Note 252 — Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

1. Sokrates [468–399] was fundamentally and practically a freethinker, insofar as in most things he thought for himself, definitely turning away from the old ideal of mere transmitted authority in morals.252 Starting in all inquiries from a position of professed ignorance, he at least repudiated all dogmatics.253 Being, however, preoccupied with public life and conduct, he did not carry his critical thinking far beyond that sphere. In regard to the extension of solid science, one of the prime necessities of Greek intellectual life, he was quite reactionary, drawing a line between the phenomena which he thought intelligible and traceable and those which he thought past finding out. “Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena in which human research was insane, fruitless, and impious.”254 Yet at the same time he formulated, apparently of his own motion, the ordinary design argument.255 The sound scientific view led up to by so many previous thinkers was set forth, even in religious phraseology, by his great contemporary Hippokrates,256 and he opposed it. While partially separating himself in practice from the popular worships, he held by the belief in omens, though not in all the ordinary ones; and in one of the Platonic dialogues he is made to say he holds by the ordinary versions of all the myths, on the ground that it is a hopeless task to find rational explanations for them.257 He hoped, in short, to rationalize conduct without seeking to rationalize creed—the dream of Plato and of a thousand religionists since.