Note 26.1 — SOCRATES.

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 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 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 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 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. Such a great prophet now appeared, and his name was Socrates.[26.1]