Note 49.1 — SOCRATES.

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, 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, 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 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 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.