more carefully, and compared with the electricity of the electric machines, are found to possess many points of resemblance, and are in time concluded to be fundamentally the same; and now our general term electricity is widened into a cosmical power, which if we fail to define, the failure will arise not from building on partial facts, but because our generalization has clearly mounted so high into the domain of the Infinite that the finite understanding staggers, and perhaps is doomed for ever to stagger, at the attempt to hold it in firm grasp. Thus the progress of physical science is a continual process of the giving up of inadequate {59} general terms, and supplying them by something either exactly adequate, or approximating to adequacy, as high as the human intellect can hope to ascend. Now to this process the discovery of the true significance of general terms in morals forms an exact parallel. Suppose, for instance, a young Englishman emerging out of the merely physical delights of cricket and boat-racing, and beginning to occupy himself seriously with some of the great social questions of the day. To him morality first presents itself, not in the form of logical analysis, the characteristic engine of Socrates, but in the concrete form of the Christian Church. He starts therefore with an idea of ethical science as a part of Christianity, and of Christianity as he knows it, formulated in certain articles of belief, represented dramatically in certain liturgic services, and held together by a certain hierarchy of office-bearers. In this condition it is not to be expected that the idea either of Morals, or of Church, or of Religion, or of Christianity, will exist in his mind so purified from adventitious and accidental matter as to stand the test of strict reasoning. What then is to be done with him, if he is not to remain contented with that purely local conception of moral and religious truth which belongs to him like his cylindrical hat or his swallow-tail coat, as an affair of accepted tradition rather than of reasoned truth? Plainly there is only one course: you must convince him of the insufficiency of his premises for warranting any general conclusion at all; and, then leading him through the whole moral and ecclesiastical experience of the Christian Church, open to him a wide and a sure field of observation from which legitimate inductions {60} with regard to moral and religious ideas comprised in the term Christianity can be made. So that the cross-examination, of which we gave a specimen above, is in reality a process of induction as much as the processes in physical science by which electricity is identified with galvanism, and both with magnetism. But if the ethical idea is to emerge perfectly pure from such an investigation, our young Episcopal philosopher will require to broaden his conception of morality and religion yet further, so as to embrace moral phenomena of an important kind beyond the pale of the term Christianity altogether. No doubt Christianity is to us, and has been to the most favoured races of humanity, for nearly two thousand years, the grand bearer of the deepest moral truth; but the religion of Christ does not exist everywhere,--did not exist certainly when a Pythagoras, a Socrates, and a Plato founded their great schools of moral teaching and training among the Greeks; and thus to bring out the ethical idea strong in the internal identity of all its various Avatars, our young inquirer must launch out into the wide, and in a great measure hitherto unexplored, sea of comparative ethics and comparative theology. A type of this sort of procedure will be found in the late admirable Baron Bunsen’s book entitled God in History, a work with regard to which even those who do not accept all its conclusions must admit that it is constructed upon the only scheme on which a large and adequate philosophy of ethical and religious truth can be raised.

We have said that moral investigation, when conducted on the Socratic method, is as truly inductive as any process in physical science. But there is a {61} distinction, and that a very vital one. In moral inquiries we can often start directly with deduction from some inward principle, implanted in the human mind by the Author of our being. The love of truth, for instance, as above set forth, is one of those principles; our general term in this case we bring with us; and any induction which we may require is not to prove the existence of such an instinct, but to verify, to extend, and to correct our notions of its applicability, or perhaps merely to confirm us in our original sacred faith, by showing in detail that society never has existed, and in fact never can exist, without that regard to truth in all dealings of man with man, the necessity of which we had asserted originally from the constraining power of the inborn moral imperative decree. And if our moral principles always existed in a vivid and healthy state, there might be little need for the slow retrogressive process of induction in ethics; but as these instincts are peculiarly liable to be enfeebled, curtailed, and perverted by individual neglect, as well as social constraint, the corrective and cathartic process by induction on a more extended basis becomes necessary for the worst men, and not without utility for the best. At the same time, of the noblest minds in the moral world it may always be asserted that their whole life has been rather a practical deduction from lofty truths given by original inspiration from the Divine Source of all vitality than the product of any induction from an acquired survey of facts. The work of a great moral teacher or reformer, such as the apostle Paul or Thomas Chalmers, is in fact a creation as much as the poems of a Shakespeare or the paintings of a Raphael; and has a {62} manifest affinity also with the grand deductions of mathematical genius, which, from the postulated form of a triangle, a circle, or other figure of which the conditions are dictated by the mind, not gathered from observation, evolves an array of the most curious relations, of which no one had hitherto dreamed, and which are each one as necessary and absolutely true as the postulate from which they came forth. Exactly so with Morals. An admitted postulate--say of truthfulness, of love, or whatever inborn original principle you please,--may be worked out as the world advances into ever new and more noble practical applications, which shall be as unconditionally right as the original diving force out of which they grew. And as the propositions of Euclid can be proved a posteriori by empirical measurements, though they do not depend on these measurements, in the same way the great truths of ethical science may be proved from induction, though in the case at least of great moral teachers they are the direct and pure products of an inspired deduction. And both with respect to mathematical and moral truths, it may be said that, while the a posteriori inductive method forces assent upon the lowest class of minds, the a priori or deductive method is the spontaneous evolution of the highest class of minds, whose dictates are sympathetically accepted by all whom Divine grace may have disposed to be touched by the noble contagion.

So much for the logical element in the Socratic method. But as his logic was merely the dexterous weapon of a great moral apostleship, we must look on him also from this aspect, and contrast the method of his teaching with that of a modern sermon. {63} A sermon is either the most rousing and effective, or the tamest and most ineffective of all moral addresses, according to the character and power of the man who delivers it. If the speaker has a real vocation to address his fellow-men on moral subjects, and if he does not deal in vague and trivial generalities, sounding very pious on Sunday, but having no distinct and recognisable reference to the secular business of Monday, then a good sermon may be compared to a discharge of moral electricity, which will arouse many sleepers, or to the setting up of a sure finger-post, which will direct many wanderers. But if he is tame, and a mere professional dealer in certain routine articles of piety, which religious people wear as a sort of amulet rather than use as a weapon--in this case no species of moral address can be looked on as less effective; for it neither rouses nor guides, and instead of ending in any work in the life of the hearer (and all moral teaching that does not end in a work is vanity), the hearing of it is rather looked on as a sort of work in itself, which, however short, is generally considered as having been a little too long when it is ended. Now, as distinguished from both these styles of pulpit address, the Socratic sermon was addressed to the individual man, and could not fail to produce a distinct and tangible effect; for it ended always by saying to the hearer, as Nathan said to David, THOU ART THE MAN! There was no escape from the appeal; it might not hover about the ears with a pious hum for half an hour, and then be forgotten; it must either be indignantly rejected, or graciously accepted. And herein precisely lay the great distinction between Socrates and the Sophists, {64} a distinction which Mr. Grote has so perversely done his best to obliterate. Socrates was a preacher; the Sophists were not. Socrates was a patriot fighting and dying earnestly for a great cause; the Sophists were cunning masters of fence, who had no cause to fight for except themselves and their own pockets. But Socrates, though in a very different way, was as earnestly a moral reformer in Athens as Calvin was in Geneva. When the stern Genevese disciplinarian set himself with all the resolution of a manly nature to put some checks and hindrances in the way of the loose practices of the “Libertines” of Lake Leman, these respectable people protested strongly against the attempt, saying to the unflinching preacher, “It is your place to explain the Scriptures; what right have you to meddle with other things--to talk about morals and find fault?” And even so in Athens there were certain Libertines who used exactly the same language to Socrates. Had you been a mere talker like the other Sophists, you might have been allowed to talk; talking is a very innocent affair; but your talk is not a mere exhibition of lingual dexterity; it means something; it means perhaps danger to the State,--certainly it means danger to us; it means that we may be called to account for our deeds by any man who assumes to have a more scrupulous conscience or a more enlightened reason than ourselves; and this is what we will not tolerate.

One of the oddities of Socrates which seems to have offended the nice taste of the χαρίεντες, or men of elegant culture in Athens, was the homeliness of his style and the familiarity of his illustrations. This is particularly alluded to by Alcibiades in the {65} humorous speech in Plato’s Banquet; from which an extract has been already made. In the peroration of that speech Alcibiades is made to say that not only the personal appearance, but the whole style and language of Socrates, had a close affinity to the Sileni and Satyrs; for instead of using elegantly turned sentences and studiously selected illustrations, like the Sophists, he was always talking about “smiths and tanners and shoemakers, and asses with pack-saddles,” and a whole host of such vulgarities, which to the hearer at first seemed to make him ridiculous; but by and by they discovered that behind all this rough Satyr’s hide of uncouth expression there lurked a truly divine meaning, and the faces of gods peeped out through the holes of the beggar’s coat. And the same language is used in Xenophon by Critias and Charicles when, in the exercise of a tyrannical authority, they called upon the philosopher to cease from his dangerous business of talking sedition to the young men. Now, any man who considers this matter will perceive that the peculiarity of style here noted lay partly in the natural character of the man, partly was the best style which he could possibly have adopted, if he really wished to do good as a moral missionary, and not merely to parade himself before men as a clever talker. The dignity of the pulpit in modern times is one of the great causes of its comparative inefficiency; it will not condescend to familiar subjects; it rejects familiar illustrations as bad taste, and the consequence too frequently is that it is not received into the confidence of every-day life, and stands apart on too lofty a pedestal to be useful. But as a sensible and acute ethical writer remarks, {66} “if moral questions disdain to walk the streets, the philosophy of them must remain in the clouds;”[66.1] and so Socrates is justified in his method of testing every lofty principle by a familiar example, and, like Wordsworth, the thoughtful poet of the Lakes, teaching us that philosophy is then most profound when it points out what is uncommon in common things, and that he is a wiser man who plucks a lesson from the daisy at his feet than he who wanders for it to the stars above his head.

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.”

Let us now make a few remarks on the theological argument, or the argument from design, here sketched {78} in such broad and masterly lines. It is an argument, when taken in the gross, and in its grand outline, so striking and so convincing, that it is only by confining the eye to a few minute and unessential points that certain precise and puzzling minds have conceited themselves that they were able to blunt the edge of its force. One class of objectors, unfortunately not at all uncommon in recent times, have imagined that they have refuted Paley’s famous argument from the watch found on a waste heath, by saying that there is no analogy between a piece of human manufacture like a watch, and a living growth like a plant or an animal. Very true, so far; a growth is a growth, and a manufacture is a manufacture; the one possesses inherent divine vitality, the other no vitality at all; but what follows? Not that an animal and a plant have nothing in common, but only that they have not the principle of vitality in common; not that the animal may not be constructed on the same principles of design and adaptation on which the watch is constructed, but that the animal to the curious machinery has something superadded which we call life. The fact of the matter is, that Dr. Paley’s argument would hold equally good if the designing soul that made the supposed watch, instead of being outside in the shape of a watch-maker, had been inside, as the principle of vitality is in a plant; then we should have called the watch a plant or an animal, and the design would have spoken out from its structure as manifestly as before. There is therefore no difference, so far as design and calculation are concerned, between a cunningly constituted growth and a curiously compacted machine. Another class of objectors are fond to tell us that things are not {79} what they are by virtue of any inherent calculated type, but by a combination of complex conditions and circumstances, which in the course of millions of millions of ages work themselves happily into a consistent organism. This is just Epicurus back again in his naked absurdity, almost indeed in the same senseless phraseology; as we may see, for instance, in the following passage from the Westminster Review, on which in the course of my reading I accidentally stumbled:--“The positive method makes very little account of marks of intelligence; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that these incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it absorbs them in the singular conception of LAW.” Let us attempt to analyse this utterance. It is the boast of the Comtian philosophy to find intelligence in the works of Auguste Comte, but not in the works of the Architect of the universe. Let that pass. In the next place it is indicated that it is a narrow view of things which discovers DESIGN in creation; a larger view reveals LAW; and the few incidents that may seem to indicate design are perhaps better explained by the old Epicurean method of the “fortuitous concourse of atoms.” Never was a greater amount of incoherence crammed into a short sentence. The inference which Dr. Paley drew from his watch is not in the least affected by the narrowness of the view which the inspection of a watch necessitates; nor would the striking evidence of a design in the structure of that little telescope the human eye, be diminished in the least by extending the view to the largest telescope ever made, or to the largest human body in the watch-tower of which a human eye was ever placed. The only legitimate consequence of {80} mounting from the contemplation of an eye, merely as an eye, to its consideration as part of a large organism called the human body, would be to increase admiration by the discovery that the little design of the instrument was subservient to the large design of the body, as if, after admiring a small chamber in a vast building, and praising the cunning of the architect, we should walk through the whole suite of rooms and then discover some new beauty in the chamber having reference to the great whole of which it was a part. But instead of this our author informs us that this wider view “absorbs the original feeling of design into the singular conception of LAW.” Applied to the supposed case of the small chamber in the large palace, this is flat nonsense. For the “singular conception of LAW,” in this case, is just the large plan of the whole building, which, along with the small plan of each part, proceeded from the comprehensive intellect of the architect. What is LAW? The reasoning in the above passage implies that it is something contrary to design, something that absorbs it, nay more, something that reduces it to the category of a “happy coincidence.” But Law is only a steady self-consistent method of operation, which explains nothing; it is only a fact; and if in this method of operation there be manifest order and purpose of producing a reasoned and consistent result, the law then becomes a manifestation of design, as in the original application of the word to the work of a lawgiver, a Solon or a Lycurgus whose laws certainly implied a calculated purpose of reform and re-organization; or, to take again the watch, the law by which this tiny worker goes, is only the single word which, describes that {81} ordered complex of calculated movements which the design of the maker puts into play, for the purpose of marking the regular lapse of time. The discovery of a great law, therefore, in an ordered and calculated system of things, such as the world, may enlarge the field in which design is exhibited, but, so far from absorbing, can only tend to make that design more prominent. So much for Comte. But what shall we say of Darwin? If that original and ingenious investigator of nature really does mean to say that there are no original types of things in the Divine mind (I use Platonic language purposely, because it is the only language that satisfies the demands of the case), and that a rose became a lily, or a lily a rose, by some external power called “natural selection,”--I reply that I shall believe this when I see it; that a modifying influence is one thing, and a plastic force another; and that, as an able Hegelian philosopher remarks,[81.1] a selection producing not a random but a reasonable result always implies some principle of selection, and a selecting agency--that is, the Socratic designing Intellect.