classes ::: person, philosopher, mystic,
children :::
branches ::: Socrates

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object:Socrates
class:person
class:philosopher
class:mystic
subject:Philosophy

see also ::: Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus



see also ::: Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO

Aristotle
Plato
Plotinus

AUTH

BOOKS
City_of_God
Conversations_of_Socrates
Enchiridion_text
Infinite_Library
On_Interpretation
Plotinus_-_Complete_Works_Vol_01
Process_and_Reality
The_Categories
The_Republic
The_Trial_and_Death_of_Socrates
The_Use_and_Abuse_of_History
Twilight_of_the_Idols

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1.02_-_THE_PROBLEM_OF_SOCRATES
1.201_-_Socrates
1.ey_-_Socrates

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
01.02_-_Sri_Aurobindo_-_Ahana_and_Other_Poems
01.03_-_Mystic_Poetry
01.04_-_The_Intuition_of_the_Age
01.05_-_Rabindranath_Tagore:_A_Great_Poet,_a_Great_Man
03.01_-_Humanism_and_Humanism
03.04_-_The_Other_Aspect_of_European_Culture
03.06_-_Divine_Humanism
03.10_-_The_Mission_of_Buddhism
03.16_-_The_Tragic_Spirit_in_Nature
04.02_-_A_Chapter_of_Human_Evolution
04.03_-_The_Eternal_East_and_West
05.01_-_Man_and_the_Gods
10.07_-_The_World_is_One
1.01_-_Adam_Kadmon_and_the_Evolution
1.02_-_THE_PROBLEM_OF_SOCRATES
1.02_-_The_Vision_of_the_Past
10.37_-_The_Golden_Bridge
1.04_-_Descent_into_Future_Hell
1.04_-_The_Divine_Mother_-_This_Is_She
1.04_-_The_First_Circle,_Limbo__Virtuous_Pagans_and_the_Unbaptized._The_Four_Poets,_Homer,_Horace,_Ovid,_and_Lucan._The_Noble_Castle_of_Philosophy.
1.04_-_The_Self
1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN
1.05_-_THE_NEW_SPIRIT
1.06_-_MORTIFICATION,_NON-ATTACHMENT,_RIGHT_LIVELIHOOD
1.06_-_Psychic_Education
1.07_-_On_Our_Knowledge_of_General_Principles
1.08_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda_-_The_Secret_of_the_Veda
1.09_-_SELF-KNOWLEDGE
1.1.05_-_The_Siddhis
1.11_-_On_Intuitive_Knowledge
1.12_-_THE_FESTIVAL_AT_PNIHTI
1.13_-_Knowledge,_Error,_and_Probably_Opinion
1.13_-_Under_the_Auspices_of_the_Gods
1.17_-_Religion_as_the_Law_of_Life
1.201_-_Socrates
12.03_-_The_Sorrows_of_God
1.23_-_The_Double_Soul_in_Man
1.24_-_RITUAL,_SYMBOL,_SACRAMENT
1.42_-_This_Self_Introversion
1.439
1.76_-_The_Gods_-_How_and_Why_they_Overlap
1.ey_-_Socrates
1.fs_-_Rousseau
1.jk_-_Epistle_To_John_Hamilton_Reynolds
1.pbs_-_Epipsychidion_-_Passages_Of_The_Poem,_Or_Connected_Therewith
1.pbs_-_Hellas_-_A_Lyrical_Drama
1.pbs_-_HERE_I_sit_with_my_paper
1.pbs_-_Queen_Mab_-_Part_II.
1.pbs_-_The_Triumph_Of_Life
1.whitman_-_The_Base_Of_All_Metaphysics
2.01_-_THE_ADVENT_OF_LIFE
2.01_-_THE_ARCANE_SUBSTANCE_AND_THE_POINT
2.03_-_Karmayogin__A_Commentary_on_the_Isha_Upanishad
2.04_-_On_Art
2.08_-_ALICE_IN_WONDERLAND
2.0_-_THE_ANTICHRIST
2.13_-_On_Psychology
2.18_-_January_1939
30.02_-_Greek_Drama
3.05_-_SAL
33.03_-_Muraripukur_-_I
3.6.01_-_Heraclitus
36.07_-_An_Introduction_To_The_Vedas
3.7.2.03_-_Mind_Nature_and_Law_of_Karma
4.03_-_Prayer_to_the_Ever-greater_Christ
4.1.3_-_Imperfections_and_Periods_of_Arrest
5.02_-_THE_STATUE
5.4.01_-_Occult_Knowledge
5_-_The_Phenomenology_of_the_Spirit_in_Fairytales
6.0_-_Conscious,_Unconscious,_and_Individuation
Apology
BOOK_II._--_PART_I._ANTHROPOGENESIS.
BOOK_II._--_PART_II._THE_ARCHAIC_SYMBOLISM_OF_THE_WORLD-RELIGIONS
BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION
BOOK_I._--_PART_III._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_VIII._-_Some_account_of_the_Socratic_and_Platonic_philosophy,_and_a_refutation_of_the_doctrine_of_Apuleius_that_the_demons_should_be_worshipped_as_mediators_between_gods_and_men
BOOK_XIII._-_That_death_is_penal,_and_had_its_origin_in_Adam's_sin
BOOK_XIV._-_Of_the_punishment_and_results_of_mans_first_sin,_and_of_the_propagation_of_man_without_lust
BOOK_XVIII._-_A_parallel_history_of_the_earthly_and_heavenly_cities_from_the_time_of_Abraham_to_the_end_of_the_world
Cratylus
ENNEAD_01.08_-_Of_the_Nature_and_Origin_of_Evils.
ENNEAD_02.05_-_Of_the_Aristotelian_Distinction_Between_Actuality_and_Potentiality.
ENNEAD_03.02_-_Of_Providence.
ENNEAD_04.03_-_Psychological_Questions.
ENNEAD_04.04_-_Questions_About_the_Soul.
ENNEAD_05.01_-_The_Three_Principal_Hypostases,_or_Forms_of_Existence.
ENNEAD_05.03_-_The_Self-Consciousnesses,_and_What_is_Above_Them.
ENNEAD_05.07_-_Do_Ideas_of_Individuals_Exist?
ENNEAD_05.09_-_Of_Intelligence,_Ideas_and_Essence.
ENNEAD_06.01_-_Of_the_Ten_Aristotelian_and_Four_Stoic_Categories.
ENNEAD_06.02_-_The_Categories_of_Plotinos.
ENNEAD_06.03_-_Plotinos_Own_Sense-Categories.
ENNEAD_06.05_-_The_One_and_Identical_Being_is_Everywhere_Present_In_Its_Entirety.345
Euthyphro
Gorgias
Ion
Liber_46_-_The_Key_of_the_Mysteries
Meno
Phaedo
Sophist
Symposium_translated_by_B_Jowett
Tablets_of_Baha_u_llah_text
Talks_600-652
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_1
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2
Theaetetus
The_Coming_Race_Contents
the_Eternal_Wisdom
Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra_text
Timaeus

PRIMARY CLASS

mystic
person
philosopher
SIMILAR TITLES
Conversations of Socrates
Socrates
The Trial and Death of Socrates

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

Socrates: (c. 470-399 B.C.) Was one of the most influential teachers of philosophy. The son of an Athenian stone cutter, named Sophroniscus, and of a mid-wife, Socrates learned his father's trade, but, in a sense, practised his mother's. Plato makes him describe himself as one who assists at the birth of ideas. With the exception of two periods of military service, he remained in Athens all his life. He claimed to be guided by a daimon which warned him against what was wrong, and Plato suggests that Socrates enjoyed mystic experiences. Much of his tirne was spent in high-minded philosophic discussion with those he chanced to meet in the public places of Athens. The young men enjoyed his easy methods of discussion and delighted in his frequent quizzing of the Sophists. He was eventually charged in the Athenian citizen court with being irreligious and corrupting the young. Found guilty, he submitted to the court and drank the poison which ended the life of one of the greatest of Athenians. He wrote nothing and is known through three widely divergent contemporary accounts. Aristophanes has caricatured him in the Clouds, Xenophon has described him, with personal respect but little understanding of his philosophical profundity; Plato's dialogues idealize him and probably develop the Socratic philosophy far beyond the original thought of his master. Socrates personifies the Athenian love of reason and of moderation; he probably taught that virtue is knowledge and that knowledge is only true when it reaches the stage of definition. See Socratic method. -- V.J.B.


TERMS ANYWHERE

academic ::: a. --> Alt. of Academical ::: n. --> One holding the philosophy of Socrates and Plato; a Platonist.
A member of an academy, college, or university; an academician.


Also first-order logic, predicate logic, and first-order predicate calculus. ::: A collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantified variables over non-logical objects and allows the use of sentences that contain variables, so that rather than propositions such as Socrates is a man one can have expressions in the form "there exists x such that x is Socrates and x is a man" and there exists is a quantifier while x is a variable.[173] This distinguishes it from propositional logic, which does not use quantifiers or relations;[248] in this sense, propositional logic is the foundation of first-order logic.

Also known as first-order predicate calculus and predicate logic. ::: A collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantified variables over non-logical objects and allows the use of sentences that contain variables, so that rather than propositions such as Socrates is a man one can have expressions in the form "there exists X such that X is Socrates and X is a man" and there exists is a quantifier while X is a variable.[173] This distinguishes it from propositional logic, which does not use quantifiers or relations.[174]

Apology: (Gr. apologia) A speech or writing in defense. Plato's Apology of Socrates purports to be the speech delivered by Socrates in his own defense at the trial in which he was condemned to death. -- G.R.M.

Aristippus of Cyrene: (c. 435-366 B.C.) Originally a Sophist, then Socrates' disciple, and finally the founder of the Cyrenaic School. He taught that pleasure, understood as the sensation of gentle character, is the true end of life. All pleasures are equal in value, but differ in degree and duration; they should be controlled and moderated by reason. -- R.B.W.

Aristotle: A Greek philosopher who lived from 384 BC to 322 BC. Aristotle wrote on numerous subjects including poetry, physics, music, politics and biology. He was the student of Plato. Alongside Plato and Socrates, Aristotle is considered an important figure to the founding of Western knowledge.

Aristotle and Plato believed in angels (Aristotle called them intelligences). Socrates, who

benevolent spirits, familiars, or angels. Socrates had

Besides the universal intelligible being of things, Aristotle was also primarily concerned with an investigation of the being of things from the standpoint of their generation and existence. But only individual things are generated and exist. Hence, for him, substance was primarily the individual: a "this" which, in contrast with the universal or secondary substance, is not communicable to many. The Aristotelian meaning of substance may be developed from four points of view: Grammar: The nature of substance as the ultimate subject of predication is expressed by common usage in its employment of the noun (or substantive) as the subject of a sentence to signify an individual thing which "is neither present in nor predicable of a subject." Thus substance is grammatically distinguished from its (adjectival) properties and modifications which "are present in and predicable of a subject."   Secondary substance is expressed by the universal term, and by its definition which are "not present in a subject but predicable of it." See Categoriae,) ch. 5. Physics: Independence of being emerges as a fundamental characteristic of substance in the analysis of change. Thus we have:   Substantial change: Socrates comes to be. (Change simply).   Accidental change; in a certain respect only: Socrates comes to be 6 feet tall. (Quantitative). Socrates comes to be musical (Qualitative). Socrates comes to be in Corinth (Local).     As substantial change is prior to the others and may occur independently of them, so the individual substance is prior in being to the accidents; i.e., the accidents cannot exist independently of their subject (Socrates), but can be only in him or in another primary substance, while the reverse is not necessarily the case. Logic: Out of this analysis of change there also emerges a division of being into the schema of categories, with the distinction between the category of substance and the several accidental categories, such as quantity, quality, place, relation, etc. In a corresponding manner, the category of substance is first; i.e., prior to the others in being, and independent of them. Metaphysics: The character of substance as that which is present in an individual as the cause of its being and unity is developed in Aristotle's metaphysical writings, see especiallv Bk. Z, ch. 17, 1041b. Primary substnnce is not the matter alone, nor the universal form common to many, but the individual unity of matter and form. For example, each thing is composed of parts or elements, as an organism is composed of cells, yet it is not merely its elements, but has a being and unity over and above the sum of its parts. This something more which causes the cells to be this organism rather than a malignant growth, is an example of what is meant by substance in its proper sense of first substance (substantia prima). Substance in its secondary sense (substantia secunda) is the universal form (idea or species) which is individuated in each thing.

Socrates: (c. 470-399 B.C.) Was one of the most influential teachers of philosophy. The son of an Athenian stone cutter, named Sophroniscus, and of a mid-wife, Socrates learned his father's trade, but, in a sense, practised his mother's. Plato makes him describe himself as one who assists at the birth of ideas. With the exception of two periods of military service, he remained in Athens all his life. He claimed to be guided by a daimon which warned him against what was wrong, and Plato suggests that Socrates enjoyed mystic experiences. Much of his tirne was spent in high-minded philosophic discussion with those he chanced to meet in the public places of Athens. The young men enjoyed his easy methods of discussion and delighted in his frequent quizzing of the Sophists. He was eventually charged in the Athenian citizen court with being irreligious and corrupting the young. Found guilty, he submitted to the court and drank the poison which ended the life of one of the greatest of Athenians. He wrote nothing and is known through three widely divergent contemporary accounts. Aristophanes has caricatured him in the Clouds, Xenophon has described him, with personal respect but little understanding of his philosophical profundity; Plato's dialogues idealize him and probably develop the Socratic philosophy far beyond the original thought of his master. Socrates personifies the Athenian love of reason and of moderation; he probably taught that virtue is knowledge and that knowledge is only true when it reaches the stage of definition. See Socratic method. -- V.J.B.

Characterology: This name originally was used for types; thus in Aristotle and Theophrastus, and even much later, e.g. in La Bruyere. Gradually it came to signify something individual; a development paralleled by the replacement of "typical" figures on the stage by individualities. There is no agreement, even today, on the definition; confusion reigns especially because of an insufficient distinction between character, personality, and person. But all agree that character manifests itself in the behavior of a person. One can distinguish a merely descriptive approach, one of classification, and one of interpretation. The general viewpoints of interpretation influence also description and classification, since they determine what is considered "important" and lay down the rules by which to distinguish and to classify. One narrow interpretation looks at character mainly as the result of inborn properties, rooted in organic constitution; character is considered, therefore, as essentially unchangeable and predetermined. The attempts at establishing correlations between character and body-build (Kretschmer a.o.) are a special form of such narrow interpretation. It makes but little difference if, besides inborn properties, the influence of environmental factors is acknowledged. The rationalistic interpretation looks at character mainly as the result of convictions. These convictions are seen as purely intellectual in extreme rationalism (virtue is knowledge, Socrates), or as referring to the value-aspect of reality which is conceived as apprehended by other than merely intellectual operations. Thus, Spranger gives a classification according to the "central values" dominating a man's behavior. (Allport has devised practical methods of character study on this basis.) Since the idea a person has of values and their order may change, character is conceived as essentially mutable, even if far going changes may be unfrequent. Character-education is the practical application of the principles of characterology and thus depends on the general idea an author holds in regard to human nature. Character is probably best defined as the individual's way of preferring or rejecting values. It depends on the innate capacities of value-apprehension and on the way these values are presented to the individual. Therefore the enormous influence of social factors. -- R.A.

Cynics: A school of Greek Philosophy, named after the gymnasium Cynosarges, founded by Antisthenes of Athens, friend of Socrates. Man's true happiness, the Cynics taught, lies in right and intelligent living, and this constitutes for them also the concept of the virtuous life. For the Cynics, this right and virtuous life consists in a course of conduct which is as much as possible independent of all events and factors external to man. This independence can be achieved through mastery over one's desires and wants. The Cynics attempted to free man from bondage to human custom, convention and institution by reducing man's desires and appetites to such only as are indispensable to life and by renouncing those whicn are imposed by civilization. In extreme cases, such as that of Diogenes, this philosophy expressed itself in a desire to live the natural life in the midst of the civilized Greek community. -- M.F.

Daimonion (Greek) Diminutive of daimon; the name given by Socrates to the warning voice which watched over him and checked his actions, never telling him what to do, but what not to do. In practical effect, it is equivalent to conscience, or the voice of the reimbodying ego, aroused in human life to an extraordinary degree.

demon">Demon In its original Latin form daemon means 'spirit', genie, or 'genius' who provided intuition, insight, and inspiration and allowed humans to converse with gods. In relation to the Greek form daimon, Socrates 'daimon' was his higher consciousness or some divinity connected with him. A demon was never considered to be an evil entity.

demon ::: n. --> A spirit, or immaterial being, holding a middle place between men and deities in pagan mythology.
One&


Demon of Socrates: The guiding spirit who forewarned the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates of dangers.

Denotation: The subjects (i.e., those entities which possess attributes) of which a term may be predicated, e.g., the term "man" denotes Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. (J. S. Mill) "Denotation" in this sense should be distinguished from "extension" in the sense in which that signifies the subclasses of the class determined by the term. The former indicates the various individual instances in which a common nature is manifested; the latter signifies the variety of kinds over which the predication of a term may extend. (H. W. B. Joseph.) -- C.A.B.

Dialectic: (Gr. dia + legein, discourse) The beginning of dialectic Aristotle is said to have attributed to Zeno of Elea. But as the art of debate by question and answer, its beginning is usually associated with the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues. As conceived by Plato himself, dialectic is the science of first principles which differs from other sciences by dispensing with hypotheses and is, consequently, "the copingstone of the sciences" -- the highest, because the clearest and hence the ultimate, sort of knowledge. Aristotle distinguishes between dialectical reasoning, which proceeds syllogistically from opinions generally accepted, and demonstrative reasoning, which begins with primary and true premises; but he holds that dialectical reasoning, in contrast with eristic, is "a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries." In modern philosophy, dialectic has two special meanings. Kant uses it as the name of that part of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft which deals critically with the special difficulties (antinomies, paralogisms and Ideas) arising out of the futile attempt (transcendental illusion) to apply the categories of the Understanding beyond the only realm to which they can apply, namely, the realm of objects in space and time (Phenomena). For Hegel, dialectic is primarily the distinguishing characteristic of speculative thought -- thought, that is, which exhibits the structure of its subject-matter (the universal, system) through the construction of synthetic categories (synthesis) which resolve (sublate) the opposition between other conflicting categories (theses and antitheses) of the same subject-matter. -- G.W.C.

F. C. S. Schiller, the Oxford pragmatist or humanist, is, if anything, more hostile to rationalism, intellectualism, absolute metaphysics and even systematic and rigorous thinking than James himself. In his Humanism (1903) and his most important book Studies in Humanism (1907), he attempts to resolve or deflate metaphysical issues and controversies by practical distinctions of terms and appeal to personal, human factors, supposedly forgotten by other philosophers. Schiller wrote about many of the topics which James treated: absolute metaphysics, religion, truth, freedom, psychic research, etc., and the outcome is similar. His spirited defense of Protagoras, "the humanist", against Socrates and his tireless bantering critique of all phases of formal logic are elements of novelty. So also is his extreme activism. He goes so far as to say that "In validating our claims to 'truth' . . . we really transform them [realities] by our cognitive efforts, thereby proving our desires and ideas to be real forces in the shaping of the world". (Studies tn Humanism, 1906, p. 425.) Schiller's apparent view that desires and ideas can transform both truth and reality, even without manipulation or experiment, could also be found in James, but is absent in Dewey and later pragmatists.

flame ::: “The true soul secret in us,—subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil,—this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” The Life Divine

Genius: Originally the word applied to a demon such as Socrates' inner voice. During the 17th century it was linked to the Plntonic theory of inspiration and was applied to the rejection of too rigid rules in art. It defined the real artist and distinguished his creative imagination from the logical reasoning of the scientist. In Kant (Critique of Judgment), genius creates its own rules. -- L.V.

Greece. Homeric thought centered in Moira (Fate), an impersonal, immaterial power that distributes to gods and men their respective stations. While the main stream of pre-Socratic thought was naturalistic, it was not materialistic. The primordial Being of things, the Physis, is both extended and spiritual (hylozoism). Soul and Mind are invariably identified with Physis. Empedocles' distinction between inertia and force (Love and Hate) was followed by Anaxagoras' introduction of Mind (Nous) as the first cause of order and the principle of spontaneity or life in things. Socrates emphasized the ideological principle and introduced the category of Value as primary both in Nature and Man. He challenged the completeness of the mechanical explanation of natural events. Plato's theory of Ideas (as traditionally interpreted by historians) is at once a metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Ideas, forming a hierarchy and systematically united in the Good, are timeless essences comprising the realm of true Being. They are archetypes and causes of things in the realm of Non-Being (Space). Aristotle, while moving in the direction of common-sense realism, was also idealistic. Forms or species are secondary substances, and collectively form the dynamic and rational structure of the World. Active reason (Nous Poietikos), possessed by all rational creatures, is immaterial and eternal. Mind is the final cause of all motion. God is pure Mind, self-contained, self-centered, and metaphysically remote from the spatial World. The Stoics united idealism and hylozoistic naturalism in their doctrine of dynamic rational cosmic law (Logos), World Soul, Pneuma, and Providence (Pronoia).

H. B. Curry, Consistency and completeness of the theory of combinators, ibid , pp. 54-61. Comedy: In Aristotle (Poetics), a play in which chief characters behave worse than men do in daily life, as contrasted with tragedy, where the main characters act more nobly. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates argues at the end that a writer of good comedies is able to write good tragedies. See Comic. Metaphysically, comedy in Hegel consists of regarding reality as exhausted in a single category. Cf. Bergson, Le rire (Laughter). Commentator, The: Name usually used for Averroes by the medieval authors of the 13th century and later. In the writings of the grammarians (modistae, dealing with modis significandi) often used for Petrus Heliae. -- R.A.

Idea: (Gr. idea) This term has enjoyed historically a considerable diversity of usage. In pre-Platonic Greek: form, semblance, nature, fashion or mode, class or species. Plato (and Socrates): The Idea is a timeless essence or universal, a dynamic and creative archetype of existents. The Ideas comprise a hierarchy and an organic unity in the Good, and are ideals as patterns of existence and as objects of human desire. The Stoics: Ideas are class concepts in the human mind. Neo-Platonism: Ideas are archetypes of things considered as in cosmic Mind (Nous or Logos). Early Christianity and Scholasticism: Ideas are archetypes eternally subsistent in the mind of God. 17th Century: Following earlier usage, Descartes generally identified ideas with subjective, logical concepts of the human mind. Ideas were similarly treated as subjective or mental by Locke, who identified them with all objects of consciousness. Simple ideas, from which, by combination, all complex ideas are derived, have their source either in sense perception or "reflection" (intuition of our own being and mental processes). Berkeley: Ideas are sense objects or perceptions, considered either as modes of the human soul or as a type of mind-dependent being. Concepts derived from objects of intuitive introspection, such as activity, passivity, soul, are "notions." Hume: An Idea is a "faint image" or memory copy of sense "impressions." Kant: Ideas are concepts or representations incapable of adequate subsumption under the categories, which escape the limits of cognition. The ideas of theoretical or Pure Reason are ideals, demands of the human intellect for the absolute, i.e., the unconditioned or the totality of conditions of representation. They include the soul, Nature and God. The ideas of moral or Practical Reason include God, Freedom, and Immortality. The ideas of Reason cannot be sensuously represented (possess no "schema"). Aesthetic ideas are representations of the faculty of imagination to which no concept can be adequate.

inference rule "logic" A procedure which combines known facts to produce ("infer") new facts. For example, given that 1. Socrates is a man and that 2. all men are motal, we can infer that Socrates is mortal. This uses the rule known as "modus ponens" which can be written in {Boolean algebra} as (A & A =" B) =" B (if {proposition} A is true, and A implies B, then B is true). Or given that, 1. Either Denis is programming or Denis is sad and 2. Denis is not sad, we can infer that Denis is programming. This rule can be written ((A OR B) & not B) =" A (If either A is true or B is true (or both), and B is false, then A must be true). Compare {syllogism}. (1994-10-31)

inference rule ::: (logic) A procedure which combines known facts to produce (infer) new facts. For example, given that 1. Socrates is a man and that2. all men are motal, we can infer that Socrates is mortal. This uses the rule known as modus ponens which can be written in Boolean algebra as (A & A => B) => B (if proposition A is true, and A implies B, then B is true).Or given that, 1. Either Denis is programming or Denis is sad and2. Denis is not sad, we can infer that Denis is programming. This rule can be written ((A OR B) & not B) => A (If either A is true or B is true (or both), and B is false, then A must be true). (1994-10-31)

Maieutic: Adjective derived from the Greek maia, midwife; hence pertaining to the art of assisting at childbirth, and to the positive aspect of the Socratic method. Socrates pretended to be a midwife, like his mother, since he assisted at the birth of knowledge by eliciting correct concepts by his process of interrogation and examination. -- J.J.R.

natural deduction "logic" A set of rules expressing how valid {proofs} may be constructed in {predicate logic}. In the traditional notation, a horizontal line separates {premises} (above) from {conclusions} (below). Vertical ellipsis (dots) stand for a series of applications of the rules. "T" is the constant "true" and "F" is the constant "false" (sometimes written with a {LaTeX} {\perp}). "^" is the AND ({conjunction}) operator, "v" is the inclusive OR ({disjunction}) operator and "/" is NOT (negation or {complement}, normally written with a {LaTeX} {\neg}). P, Q, P1, P2, etc. stand for {propositions} such as "Socrates was a man". P[x] is a proposition possibly containing instances of the variable x, e.g. "x can fly". A proof (a sequence of applications of the rules) may be enclosed in a box. A boxed proof produces conclusions that are only valid given the assumptions made inside the box, however, the proof demonstrates certain relationships which are valid outside the box. For example, the box below labelled "Implication introduction" starts by assuming P, which need not be a true {proposition} so long as it can be used to derive Q. Truth introduction: - T (Truth is free). Binary AND introduction: ----------- | . | . | | . | . | | Q1 | Q2 | -----------  Q1 ^ Q2 (If we can derive both Q1 and Q2 then Q1^Q2 is true). N-ary AND introduction: ---------------- | . | .. | . | | . | .. | . | | Q1 | .. | Qn | ---------------- Q1^..^Qi^..^Qn Other n-ary rules follow the binary versions similarly. Quantified AND introduction: --------- | x . | |  . | | Q[x] | --------- For all x . Q[x] (If we can prove Q for arbitrary x then Q is true for all x). Falsity elimination: F - Q (Falsity opens the floodgates). OR elimination:  P1 v P2 ----------- | P1 | P2 | | . | . | | . | . | | Q | Q | -----------   Q (Given P1 v P2, if Q follows from both then Q is true). Exists elimination: Exists x . P[x] ----------- | x P[x] | |   . | |   . | |   Q | -----------    Q (If Q follows from P[x] for arbitrary x and such an x exists then Q is true). OR introduction 1:   P1 ------- P1 v P2 (If P1 is true then P1 OR anything is true). OR introduction 2:   P2 ------- P1 v P2 (If P2 is true then anything OR P2 is true). Similar symmetries apply to ^ rules. Exists introduction:   P[a] ------------- Exists x.P[x] (If P is true for "a" then it is true for all x). AND elimination 1: P1 ^ P2 -------   P1 (If P1 and P2 are true then P1 is true). For all elimination: For all x . P[x] ----------------    P[a] (If P is true for all x then it is true for "a"). For all implication introduction: ----------- | x P[x] | |   . | |   . | |  Q[x] | ----------- For all x . P[x] -" Q[x] (If Q follows from P for arbitrary x then Q follows from P for all x). Implication introduction: ----- | P | | . | | . | | Q | ----- P -" Q (If Q follows from P then P implies Q). NOT introduction: ----- | P | | . | | . | | F | ----- / P (If falsity follows from P then P is false). NOT-NOT: //P --- P (If it is not the case that P is not true then P is true). For all implies exists: P[a] For all x . P[x] -" Q[x] -------------------------------    Q[a] (If P is true for given "a" and P implies Q for all x then Q is true for a). Implication elimination, modus ponens: P P -" Q ----------   Q (If P and P implies Q then Q). NOT elimination, contradiction: P /P ------  F (If P is true and P is not true then false is true). (1995-01-16)

natural deduction ::: (logic) A set of rules expressing how valid proofs may be constructed in predicate logic.In the traditional notation, a horizontal line separates premises (above) from conclusions (below). Vertical ellipsis (dots) stand for a series of applications of the rules. T is the constant true and F is the constant false (sometimes written with a LaTeX \perp).^ is the AND (conjunction) operator, v is the inclusive OR (disjunction) operator and / is NOT (negation or complement, normally written with a LaTeX \neg).P, Q, P1, P2, etc. stand for propositions such as Socrates was a man. P[x] is a proposition possibly containing instances of the variable x, e.g. x can fly.A proof (a sequence of applications of the rules) may be enclosed in a box. A boxed proof produces conclusions that are only valid given the assumptions made introduction starts by assuming P, which need not be a true proposition so long as it can be used to derive Q.Truth introduction: -T (Truth is free).Binary AND introduction: -----------| . | . | (If we can derive both Q1 and Q2 then Q1^Q2 is true).N-ary AND introduction: ----------------| . | .. | . | Other n-ary rules follow the binary versions similarly.Quantified AND introduction: ---------| x . | (If we can prove Q for arbitrary x then Q is true for all x).Falsity elimination: F- (Falsity opens the floodgates).OR elimination: P1 v P2----------- (Given P1 v P2, if Q follows from both then Q is true).Exists elimination: Exists x . P[x]----------- (If Q follows from P[x] for arbitrary x and such an x exists then Q is true).OR introduction 1: P1------- (If P1 is true then P1 OR anything is true).OR introduction 2: P2------- (If P2 is true then anything OR P2 is true). Similar symmetries apply to ^ rules.Exists introduction: P[a]------------- (If P is true for a then it is true for all x).AND elimination 1: P1 ^ P2------- (If P1 and P2 are true then P1 is true).For all elimination: For all x . P[x]---------------- (If P is true for all x then it is true for a).For all implication introduction: -----------| x P[x] | (If Q follows from P for arbitrary x then Q follows from P for all x).Implication introduction: -----| P | (If Q follows from P then P implies Q).NOT introduction: -----| P | (If falsity follows from P then P is false).NOT-NOT: //P--- (If it is not the case that P is not true then P is true).For all implies exists: P[a] For all x . P[x] -> Q[x]------------------------------- (If P is true for given a and P implies Q for all x then Q is true for a).Implication elimination, modus ponens: P P -> Q---------- (If P and P implies Q then Q).NOT elimination, contradiction: P /P------ (1995-01-16)

orthocracy ::: A philosophical logical scheme that asserts minimal deviation of practice from theory during management of material and immaterial wealth under strict adherence to ethical principles of human communities. By definition it is close to orthodoxy. Aristoteles and Socrates are two philosophers whose thoughts could point to orthocracy.

Phoebus (Greek) Pure, bright, radiant, beaming; the solar regent, and in Latin mystic mythology the sun god, offspring of Zeus and Latona: also known by the Greeks as Apollo or Phoebus-Apollo. This deity represented both physical and spiritual purity and radiance to the Greeks; and to the Greek mind the solar divinity bore intimate relationships with mankind through his Oracle at Delphi, situated on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in Phocis, where a temple and oracular sanctuary were erected in his honor, to which consultants and suppliants thronged from all parts of the ancient world. Inscribed on the temple was the phrase associated with Socrates and Plato — gnothi seauton (know yourself). See also APOLLO; ORACLE

Plato: (428-7 - 348-7 B.C.) Was one of the greatest of the Greek philosophers. He was born either in Athens or on the island of Aegina, and was originally known as Aristocles. Ariston, his father, traced his ancestry to the last kings of Athens. His mother, Perictione, was a descendant of the family of Solon. Plato was given the best elementary education possible and he spent eight years, from his own twentieth year to the death of Socrates, as a member of the Socratic circle. Various stories are told about his supposed masters in philosophy, and his travels in Greece, Italy, Sicily and Egypt, but all that we know for certain is that he somehow acquired a knowledge of Pythagoreanisrn, Heracleitanism, Eleaticism and othei Pre-Socratic philosophies. He founded his school of mathematics and philosophy in Athens in 387 B.C. It became known as the Academy. Here he taught with great success until his death at the age of eighty. His career as a teacher was interrupted on two occasions by trips to Sicily, where Plato tried without much success to educate and advise Dionysius the Younger. His works have been very well preserved; we have more than twenty-five authentic dialogues, certain letters, and some definitions which are probably spurious. For a list of works, bibliography and an outline of his thought, see Platonism. -- V.J.B.

Plato ::: Ancient Greek philosopher (4th century B.C.E.), student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, whose identification of reality with the non-material world of ideas (“the ideal world”) played an enormous role in subsequent philosophy and religion (see neo-Platonism). Father of “Platonism” and the Platonic Academy as a philosophical institution in Athens.

Pragmatism: (Gr. pragma, things done) Owes its inception as a movement of philosophy to C. S. Peirce and William James, but approximations to it can be found in many earlier thinkers, including (according to Peirce and James) Socrates and Aristotle, Berkeley and Hume. Concerning a closer precursor, Shadworth Hodgson, James says that he "keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known as' ". Kant actually uses the word "pragmatic" to characterize "counsels of prudence" as distinct from "rules of skill" and "commands of morality" (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 40). His principle of the primacy of practical reason is also an anticipation of pragmatism. It was reflection on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which originally led Peirce to formulate the view that the muddles of metaphysics can be cleared up if one attends to the practical consequences of ideas. The pragmatic maxim was first stated by Peirce in 1878 (Popular Science Monthly) "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". A clearer formulation by the same author reads: "In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception". This is often expressed briefly, viz.: The meaning of a proposition is its logical (or physical) consequences. The principle is not merely logical. It is also admonitory in Baconian style "Pragmatism is the principle that everv theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose onlv meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the impentive mood". (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 5.18.) Although Peirce's maxim has been an inspiration not only to later pragmatists, but to operationalists as well, Peirce felt that it might easily be misapplied, so as to eliminate important doctrines of science -- doctrines, presumably, which hive no ascertainable practical consequences.

presence ::: 1. The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence. 2. A divine, spiritual, or supernatural spirit or influence felt or conceived as present. 3. The immediate proximity of someone or something.


Sri Aurobindo: "It is intended by the word Presence to indicate the sense and perception of the Divine as a Being, felt as present in one"s existence and consciousness or in relation with it, without the necessity of any further qualification or description. Thus, of the ‘ineffable Presence" it can only be said that it is there and nothing more can or need be said about it, although at the same time one knows that all is there, personality and impersonality, Power and Light and Ananda and everything else, and that all these flow from that indescribable Presence. The word may be used sometimes in a less absolute sense, but that is always the fundamental significance, — the essential perception of the essential Presence supporting everything else.” *Letters on Yoga

"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” Essays Divine and Human

"But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master — a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within.” *The Life Divine

"The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” *The Life Divine

"If we need any personal and inner witness to this indivisible All-Consciousness behind the ignorance, — all Nature is its external proof, — we can get it with any completeness only in our deeper inner being or larger and higher spiritual state when we draw back behind the veil of our own surface ignorance and come into contact with the divine Idea and Will behind it. Then we see clearly enough that what we have done by ourselves in our ignorance was yet overseen and guided in its result by the invisible Omniscience; we discover a greater working behind our ignorant working and begin to glimpse its purpose in us: then only can we see and know what now we worship in faith, recognise wholly the pure and universal Presence, meet the Lord of all being and all Nature.” *The Life Divine

"The presence of the Spirit is there in every living being, on every level, in all things, and because it is there, the experience of Sachchidananda, of the pure spiritual existence and consciousness, of the delight of a divine presence, closeness, contact can be acquired through the mind or the heart or the life-sense or even through the physical consciousness; if the inner doors are flung sufficiently open, the light from the sanctuary can suffuse the nearest and the farthest chambers of the outer being.” *The Life Divine

"There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.” *The Synthesis of Yoga

"For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge.” *The Synthesis of Yoga

"One must have faith in the Master of our life and works, even if for a long time He conceals Himself, and then in His own right time He will reveal His Presence.” *Letters on Yoga

"They [the psychic being and the Divine Presence in the heart] are quite different things. The psychic being is one"s own individual soul-being. It is not the Divine, though it has come from the Divine and develops towards the Divine.” *Letters on Yoga

"For it is quietness and inwardness that enable one to feel the Presence.” *Letters on Yoga

"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” *Essays Divine and Human

The Mother: "For, in human beings, here is a presence, the most marvellous Presence on earth, and except in a few very rare cases which I need not mention here, this presence lies asleep in the heart — not in the physical heart but the psychic centre — of all beings. And when this Splendour is manifested with enough purity, it will awaken in all beings the echo of his Presence.” Words of the Mother, MCW, Vol. 15.


resolution 1. "hardware" the maximum number of {pixels} that can be displayed on a {monitor}, expressed as (number of horizontal pixels) x (number of vertical pixels), i.e., 1024x768. The ratio of horizontal to vertical resolution is usually 4:3, the same as that of conventional television sets. 2. "logic" A mechanical method for proving statements of {first order logic}, introduced by J. A. Robinson in 1965. Resolution is applied to two {clauses} in a {sentence}. It eliminates, by {unification}, a {literal} that occurs "positive" in one and "negative" in the other to produce a new clause, the {resolvent}. For example, given the sentence: (man(X) =" mortal(X)) AND man(socrates). The literal "man(X)" is "negative". The literal "man(socrates)" could be considered to be on the right hand side of the degenerate implication True =" man(socrates) and is therefore "positive". The two literals can be unified by the binding X = socrates. The {truth table} for the implication function is A | B | A =" B --+---+------- F | F | T F | T | T T | F | F T | T | T (The implication only fails if its premise is true but its conclusion is false). From this we can see that A =" B == (NOT A) OR B Which is why the left hand side of the implication is said to be negative and the right positive. The sentence above could thus be written ((NOT man(socrates)) OR mortal(socrates)) AND man(socrates) Distributing the AND over the OR gives ((NOT man(socrates)) AND man(socrates)) OR mortal(socrates) AND man(socrates) And since (NOT A) AND A == False, and False OR A == A we can simplify to just mortal(socrates) AND man(socrates) So we have proved the new literal, mortal(socrates). Resolution with {backtracking} is the basic control mechanism of {Prolog}. See also {modus ponens}, {SLD Resolution}. 3. "networking" {address resolution}. (1996-02-09)

resolution ::: 1. (hardware) the maximum number of pixels that can be displayed on a monitor, expressed as (number of horizontal pixels) x (number of vertical pixels), i.e., 1024x768. The ratio of horizontal to vertical resolution is usually 4:3, the same as that of conventional television sets.2. (logic) A mechanical method for proving statements of first order logic, introduced by J. A. Robinson in 1965. Resolution is applied to two positive in one and negative in the other to produce a new clause, the resolvent.For example, given the sentence: (man(X) => mortal(X)) AND man(socrates). considered to be on the right hand side of the degenerate implication True => man(socrates) and is therefore positive. The two literals can be unified by the binding X = socrates.The truth table for the implication function is A | B | A => B--+---+------- (The implication only fails if its premise is true but its conclusion is false). From this we can see that A => B == (NOT A) OR B and the right positive. The sentence above could thus be written ((NOT man(socrates)) OR mortal(socrates))AND Distributing the AND over the OR gives ((NOT man(socrates)) AND man(socrates))OR And since (NOT A) AND A == False, and False OR A == A we can simplify to just mortal(socrates) AND man(socrates) So we have proved the new literal, mortal(socrates).Resolution with backtracking is the basic control mechanism of Prolog.See also modus ponens, SLD Resolution.3. (networking) address resolution. (1996-02-09)

socratical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Socrates, the Grecian sage and teacher. (b. c. 469-399), or to his manner of teaching and philosophizing.

Socratic method: (from Socrates, who is said by Plato and Xenophon to have used this method) is a way of teaching in which the master professes to impart no information, (for, in the case of Socrates, he claimed to have none), but draws forth more and more definite answers by means of pointed questions. The method is best illustrated in Socrates' questioning of an unlearned slave boy in the Meno of Plato. The slave is led, step by step, to a demonstration of a special case of the Pythagorean theoiem. Socrates' original use of the method is predicated on the belief that children are born with knowledge already in their souls but that they cannot recall this knowledge without some help, (theory of anamnesis). It is also associated with Socratic Irony, i.e., the profession of ignorance on the part of a questioner, who may be in fact quite wise. -- V.J.B.

socratism ::: n. --> The philosophy or the method of Socrates.

socratist ::: n. --> A disciple or follower of Socrates.

soul ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The word ‘soul", as also the word ‘psychic", is used very vaguely and in many different senses in the English language. More often than not, in ordinary parlance, no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire — the false soul or desire-soul — is intended by the words ‘soul" and ‘psychic" and not the true soul, the psychic being.” *Letters on Yoga


  "The word soul is very vaguely used in English — as it often refers to the whole non-physical consciousness including even the vital with all its desires and passions. That was why the word psychic being has to be used so as to distinguish this divine portion from the instrumental parts of the nature.” *Letters on Yoga

  "The word soul has various meanings according to the context; it may mean the Purusha supporting the formation of Prakriti, which we call a being, though the proper word would be rather a becoming; it may mean, on the other hand, specifically the psychic being in an evolutionary creature like man; it may mean the spark of the Divine which has been put into Matter by the descent of the Divine into the material world and which upholds all evolving formations here.” *Letters on Yoga

  "A distinction has to be made between the soul in its essence and the psychic being. Behind each and all there is the soul which is the spark of the Divine — none could exist without that. But it is quite possible to have a vital and physical being supported by such a soul essence but without a clearly evolved psychic being behind it.” *Letters on Yoga

  "The soul and the psychic being are practically the same, except that even in things which have not developed a psychic being, there is still a spark of the Divine which can be called the soul. The psychic being is called in Sanskrit the Purusha in the heart or the Chaitya Purusha. (The psychic being is the soul developing in the evolution.)” *Letters on Yoga

  "The soul or spark is there before the development of an organised vital and mind. The soul is something of the Divine that descends into the evolution as a divine Principle within it to support the evolution of the individual out of the Ignorance into the Light. It develops in the course of the evolution a psychic individual or soul individuality which grows from life to life, using the evolving mind, vital and body as its instruments. It is the soul that is immortal while the rest disintegrates; it passes from life to life carrying its experience in essence and the continuity of the evolution of the individual.” *Letters on Yoga

  ". . . for the soul is seated within and impervious to the shocks of external events. . . .” *Essays on the Gita

  ". . . the soul is at first but a spark and then a little flame of godhead burning in the midst of a great darkness; for the most part it is veiled in its inner sanctum and to reveal itself it has to call on the mind, the life-force and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as best they can, to express it; ordinarily, it succeeds at most in suffusing their outwardness with its inner light and modifying with its purifying fineness their dark obscurities or their coarser mixture. Even when there is a formed psychic being able to express itself with some directness in life, it is still in all but a few a smaller portion of the being — ‘no bigger in the mass of the body than the thumb of a man" was the image used by the ancient seers — and it is not always able to prevail against the obscurity or ignorant smallness of the physical consciousness, the mistaken surenesses of the mind or the arrogance and vehemence of the vital nature.” *The Synthesis of Yoga

". . . the soul is an eternal portion of the Supreme and not a fraction of Nature.” The Life Divine

"The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” The Life Divine

*Soul, soul"s, Soul"s, souls, soulless, soul-bridals, soul-change, soul-force, Soul-Forces, soul-ground, soul-joy, soul-nature, soul-range, soul-ray, soul-scapes, soul-scene, soul-sense, soul-severance, soul-sight, soul-slaying, soul-space,, soul-spaces, soul-strength, soul-stuff, soul-truth, soul-vision, soul-wings, world-soul, World-Soul.



Sri Aurobindo: "The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” *The Life Divine

Stoics [from stoa corridor in Athens in which Zeno held his school and taught] Stoicism is most familiar as a great ethical system; its aim was to make wisdom practical. It set virtue above outer, physical, or social happiness as an ideal to be aimed at, and both its watchword and its consequent objective was duty. Though in the form familiar to us it arose in Greece, its qualities were better adapted to Hellenistic then to purely Greek appreciations, and especially to the Romans of the Empire with their graver temperament and individual subjection to the imperium. So far as Greece is concerned, its practical character can be traced to the influence of Socrates and of the Cynics; but it received Asiatic influence from its founder (Zeno, 4th century BC), of Asiatic origin.

symbolic inference ::: The derivation of new facts from known facts and inference rules. This is one of the fundamental operations of artificial intelligence and logic programming languages like Prolog.Inference is a basic part of human reasoning. For example given that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man, it is a trivial step to infer that Socrates is mortal. We might express these symbolically: man(X) => mortal(X).man(socrates). chaining system (a production system) could use these to infer the new fact mortal(socrates). simply by matching the left-hand-side of the implication against the fact and substituting socrates for the variable X. (1994-10-28)

symbolic inference The derivation of new facts from known facts and {inference rules}. This is one of the fundamental operations of {artificial intelligence} and {logic programming} languages like {Prolog}. Inference is a basic part of human reasoning. For example given that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man, it is a trivial step to infer that Socrates is mortal. We might express these symbolically: man(X) =" mortal(X). man(socrates). ("if X is a man then X is mortal" and "Socrates is a man"). Here, "man", "mortal" and "socrates" are just arbitrary symbols which the computer manipulates without reference to or knowledge of their external meaning. A {forward chaining} system (a {production system}) could use these to infer the new fact mortal(socrates). simply by matching the left-hand-side of the implication against the fact and substituting socrates for the variable X. (1994-10-28)

The daemon of Socrates stood for his higher and spiritual self, and parallels in this sense the Christian idea of the Guardian Angel. Hesiod designated them as spirits of the golden age appointed to watch over and guard mankind. We often find two daemones accompanying the individual, one prompting to good, the other to evil; while again it may be the same genius, whose influence is defined as at one time good, at another evil.

The doctrine of the person reached its high point in Greek philosophy in Socrates (469-399 B.C.) who recognized the soul or self as the center from which sprang all man's actions.

“The true soul secret in us,—subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil,—this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” The Life Divine

Though Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had propounded doctrines of virtues, they were concerned essentially with Good rather than with rightness of action as such. The Stoics were the first to develop and popularize the notion that man has a duty to live virtuously, reasonably and fittingly, regardless of considerations of human happiness. Certain elements in Rabbinical legalism and the Christian Gospel strained in the same direction, notably the concept of the supreme and absolute law of God. But it was Kant who pressed the logic of duty to its final conclusion. The supreme law of duty, the categorical imperative (q.v.), is revealed intuitively by the pure rational will and strives to determine the moral agent to obey only that law which can be willed universally without contradiction, regardless of consequences.

Whence, in the typical Scholastic or medieval notion, intellect is an immaterial faculty of the soul, that is, its operations are performed without a bodily organ, though they depend on the body and its senses for the material from which they receive their first impulse. Nothing is in the intellect that has not been previously in the senses. The impressions received by the external senses are synthesized by the internal sensus communis which forms an image or phantasm; the phantasm is presented to the intellect by imagination, memory and the vis cogitativa co-operating. The internal senses are conceived as being bound to organic functions of the brain. The intellect operates in a twofold manner, but is only one. As active intellect (intellectus agens) it "illuminates" the phantasm, disengaging there from the universal nature; as passive intellect (int. possibilis) it is informed by the result of this abstractive operation and develops the concept. Concepts are united into judgments by combination and division (assertion and negation). Judgments are related to each other in syllogistic reasoning or by the abbreviated form of enthymeme. Aquinas denies to the intellect the capacity of becoming aware of particulars in any direct way. The intellect knows of them (e.g. when asserting: Socrates is a man) only indirectly by reflecting on its own operations and finally on the phantasm which served as starting point. Propositions, however, have no directly corresponding phantasm. Later Scholastics credit the intellect with a direct knowledge of particulars (Suarez). See Abstraction, Faculty. -- R.A.

With reference to the approach to the central reality of religion, God, and man's relation to it, types of the Philosophy of Religion may be distinguished, leaving out of account negative (atheism), skeptical and cynical (Xenophanes, Socrates, Voltaire), and agnostic views, although insertions by them are not to be separated from the history of religious consciousness. Fundamentalism, mainly a theological and often a Church phenomenon of a revivalist nature, philosophizes on the basis of unquestioning faith, seeking to buttress it by logical argument, usually taking the form of proofs of the existence of God (see God). Here belong all historic religions, Christianity in its two principal forms, Catholicism with its Scholastic philosophy and Protestantism with its greatly diversified philosophies, the numerous religions of Hinduism, such as Brahmanism, Shivaism and Vishnuism, the religion of Judaism, and Mohammedanism. Mysticism, tolerated by Church and philosophy, is less concerned with proof than with description and personal experience, revealing much of the psychological factors involved in belief and speculation. Indian philosophy is saturated with mysticism since its inception, Sufism is the outstanding form of Arab mysticism, while the greatest mystics in the West are Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Thomas a Kempis, and Jacob Bohme. Metaphysics incorporates religious concepts as thought necessities. Few philosophers have been able to avoid the concept of God in their ontology, or any reference to the relation of God to man in their ethics. So, e.g., Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and especially Hegel who made the investigation of the process of the Absolute the essence of the Philosophy of Religion.



QUOTES [49 / 49 - 1500 / 1523]


KEYS (10k)

   34 Socrates
   4 Isocrates
   2 Socrates?
   1 Wikipedia
   1 Sri Aurobindo
   1 Saul Ader
   1 Ralph Waldo Emerson
   1 Howard Gardner
   1 Etienne Gilson
   1 Ernest Holmes
   1 Carl Sagan
   1 Epictetus

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

  703 Socrates
   72 Plato
   28 Isocrates
   20 Epictetus
   15 Friedrich Nietzsche
   15 Anonymous
   14 Michel de Montaigne
   13 Peter Kreeft
   12 Jostein Gaarder
   9 Ralph Waldo Emerson
   9 Marcus Aurelius
   9 Bertrand Russell
   7 Steven Pressfield
   7 Ray Bradbury
   7 John Stuart Mill
   6 Neil deGrasse Tyson
   6 Kurt Vonnegut
   5 Xenophon
   5 S ren Kierkegaard
   5 Piper Kerman

1:Be as you wish to seem.
   ~ Socrates,
2:An honest man is always a child.
   ~ Socrates,
3:Wisdom is knowing you know nothing ~ Socrates,
4:The unexamined life is not worth living ~ Socrates,
5:The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates,
6:I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
   ~ Socrates,
7:Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal. ~ Socrates?,
8:Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
   ~ Socrates,
9:The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. ~ Socrates,
10:The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. ~ Socrates,
11:Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.
   ~ Socrates,
12:Love alone knows the secret of getting rich by giving. ~ Socrates,
13:Let him that would move the world first move himself.
   ~ Socrates,
14:There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
   ~ Socrates,
15:I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
   ~ Socrates,
16:Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
   ~ Socrates,
17:Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.
   ~ Socrates,
18:Socrates had no philosophy, he was it. ~ Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers,
19:He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature. ~ Socrates,
20:The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.
   ~ Socrates,
21:The greater the power that deigns to serve you, the more honor it demands of you. ~ Socrates,
22:You're not yet Socrates, but you can still live as if you want to be him. ~ Epictetus,
23:The image, if expressing in every point the entire reality, would no longer be an image.
   ~ Socrates, Cratylus,
24:Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
25:The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. ~ Socrates,
26:The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
   ~ Socrates?,
27:By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. ~ Socrates,
28:One of the most important precepts of wisdom is to know oneself. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
29:Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
   ~ Socrates,
30:To be a man of worth and not to try to look like one is the true way to glory. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
31:I renounce the honours to which the world aspires and desire only to know the Truth. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
32:The soul like the body accepts by practice whatever habit one wishes it to contract. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
33:Labour to master adversity even as your passions, to which it would be shameful for you to be subjected. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
34:The Great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson... have taught man to look within himself to find God.
   ~ Ernest Holmes,
35:Why do you wonder that globetrotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason that set you wandering is ever at your heels. ~ Socrates,
36:The soul includes everything; whoever knows his soul, knows everything and whoever is ignorant of his soul, is ignorant of everything. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
37:In order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. ~ Socrates,
38:Therefore neither you, O judges, nor men in general ought to fear death: they have only to remember one thing, that for a just man there is no ill in life and no ill in death. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
39:Young Monk: "Are we human beings having a spiritual experience or are we spiritual beings having a human experience?" Old Monk: "What's the difference?" ~ Saul Ader, "Gifts From Stillness,", (2001). Known as " ~ the Socrates of Provincetown.",
40:Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
41:You tell me that good cheer, raiment, riches and luxury are happiness. I believe that the greatest felicity is to desire nothing, and in order to draw near to this supreme happiness, one must habituate oneself to have need of little. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom
42:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan,
43:If Confucius can serve as the Patron Saint of Chinese education, let me propose Socrates as his equivalent in a Western educational context - a Socrates who is never content with the initial superficial response, but is always probing for finer distinctions, clearer examples, a more profound form of knowing. Our concept of knowledge has changed since classical times, but Socrates has provided us with a timeless educational goal - ever deeper understanding. ~ Howard Gardner,
44:In Plato's Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a 'great daemon' (202d). She goes on to explain that 'everything daemonic is between divine and mortal' (202d-e), and she describes daemons as 'interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above...' (202e). In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a 'divine something')[16] that frequently warned him-in the form of a 'voice'-against mistakes but never told him what to do.
   ~ Wikipedia, Daemon,
45:The true soul secret in us, - subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, - this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
46:To The Works Of:
   Aristotle, Cassius J. Keyser, Eric T. Bell, G. W. Leibnitz, Eugen Bleuler, J. Locke, Niels Bohr, Jacques Loeb, George Boole, H. A. Lorentz, Max Born, Ernst Mach, Louis De Brogue, J. C. Maxwell, Georg Cantor, Adolf Meyer, Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Minkowsja, Charles M. Child, Isaac Newton, C. Darwin, Ivan Pavlov, Rene Descartes, Giuseppe Peano, P. A. M. Dirac, Max Planck, A. S. Eddington, Plato, Albert Einstein, H. Poincare, Euclid, M. Faraday, Sigmund Freud, Josiah Royce, Karl F. Gauss, G. Y. Rainich, G. B. Riemann, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Graham, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Haas, E. Schrodinger, Wm. R. Hamilton, C. S. Sherrington, Henry Head, Socrates, Werner Heisenberg, Arnold Sommerfeld, C. Judson Herrick, Oswald Veblen, E. V. Huntington, Wm. Alanson White, Smith Ely Jeluffe, Alfred N. Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein
   Which Have Creatly Influenced My Enquiry
   This System Is Dedicated ~ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity,
47:''He is a great spirit,151 Socrates. All spirits are intermediate between god and mortal''.
''What is the function of a spirit?'' I asked.
''Interpreting and conveying all that passes between gods and humans: from humans, petitions and sacrificial offerings, and from gods, instructions and the favours they return. Spirits, being intermediary, fill the space between the other two, so that all are bound together into one entity. It is by means of spirits that all divination can take place, the whole craft of seers and priests, with their sacrifices, rites and spells, and all prophecy and magic. Deity and humanity are completely separate, but through the mediation of spirits all converse and communication from gods to humans, waking and sleeping, is made possible. The man who is wise in these matters is a man of the spirit,152 whereas the man who is wise in a skill153 or a manual craft,154 which is a different sort of expertise, is materialistic.155 These spirits are many and of many kinds, and one of them is Love''. ~ Plato, Symposium, 202e,
48:How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
   From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.
   ~ Epictetus, (From Manual 51),
49:I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.

From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be - what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing - I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.

We do not know - neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I- what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know. ~ Socrates,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Know thyself.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
2:Wisdom begins in wonder.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
3:Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
4:An honest man is always a child.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
5:Life is like a drop of dew on a leaf.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
6:Thou should eat to live; not live to eat.   ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
7:How many things are there which I do not want. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
8:My belief is that to have no wants is divine.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
9:I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
10:Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
11:Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.   ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
12:The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
13:Let him that would move the world, first move himself. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
14:True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
15:We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
16:If he who does not know kept silent, discord would cease. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
17:Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
18:The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
19:Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
20:I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
21:Socrates claimed that death is remembering, not forgetting. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove
22:An envious man waxeth lean with the fatness of his neighbours.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
23:If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove
24:I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
25:See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
26:I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. ~ steve-jobs, @wisdomtrove
27:It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove
28:The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
29:Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove
30:The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
31:To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove
32:I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
33:He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
34:To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
35:The greatest way to live with honour in this world is to be what we pretend to be.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
36:And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove
37:If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
38:He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
39:The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove
40:By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
41:Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
42:The Delphic Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks.  It is because I alone of all the Greeks know that I know nothing. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
43:In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove
44:I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
45:At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained in body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the highest. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove
46:I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
47:If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
48:Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove
49:Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
50:Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me? ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove
51:Even Socrates, who lived a very frugal and simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove
52:The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use? ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove
53:Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove
54:When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: "Try to bear lightly what needs must be." Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove
55:In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove
56:I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove
57:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove
58:…although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.  ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
59:When people asked Socrates, What is wisdom?’ he always gave the same answer: I don’t know’. In fact, Socrates never claimed to know much of anything except how to ask questions. And by asking questions, he would prove to other people that they didn’t know what they thought they knew. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove
60:The only analogy I have before me is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task, to revise the definition of what it is to be a Christian. For my part I do not call myself a "Christian" (thus keeping the ideal free), but I am able to make it evident that the others are still less than I. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove
61:Socrates told us, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.  Roger Ebert ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
62:It must be granted that in every syllogism, considered as an argument to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii. When we say, All men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal; it is unanswerably urged by the adversaries of the syllogistic theory, that the proposition, Socrates is mortal. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove
63:Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of - for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to appear. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
64:Socrates said, our only knowledge was "To know that nothing could be known;" a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an ass Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present. Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas! Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent, That he himself felt only "like a youth Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth." ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove
65:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove
66:There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove
67:My parents were only one part of my lineage. I also met a number of mentors, one of whom I nicknamed "Socrates" after the ancient Greek, and wrote about in my first book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior. That book emerged in 1980, as a result of travels around the world and decades of preparation, eventually leading to 15 other books written over the years, culminating in my newest offering, The Four Purposes of Life. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove
68:The maxim, "An unexamined life is not worth living," is the priceless legacy of Socrates to the generations of men who have followed him upon this earth. The beings who have stood on humanity's summit are those, and only those, who have heard the voice of across the centuries. The others are a superior kind of cattle.  Nicholas Murray Butler ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove
69:Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove
70:One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his mind is, and always will be, essentially unpopular. That is why Socrates was unpopular, though he did not use any special terms, for to grasp and hold his &
71:He must also know evil, hate and bigotry as real phenomena, but he must see love as the greater force. He must not doubt this even for a moment or he is lost. His only salvation is to dedicate himself to love, in the same fashion as Gandhi did to militant nonviolence, as Socrates to truth, as Jesus did to love and as More did to integrity. Only then will he have the strength to combat the forces of doubt, confusion and contradiction. He can depend upon no on or no thing for reinforcement and assurance but himself. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove
72:There’s nothing so delightful as being aware. Would you rather live in darkness? Would you rather act and not be aware of your words? Would you rather listen to people and not be aware of what you’re hearing, or see things and not be aware of what you’re looking at? The great Socrates said, ‘The unaware life is not worth living.’ That’s a self- evident truth. Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts—generally somebody else’s—mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. ~ anthony-de-mello, @wisdomtrove
73:A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to- morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. - ’Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’— Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Be as you wish to seem ~ Socrates,
2:Be as you wish to seem. ~ Socrates,
3:Sólo sé que no sé nada. ~ Socrates,
4:wisdom begins in wonder ~ Socrates,
5:Wisdom begins in wonder. ~ Socrates,
6:Be true to thine own self ~ Socrates,
7:Wisdom belongs in wonder. ~ Socrates,
8:Be as you wish to seem.
   ~ Socrates,
9:Be true to thine own self. ~ Socrates,
10:I know what I do not know. ~ Socrates,
11:Yo solo sé que no sé nada. ~ Socrates,
12:Go wherever the facts lead. ~ Socrates,
13:I know that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
14:I only know, I know nothing ~ Socrates,
15:Nobody knows what death is, ~ Socrates,
16:She soars on her own wings. ~ Socrates,
17:We are what we think we are ~ Socrates,
18:Homme, connais-toi toi-même! ~ Socrates,
19:Not I, but the city teaches. ~ Socrates,
20:I only know how little I know ~ Socrates,
21:Contentment is natural wealth. ~ Socrates,
22:Envy is the ulcer of the soul. ~ Socrates,
23:No one does wrong voluntarily. ~ Socrates,
24:Beauty is a short-lived tyranny ~ Socrates,
25:I only know that I know nothing ~ Socrates,
26:Knowledge is our ultimate good. ~ Socrates,
27:Laws are not made for the good. ~ Socrates,
28:An honest man is always a child. ~ Socrates,
29:Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. ~ Socrates,
30:Knowledge will make you be free. ~ Socrates,
31:We shall be better, braver, and ~ Socrates,
32:All I know is that I know nothing ~ Socrates,
33:Happiness is unrepented pleasure. ~ Socrates,
34:How many things can I do without? ~ Socrates,
35:How many things I can do without! ~ Socrates,
36:Talk in order that I may see you. ~ Socrates,
37:There is but one evil, ignorance. ~ Socrates,
38:Virtue is the beauty of the soul. ~ Socrates,
39:All I know is that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
40:All thinking begins with wondering ~ Socrates,
41:The mind is the pilot of the soul. ~ Socrates,
42:The warm love has the coldest end. ~ Socrates,
43:To harm another is to harm oneself ~ Socrates,
44:What a lot of things I don't need. ~ Socrates,
45:Wisdom is knowing you know nothing ~ Socrates,
46:Wonder is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Socrates,
47:An honest man is always a child.
   ~ Socrates,
48:Grav-Skrivt Over Socrates
~ Ambrosius Stub,
49:Imitate Jesus and Socrates ~ Benjamin Franklin,
50:Wisdom is knowing you know nothing ~ Socrates,
51:You don't know what you don't know. ~ Socrates,
52:as Socrates so often declared. ~ Matthew Walker,
53:Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds. ~ Socrates,
54:I neither know nor think that I know ~ Socrates,
55:Let the questions be the curriculum. ~ Socrates,
56:Through your rags I see your vanity. ~ Socrates,
57:to find yourself, think for yourself ~ Socrates,
58:Wisest is he who knows he knows not. ~ Socrates,
59:Aku tahu bahwa aku tidak tahu apa-apa ~ Socrates,
60:Beware the barrenness of a busy life. ~ Socrates,
61:Justice. If only we knew what it was. ~ Socrates,
62:Socrates should have written comics. ~ Mark Waid,
63:The hottest love has the coldest end. ~ Socrates,
64:To find yourself, think for yourself. ~ Socrates,
65:When our feet hurt, we hurt all over. ~ Socrates,
66:Wisdom is knowing how little we know. ~ Socrates,
67:Wisdom is knowing when you don't know ~ Socrates,
68:Follow the argument wherever it leads. ~ Socrates,
69:I know one thing, that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
70:There is no solution; seek it lovingly ~ Socrates,
71:Wisdom is knowing what you don't know. ~ Socrates,
72:Wonder is the beginning of all wisdom. ~ Socrates,
73:Athletics have become professionalized. ~ Socrates,
74:Socrates said, our only knowledge was ~ Lord Byron,
75:The unexamined life is not worth living ~ Socrates,
76:A multitude of books distracts the mind. ~ Socrates,
77:As for me, all I know is I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
78:Knowing thyself is the height of wisdom. ~ Socrates,
79:The unexamined life is not worth living ~ Socrates,
80:The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates,
81:All I know is that I do not know anything ~ Socrates,
82:All that we know is nothing can be known. ~ Socrates,
83:Life without enquiry is not worth living. ~ Socrates,
84:May the inward and outward man be as one. ~ Socrates,
85:There is no learning without remembering. ~ Socrates,
86:Thou should eat to live; not live to eat. ~ Socrates,
87:To move the world we must move ourselves. ~ Socrates,
88:Death offers mankind a full view of truth. ~ Socrates,
89:Fear of women love more than hate the man. ~ Socrates,
90:My divine sign indicates the future to me. ~ Socrates,
91:Nothing is to be preferred before justice. ~ Socrates,
92:To know, is to know that you know nothing. ~ Socrates,
93:understanding a question is half an answer ~ Socrates,
94:What I do not know, I do not think I know. ~ Socrates,
95:An unexamined life is a life of no account. ~ Socrates,
96:Is it true; is it kind, or is it necessary? ~ Socrates,
97:Man's life is like a drop of dew on a leaf. ~ Socrates,
98:Pride divides the men, humility joins them. ~ Socrates,
99:Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat. ~ Socrates,
100:To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Socrates,
101:Understanding a question is half an answer. ~ Socrates,
102:The more I learn, the less I realize I know. ~ Socrates,
103:The only thing I know is that I know nothing ~ Socrates,
104:Why should I resent it when an ass kicks me? ~ Socrates,
105:An unconsidered life is not one worth living. ~ Socrates,
106:As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
107:A Socrates in every classroom. ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold,
108:Every action has its pleasures and its price. ~ Socrates,
109:Hayat kısa, vazife ağır, fırsatlar geçicidir. ~ Socrates,
110:It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong ~ Socrates,
111:My belief is that to have no wants is divine. ~ Socrates,
112:The only thing i know is that i know nothing. ~ Socrates,
113:The universe really is motion & nothing else. ~ Socrates,
114:Wind buffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools. ~ Socrates,
115:How many things are there which I do not want. ~ Socrates,
116:I am very conscious that I am not wise at all. ~ Socrates,
117:I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance ~ Socrates,
118:One thing that I know, is that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
119:All things in moderation, including moderation. ~ Socrates,
120:Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth ~ Socrates,
121:If you want to be wrong then follow the masses. ~ Socrates,
122:I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance. ~ Socrates,
123:The misuse of language induces evil in the soul ~ Socrates,
124:The only wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. ~ Socrates,
125:Those who are hardest to love need it the most. ~ Socrates,
126:Flattery is like a painted armor; only for show. ~ Socrates,
127:He is the richest who is content with the least. ~ Socrates,
128:In humility imitate Jesus and Socrates. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
129:The examined life is the only life worth living. ~ Socrates,
130:The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. ~ Socrates,
131:The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods. ~ Socrates,
132:All wars are fought for the acquisition of wealth ~ Socrates,
133:Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~ Socrates,
134:I only know one thing, and that is I know nothing ~ Socrates,
135:Let us follow the truth whither so ever it leads. ~ Socrates,
136:Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued. ~ Socrates,
137:Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal. ~ Socrates,
138:Scio me nihil scire" - I know that I know nothing ~ Socrates,
139:Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing. ~ Iris Murdoch,
140:The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms. ~ Socrates,
141:The greatest of all mysteries is the man himself. ~ Socrates,
142:The mind is everything; what you think you become ~ Socrates,
143:This is a universe that does not favor the timid. ~ Socrates,
144:To find yourself, think for yourself. —Socrates ~ Robyn Carr,
145:Awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Socrates,
146:Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods. ~ Socrates,
147:I call that man idle who might be better employed. ~ Socrates,
148:If you would seek health, look first to the spine. ~ Socrates,
149:I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
   ~ Socrates,
150:It is not living that matters, but living rightly. ~ Socrates,
151:Lies are the greatest murder. They kill the Truth. ~ Socrates,
152:The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods. ~ Socrates,
153:The mind is everything; what you think you become! ~ Socrates,
154:Der Missbrauch der Sprache lässt Böses in die Seele ~ Socrates,
155:I pray Thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within. ~ Socrates,
156:Life without enquiry is not worth living for a man. ~ Socrates,
157:Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal. ~ Socrates?,
158:Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior. ~ Socrates,
159:The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. ~ Socrates,
160:The definition of terms is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Socrates,
161:The more I know, the more I know that I don't know. ~ Socrates,
162:The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
163:There is no illness of the body except for the mind ~ Socrates,
164:Better to do a little well, then a great deal badly. ~ Socrates,
165:Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
   ~ Socrates,
166:In every person there is a sun. Just let them shine. ~ Socrates,
167:Let him who would move the world first move himself. ~ Socrates,
168:The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. ~ Socrates,
169:The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. ~ Socrates,
170:There's no good answer to a question you didn't hear ~ Socrates,
171:The true Wisdom is in recognizing our own ignorance. ~ Socrates,
172:What a lot of things there are a man can do without. ~ Socrates,
173:Everything is plainer when spoken than when unspoken. ~ Socrates,
174:I know nothing but the certainty of my own ignorance. ~ Socrates,
175:Living or dead, to a good man there can come no evil. ~ Socrates,
176:Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me. ~ Socrates,
177:The body cannot be cured without regard for the soul. ~ Socrates,
178:The purpose in life is to develop a strong character. ~ Socrates,
179:As Socrates said, “True learning is remembering. ~ Baron Baptiste,
180:Flattery is like friendship in show, but not in fruit. ~ Socrates,
181:It is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one ~ Socrates,
182:Malice drinketh up the greater part of its own poison. ~ Socrates,
183:Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.
   ~ Socrates,
184:One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing ~ Socrates,
185:Socrates was the best teacher and they killed him! ~ Rafe Esquith,
186:The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing... ~ Socrates,
187:The unexamined life is not worth living.” —Socrates ~ Frank Viola,
188:All that I know is nothing - I'm not even sure of that. ~ Socrates,
189:Đó là một câu hỏi phức tạp, mà đời người thì ngắn ngủi. ~ Socrates,
190:From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate. ~ Socrates,
191:I love to go and see all the things I am happy without. ~ Socrates,
192:Marry or marry not, in any either case you'll regret it ~ Socrates,
193:Nothing is so well learned as that which is discovered. ~ Socrates,
194:One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
195:True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. ~ Socrates,
196:We cannot live better than in seeking to become better. ~ Socrates,
197:Let him that would move the world first move himself.
   ~ Socrates,
198:One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing'. ~ Socrates,
199:The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live. ~ Socrates,
200:Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~ Socrates,
201:By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful. ~ Socrates,
202:I am convinced that I never wrong anyone intentionally... ~ Socrates,
203:If he who does not know kept silent, discord would cease. ~ Socrates,
204:Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing. ~ Socrates,
205:The best seasoning for food is hunger; for drink, thirst. ~ Socrates,
206:The really important thing is not live, but to live well. ~ Socrates,
207:Those who want the fewest things are nearest to the gods. ~ Socrates,
208:To live well and honorably and justly are the same thing. ~ Socrates,
209:We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is a habit. ~ Socrates,
210:Wisdom adorneth riches and casteth a shadow over poverty. ~ Socrates,
211:A Life without criticism and status is not a worth living. ~ Socrates,
212:By means of beauty, all beautiful things become beautiful. ~ Socrates,
213:He who would change the world should first change himself. ~ Socrates,
214:I cannot teach anybody anything I can only make them think ~ Socrates,
215:I know I'm intelligent because I know that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
216:I shall never fear or avoid things of which I do not know. ~ Socrates,
217:I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live. ~ Socrates,
218:The man who is truly wise knows that he knows very little. ~ Socrates,
219:The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. ~ Socrates,
220:Una vida aceptada sin reflexión no merece la pena vivirla. ~ Socrates,
221:What most counts is not merely to live, but to live right. ~ Socrates,
222:False language, evil in itself, infects the soul with evil. ~ Socrates,
223:Human nature will not easily find a better helper than eros ~ Socrates,
224:I alone know I am wise because I alone know I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
225:I am a citizen, not of Athens, or Greece, but of the world. ~ Socrates,
226:I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think ~ Socrates,
227:People learn more on their own rather than being force fed. ~ Socrates,
228:the great honor in the world is to be what we pretend to be ~ Socrates,
229:There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. ~ Socrates,
230:Be the kind of person that you want people to think you are. ~ Socrates,
231:Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty. ~ Socrates,
232:I am a Citizen of the World, and my Nationality is Goodwill. ~ Socrates,
233:I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. ~ Socrates,
234:The duller eye may often see a thing sooner than the keener. ~ Socrates,
235:Anybody can be a hellene, by his heart, his mind, his spirit. ~ Socrates,
236:Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty". ~ Socrates,
237:Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others. ~ Socrates,
238:How can you call a man free when his pleasures rule over him. ~ Socrates,
239:If I save my insight, I don’t attend to weakness of eyesight. ~ Socrates,
240:Socrates asked the key question: Why should we be moral? ~ Arundhati Roy,
241:Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Dan Ariely,
242:So you would rather suffer an injustice than do an injustice? ~ Socrates,
243:Wen das Wort nicht schlägt, den schlägt auch der Stock nicht. ~ Socrates,
244:Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy. ~ Socrates,
245:The real danger in life is not death, but living an evil life. ~ Socrates,
246:There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
   ~ Socrates,
247:It has been shown that to injure anyone is never just anywhere. ~ Socrates,
248:It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. ~ C S Lewis,
249:Only the knowledge that comes from inside is the real Knowledge ~ Socrates,
250:The life of which meaning one never ponders is not worth living ~ Socrates,
251:There are two kinds of disease of the soul, vice and ignorance. ~ Socrates,
252:When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. ~ Socrates,
253:When the debate is over, slander becomes the tool of the loser. ~ Socrates,
254:I have good hope that there is something remaining for the dead. ~ Socrates,
255:One of the most important precepts of wisdom is to know oneself. ~ Socrates,
256:Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks? ~ Socrates,
257:All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates. ~ Plato,
258:Creation is man's immortality and brings him nearest to the gods. ~ Socrates,
259:Either I do not corrupt the young or, if I do, it is unwillingly. ~ Socrates,
260:I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
   ~ Socrates,
261:If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour. ~ William Blake,
262:I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
263:It is better to change an opinion than to persist in a wrong one. ~ Socrates,
264:Remember what is unbecoming to do is also unbecoming to speak of. ~ Socrates,
265:See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all. ~ Socrates,
266:Socrates asked the key question:
why should we be moral? ~ Arundhati Roy,
267:Socrates says the male libido is like being chained to a madman, ~ Anonymous,
268:The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor. ~ Socrates,
269:They give you the semblance of success, I give you the reality... ~ Socrates,
270:You are making Socrates's mistake of assuming the gods are good. ~ Jo Walton,
271:All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat. ~ Eugene Ionesco,
272:Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. ~ Socrates,
273:Exercise till the mind feels delight in reposing from the fatigue. ~ Socrates,
274:If one knows what is right, he will do it; nobody wants to be evil ~ Socrates,
275:Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued. —Socrates ~ Timothy Ferriss,
276:Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Arianna Huffington,
277:Well, then, let’s not just trust the likelihood based on painting. ~ Socrates,
278:Admitting one's ignorance is the first step in acquiring knowledge. ~ Socrates,
279:And in knowing that you know nothing makes you the smartest of all. ~ Socrates,
280:An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all. ~ Socrates,
281:I don't care what people say about me. I do care about my mistakes. ~ Socrates,
282:I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. ~ Steve Jobs,
283:The first key to greatness is to be in reality what we appear to be. ~ Socrates,
284:The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” —Socrates ~ Angela Roquet,
285:Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
   ~ Socrates,
286:There is no possession more valuable than a good and faithful friend. ~ Socrates,
287:The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it." - Socrates ~ Dan Millman,
288:The years wrinkle our skin, but lack of enthusiasm wrinkles our soul. ~ Socrates,
289:Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind. ~ Socrates,
290:how many teachers since Socrates actually lived what they taught? ~ Walter Mosley,
291:I am a fool, but I know I'm a fool and that makes me smarter than you. ~ Socrates,
292:It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. ~ John Stuart Mill,
293:It is only in death that we are truly cured of the 'sickness' of life. ~ Socrates,
294:No man has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training ~ Socrates,
295:Socrates... Whom well inspir'd the oracle pronounc'd Wisest of men. ~ John Milton,
296:The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow. ~ Socrates,
297:The Only Thing I Know For Sure Is That I Know Nothing At All, For Sure ~ Socrates,
298:YOU ARE NOT ONLY GOOD TO YOURSELF, BUT THE CAUSE OF GOODNESS IN OTHERS ~ Socrates,
299:Loin de parler quand on me paie, et de me taire quand on me donne rien. ~ Socrates,
300:One thing I know, that I know nothing. This is the source of my wisdom. ~ Socrates,
301:The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can. ~ Socrates,
302:A: Socrates is a man. B: All men are mortal. C: All men are Socrates. ~ Woody Allen,
303:Critón, le debemos un gallo a Asclepio. ¿Te acordarás de pagar la deuda? ~ Socrates,
304:Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Norman L Geisler,
305:Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
306:The heart of the person before you is a mirror. See there your own form. ~ Socrates,
307:Whatever authority I may have rests solely on knowing how little I know. ~ Socrates,
308:Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? ~ Socrates,
309:Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.
   ~ Socrates,
310:He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is an incorrigible fool. ~ Socrates,
311:Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.3 ~ Norman L Geisler,
312:That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless ~ Plato,
313:True wisdom lies in one's confession about the limits of one's knowledge. ~ Socrates,
314:I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer. ~ Woody Allen,
315:Since I am convinced that I wrong no one, I am not likely to wrong myself. ~ Socrates,
316:There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse. ~ Socrates,
317:The same wind is blowing, and yet one of us may be cold and the other not. ~ Socrates,
318:The understanding of mathematics is necessary for a sound grasp of ethics. ~ Socrates,
319:When a woman is allowed to become a man's equal, she becomes his superior. ~ Socrates,
320:You're not yet Socrates, but you can still live as if you want to be him. ~ Epictetus,
321:A man who preserves his integrity no real, long-lasting harm can ever come. ~ Socrates,
322:But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
323:Death is not dreadful or else it would have appeared dreadful to Socrates. ~ Epictetus,
324:Only the extremely ignorant or the extremely intelligent can resist change. ~ Socrates,
325:Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual. ~ Socrates,
326:The friend must be like money, that before you need it, the value is known. ~ Socrates,
327:Two things greater than all the things are.On is love and the other is war. ~ Socrates,
328:You're not yet Socrates, but you can still live as if you want to be him. ~ Epictetus,
329:All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates. ~ Woody Allen,
330:But my dear Crito, why should we care so much about what the majority think? ~ Socrates,
331:It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook. ~ Anton Chekhov,
332:Silence is a profound melody, for those who can hear it above all the noise. ~ Socrates,
333:Socrates: But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many? ~ Plato,
334:Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world. ~ Plutarch,
335:Socrates says. Recognizing your ignorance is the beginning of all wisdom. ~ Eric Weiner,
336:Criton - Le principe, que l'important n'est pas de vivre, mais de bien vivre. ~ Socrates,
337:Give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward may be one. ~ Socrates,
338:How many things there are that I do not want. —SOCRATES, CIRCA 425 B.C. ~ Michael Finkel,
339:Kehidupan yang tak dipikirkan adalah kehidupan yang tak pantas untuk dijalani ~ Socrates,
340:One cannot come closer to the gods than by bringing health to his Fellow Man. ~ Socrates,
341:Regard your good name as the richest jewel yoou can possibly be possessed of. ~ Socrates,
342:Sometimes you have to let go to see if there was anything worth holding onto. ~ Socrates,
343:Well, Socrates, it's by no means uncommon for people to say what is not correct. ~ Plato,
344:Whoever would have his body supple, easy and healthful should learn to dance. ~ Socrates,
345:Is it not, then, better to be ridiculous and friendly than clever and hostile? ~ Socrates,
346:Man's greatest privilege is the discussion of virtue" Socrates in The Apology. ~ Socrates,
347:To be a man of worth and not to try to look like one is the true way to glory. ~ Socrates,
348:To Believe without evidence and demonstration is an act of ignorance and folly ~ Socrates,
349:To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous. ~ Socrates,
350:If Socrates died like a philosopher, Jesus Christ died like a God. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
351:I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...I drank what? ~ Val Kilmer,
352:Programming is not about what you know.
It's about what you can figure out. ~ Socrates,
353:A disorderly mob is no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house ~ Socrates,
354:Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm & constant. ~ Socrates,
355:Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one. ~ Socrates,
356:Nobody knows anything, but I, knowing nothing, am the smartest man in the world. ~ Socrates,
357:We gain our first measure of intelligence when we first admit our own ignorance. ~ Socrates,
358:Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant. ~ Socrates,
359:Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen. ~ Socrates,
360:He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature. ~ Socrates,
361:I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
362:It is better said Socrates, to change an Opinion, than to persist in a wrong one. ~ Xenophon,
363:Socrates argued that only God can be a sophist, only God can be truly wise. ~ Bettany Hughes,
364:The greater the power that deigns to serve you, the more honor it demands of you. ~ Socrates,
365:The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. ~ Socrates,
366:The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. ~ Socrates,
367:To find the Father of all is hard. And when found, it is impossible to utter Him. ~ Socrates,
368:To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge. ~ Socrates,
369:He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed. ~ Socrates,
370:He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature. ~ Socrates,
371:It seems that God took away the minds of poets that they might better express His. ~ Socrates,
372:Not because Socrates said so,... I look upon all men as my compatriots. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
373:The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.
   ~ Socrates,
374:The greatest way to live with honour in this world is to be what we pretend to be. ~ Socrates,
375:There is no greater magnificence than to defeat oneself. That is the magnificence. ~ Socrates,
376:The way to gain a good reputation, is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. ~ Socrates,
377:You never know a line is crooked unless you have a straight one to put next to it. ~ Socrates,
378:As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't. ~ John Gardner,
379:For comic writers charge Socrates with making the worse appear the better reason. ~ Quintilian,
380:I call myself a Peaceful Warrior... because the battles we fight are on the inside. ~ Socrates,
381:Athenian men, I respect and love you,
but I shall obey the god rather than you... ~ Socrates,
382:I renounce the honours to which the world aspires and desire only to know the Truth. ~ Socrates,
383:No man is capable of causing great evil without thinking he's doing the right thing. ~ Socrates,
384:...[R]eal wisdom is the property of God, and... human wisdom has little or no value. ~ Socrates,
385:Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people. ~ Socrates,
386:The soul like the body accepts by practice whatever habit one wishes it to contract. ~ Socrates,
387:To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. ~ Socrates,
388:Again what city ever received Plato's or Aristotle's laws, or Socrates' precepts? But, ~ Erasmus,
389:All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine. ~ Socrates,
390:Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat. ~ Eug ne Ionesco,
391:I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. ~ Socrates,
392:The soul, like the body, accepts by practice whatever habit one wishes it to contact. ~ Socrates,
393:This is...self-knowled ge-for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know. ~ Socrates,
394:Unlike Churchill, I have no plans to shape history. . . . Socrates gave advice ~ George H W Bush,
395:If you can do only a little. Do what you can. What you cannot enforce, do not command. ~ Socrates,
396:In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent. ~ Socrates,
397:I swear it upon Zeus an outstanding runner cannot be the equal of an average wrestler. ~ Socrates,
398:Socrates himself said, "one thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
399:The answer I gave myself and the oracle was that it was to my advantage to be as I am. ~ Socrates,
400:The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and i am no quite sure that i know that. ~ Socrates,
401:Though flattery blossoms like friendship, yet there is a vast difference in the fruit. ~ Socrates,
402:Be nicer than necessary to everyone you meet. Everyone is fighting some kind of battle. ~ Socrates,
403:Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us. ~ Socrates,
404:Trust not a woman when she weeps, for it is her nature to weep when she wants her will. ~ Socrates,
405:Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. ~ Socrates,
406:Conocerse a uno mismo, ese es el principio fundamental de la verdadera sabiduría Humana. ~ Socrates,
407:How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? ~ Socrates,
408:The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift. ~ Socrates,
409:Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live. ~ Socrates,
410:Get not your friends by bare compliments but by giving them sensible tokens of your love. ~ Socrates,
411:My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games. ~ Patti Smith,
412:The bad one is that way because of the ignorance, therefore he can be healed with wisdom. ~ Socrates,
413:The easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves. ~ Socrates,
414:As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent ~ Socrates,
415:Do not go through life like leaf blown from here to there believing whatever you are told. ~ Socrates,
416:Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love. ~ Socrates,
417:men, we know least, and talk most. Homer, Socrates, and Shakespere have, perhaps, contributed ~ Homer,
418:The wise man seeks death all his life, and for this reason death is not terrifying to him. ~ Socrates,
419:And then we’ll be emulating Socrates,* once we’re able to write hymns of praise in prison. ~ Epictetus,
420:As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent. ~ Socrates,
421:He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. ~ Plato,
422:He who is not content with what he has will not be content with what he would like to have. ~ Socrates,
423:I think I understand, Socrates.” “Don’t you mean you understand you think?” he smiled. I ~ Dan Millman,
424:It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself. ~ Socrates,
425:Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat. ~ Socrates,
426:No. Frank Socrates doesn’t have conditions, because he’s dead. He loves me unconditionally. ~ A S King,
427:The reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service. ~ Socrates,
428:They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed. ~ Socrates,
429:This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin. ~ Socrates,
430:And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul. ~ Plato,
431:Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live. ~ Socrates,
432:It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite. ~ Saul Bellow,
433:Neither I nor any other man should, on trial or in way, contrive to avoid death at any cost. ~ Socrates,
434:SOCRATES: But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general. ION: Certainly. ~ Plato,
435:...[S]ome of the opinions which people entertain should be respected, and others should not. ~ Socrates,
436:To need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer does he approach to divinity. ~ Socrates,
437:If the whole world depends on today's youth, I can't see the world lasting another 100 years. ~ Socrates,
438:If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth. ~ Socrates,
439:Obscurity is dispelled by augmenting the light of discernment, not by attacking the darkness. ~ Socrates,
440:Socrates said that, from above, the Earth looks like one of those twelve-patched leathern balls. ~ Plato,
441:The tongue of a fool is the key of his counsel, which, in a wise man, wisdom hath in keeping. ~ Socrates,
442:To be is to do - Socrates

To do is to be - Sartre

Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
443:He said that there was one only good, namely, knowledge; and one only evil, namely, ignorance. ~ Socrates,
444:If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it. ~ Socrates,
445:If what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all ~ Socrates,
446:If you will be guided by me, you will make little account of Socrates, and much more of truth. ~ Socrates,
447:Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. My dad said, Booty - mmm mmm. ~ Christopher Titus,
448:In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep. ~ Socrates,
449:Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it. ~ Socrates,
450:When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it. ~ Socrates,
451:I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I'll do it again. ~ Socrates,
452:It is best and easiest not to discredit others but to prepare oneself to be as good as possible. ~ Socrates,
453:The right way to begin is to pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible. ~ Socrates,
454:The wise are doubtful,' Socrates returned, 'and I should not be singular if I too doubted. ~ Edith Hamilton,
455:Doing good is a matter of looking after the part of yourself which matters most, namely your soul ~ Socrates,
456:He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. ~ Socrates,
457:The beginning is the most important part, especially when dealing with anything young and tender. ~ Socrates,
458:The Spirit is neither good nor bad, it runs where the wild heart leads" "Wisdom begins in wonder. ~ Socrates,
459:To be is to do”—Socrates. “To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre. “Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
460:Bad people live that they may eat and drink, whereas good people eat and drink that they may live. ~ Socrates,
461:I hear Socrates saying that the best seasoning for food is hunger; for drink, thirst. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,
462:Is something good because the gods approve of it? Or do the gods approve of it because it is good? ~ Socrates,
463:Remember this, my boy. The two greatest men who ever livied-Jesus and Socrates-were both hoboes. ~ Sam Torode,
464:Socrates thought and so do I that the wisest theory about the gods is no theory at all. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
465:Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down. ~ Socrates,
466:The first key to greatness,” Socrates reminds us, “is to be in reality what we appear to be. ~ John C Maxwell,
467:When you propose ridiculous things to believe, too many men will choose to believe nothing at all. ~ Socrates,
468:A man can no more make a safe use of wealth without reason than he can of a horse without a bridle. ~ Socrates,
469:And now we go, you to your lives, and I to death, and which of us goes to the better only God knows ~ Socrates,
470:Criton - C'est une obligation sacrée de ne jamais rendre injustice pour injustice, ni mal pour mal. ~ Socrates,
471:He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy. ~ Socrates,
472:I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said--and did not say. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
473:...[M]en are put in a sort of guard-post, from which one must not release one's self or run away... ~ Socrates,
474:People put up walls. Not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.” —Socrates ~ Zane,
475:I am likely to be wiser than he to this small, extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know ~ Socrates,
476:If you want to be a good saddler, saddle the worst horse; for if you can tame one, you can tame all. ~ Socrates,
477:INTRODUCTION THE FIRST NEGOTIATION Let him who would move the world first move himself. —SOCRATES ~ William Ury,
478:Socrates is without doubt the most influential and famous philosopher who never wrote anything. ~ Peter Adamson,
479:Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. ~ James Madison,
480:I am likely to be wiser than he to this small, extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know. ~ Socrates,
481:Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life? ~ Joshua Foer,
482:The image, if expressing in every point the entire reality, would no longer be an image.
   ~ Socrates, Cratylus,
483:The nearest way to glory a shortcut, as it were is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be. ~ Socrates,
484:And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died. ~ Julien Benda,
485:Marry a good woman, and be happy the rest of your life. Or, marry a bad, and become a good philosopher ~ Socrates,
486:Philosophers have a long tradition of marrying stupid women, from Socrates on. They think it clever. ~ Simon Gray,
487:Socrates would probably say the only way to ensure you're not an asshole is to assume you are one. ~ Scott Berkun,
488:To be is to do - Socrates.
To do is to be - Jean-Paul Satre.
Do be do be do -Frank Sinatra. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
489:The highest hope of Socrates’ peers, of young Athenian men, was to serve Athens by dying for her. ~ Bettany Hughes,
490:Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults. ~ Socrates,
491:Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults. ~ Socrates,
492:What do you think Socrates meant when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”? Third, ~ Karen Armstrong,
493:I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others. ~ Socrates,
494:Labour to master adversity even as your passions, to which it would be shameful for you to be subjected. ~ Socrates,
495:Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates. ~ Emil M Cioran,
496:One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him. ~ Socrates,
497:One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice. ~ Socrates,
498:To express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul. ~ Socrates,
499:As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it. ~ Tom Stoppard,
500:Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates. ~ Emile M Cioran,
501:Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth. ~ Jennifer Michael Hecht,
502:Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish! ~ Umberto Eco,
503:Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
504:The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
   ~ Socrates?,
505:The trial lawyer does what Socrates was executed for: making the worse argument appear the stronger. ~ Irving Kaufman,
506:Virtue does not come from wealth, but wealth, and every other good thing which men have comes from virtue. ~ Socrates,
507:LISTEN SOCRATES, TO THE STORY; AS EXTRAORDINARY AS IT IS, IT IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE.” Plato Timaeus 355 BC ~ Jos Arg elles,
508:Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae, bugbears to frighten children. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
509:The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless. ~ Plato,
510:We can do nothing without the body, let us always take care that it is in the best condition to sustain us. ~ Socrates,
511:The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
512:The highest realms of thought are impossible to reach without first attaining an understanding of compassion. ~ Socrates,
513:The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less. ~ Socrates,
514:To be is to do’ — Socrates.
‘To do is to be’ — Jean-Paul Sartre.
‘Do be do be do’ — Frank Sinatra. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
515:True perfection is a bold quest to seek. Only the willing and true of heart will seek the betterment of many. ~ Socrates,
516:...a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods. ~ Socrates,
517:As Socrates I believe said the unexamined life is not worth living. I believe that's true. I do believe that. ~ Joy Behar,
518:Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannise their teachers. ~ Socrates,
519:Mankind is made of two kinds of people: wise people who know they're fools, and fools who think they are wise. ~ Socrates,
520:My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher. ~ Socrates,
521:Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, 'How many things I have no need of!' ~ Socrates,
522:Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form. ~ Socrates,
523:When you want success as badly as you want the air, then you will get it. There is no other secret of success. ~ Socrates,
524:By all means marry,if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher". ~ Socrates,
525:One becomes free, Socrates seems to have taught, not by fulfilling all desires but by eliminating desire. ~ Michael Finkel,
526:May I consider the wise man rich, and may I have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure. ~ Socrates,
527:Improve yourself by other men's writings thus attaining effortlessly what they acquired through great difficulty. ~ Socrates,
528:It is not difficult to avoid death. It is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death. ~ Socrates,
529:It is Plato's portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
530:My plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a
proof that I am speaking the truth. ~ Socrates,
531:The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows. ~ Socrates,
532:What you should do, said Socrates, is to say a magic spell over him every day until you have charmed his fears away. ~ Plato,
533:I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them. ~ Socrates,
534:The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better only god knows. ~ Socrates,
535:By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. ~ Socrates,
536:I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."

[As quoted in Plutarch's Of Banishment] ~ Socrates,
537:In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever. ~ Socrates,
538:Know thyself,’ said Socrates. Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
539:My friend...care for your psyche...know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves ~ Socrates,
540:Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock. ~ Gil Amelio,
541:By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. ~ Socrates,
542:By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. ~ Socrates,
543:Virtue does not come from wealth, but. . . wealth, and every other good thing which men have. . . comes from virtue. ~ Socrates,
544:Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially. ~ Socrates,
545:The individual leads in order that those who are led can develop their potential as human beings and thereby prosper. ~ Socrates,
546:A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly, for nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind. ~ Socrates,
547:A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time. ~ Socrates,
548:It is better to make a mistake with full force of your being than to carefully avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit. ~ Socrates,
549:Know thyself,’ said Socrates.
Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
550:Let he who would move the world, first complete an environmental impact assessment and a 90-day public comment period. ~ Socrates,
551:some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
552:We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. ~ Socrates,
553:By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities. ~ Socrates,
554:In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social. ~ James Mark Baldwin,
555:One gets used to it, said Socrates, as those who live close to a mill do to the sound of the water-wheel turning. ~ Sarah Bakewell,
556:One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them. ~ Socrates,
557:The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. ~ Socrates,
558:I will not yield to any man contrary to what is right, for fear of death, even if I should die at once for not yielding. ~ Socrates,
559:Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process. ~ William Butler Yeats,
560:True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. ~ Socrates,
561:By all means marry. If you get a good spouse you'll become happy, while if you get a bad one you'll become a philosopher. ~ Socrates,
562:has any of you such power as Socrates had, in all his intercourse with men, of winning them over to his own convictions? ~ Epictetus,
563:I believe that we cannot live better than in seeking to become better, nor more agreeably than having a clear conscience. ~ Socrates,
564:Socrates feared written books would weaken the human memory. Socrates feared written books would weaken deep thinking. ~ Tony Reinke,
565:Wonder [said Socrates] is very much the affection of a philosopher; for there is no other beginning of philosophy than this. ~ Plato,
566:The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellos (Greece) because they do not study the whole person. ~ Socrates,
567:True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, & the world around us. ~ Socrates,
568:Be of good cheer about death and know this as a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death ~ Socrates,
569:In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep. —Socrates (469–399 BCE) ~ Kresley Cole,
570:Just as you ought not to attempt to cure eyes without head or head without body, so you should not treat body without soul. ~ Socrates,
571:Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. ~ Steven Pressfield,
572:If I had engaged in politics, O men of Athens, I should have perished long ago, and done no good either to you or to myself. ~ Socrates,
573:The perfect human being is all human beings put together, it is a collective, it is all of us together that make perfection. ~ Socrates,
574:The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." - Socrates ~ Leo Babauta,
575:To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. ~ Socrates,
576:To fear death, gentlemen, is no other then to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. ~ Socrates,
577:wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state ~ Socrates,
578:Wow. She’s like a mini-Socrates with all this life advice. I feel like I should be taking notes. Or debating with her. ~ Colleen Hoover,
579:Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
580:Be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. ~ Socrates,
581:For him who fain would teach the world The world holds hate in fee- For Socrates, the hemlock cup; For Christ, Gethsemane. ~ Don Marquis,
582:Socrates learned to his cost, the true nature of democracy is to encourage corruption and excess in all its forms. But the ~ Philip Kerr,
583:Who is the richest of men?" asked Socrates. "He who is content with the least, for contentment is nature's riches. ~ Orison Swett Marden,
584:He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. ~ Socrates,
585:In 80% of Socrates' dialogues there was no constructive outcome. He saw his role as simply pointing out what was "wrong. ~ Edward de Bono,
586:My friend...care for your psyche...know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves" -Socrates ~ Socrates,
587:Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune. ~ Socrates,
588:Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order. ~ Harold Bloom,
589:The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. ~ Socrates,
590:Do not grieve over someone who changes all of the sudden. It might be that he has given up acting and returned to his true self. ~ Socrates,
591:Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. ~ Socrates,
592:It is the greatest good for an individual to discuss virtue (aka areté) every day...for the unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates,
593:Our lives are but specks of dust falling through the fingers of time. Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. ~ Socrates,
594:Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune, nor too sorrowful in misfortune. ~ Socrates,
595:I have lived long enough to learn how much there is I can really do without.... He is nearest to God who needs the fewest things. ~ Socrates,
596:It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return. ~ Socrates,
597:Now it is time that we are going, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God ~ Socrates,
598:Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty,
599:True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all. ~ Socrates,
600:Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. ~ Socrates,
601:I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good. ~ Socrates,
602:Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god. ~ Socrates,
603:The alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls. They will trust the written characters and not remember themselves. ~ Socrates,
604:Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
   ~ Socrates,
605:I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another. ~ Socrates,
606:The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
607:The Delphic Oracle said I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because that I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing. ~ Socrates,
608:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. ~ John Stuart Mill,
609:Socrates had a student named Plato, Plato had a student named Aristotle, and Aristotle had a student named Alexander the Great. ~ Old Tom Morris,
610:Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought. ~ Mark Kingwell,
611:SOCRATES: You have? Oh – you said that you honour Athenians for our openness to persuasion. And for our defiance of bullies. But ~ David Deutsch,
612:The Republic isn't as much fun as The Symposium. It's all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle. ~ Jo Walton,
613:Nay, Socrates," said Glaucon, "the measure of listening to such discussions is the whole of life for reasonable men". The Republic, 450c. ~ Plato,
614:Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity. ~ Socrates,
615:Some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some are cowards under the same conditions. ~ Socrates,
616:The soul includes everything; whoever knows his soul, knows everything and whoever is ignorant of his soul, is ignorant of everything. ~ Socrates,
617:Hi,' Winifred Minette said to her husband.
Socrates imagined all of the sweet knowledge buried in her hello. It made him happy. ~ Walter Mosley,
618:Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
619:The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows. ~ Socrates,
620:And Agathon said, It is probable, Socrates, that I knew nothing of what I had said.

And yet spoke you beautifully, Agathon, he said. ~ Plato,
621:It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen of the jury; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death. ~ Socrates,
622:There have been times, Socrates, when I have been driven in my perplexity to take refuge with Protagoras; not that I agree with him at all. ~ Plato,
623:As Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone else had also said, I'll eat fish and I'll eat meat, but there is some shit I will not eat. ~ Stephen King,
624:Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be one. ~ Socrates,
625:Such as thy words are, such will thy affections be esteemed; and such will thy deeds be as thy affections and such thy life as thy deeds. ~ Socrates,
626:Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively. ~ Socrates,
627:Craindre la mort, Athéniens, ce n'est autre chose que se croire sage sans l'être, car c'est croire connaître ce que l'on ne connaît point. ~ Socrates,
628:...each individual can only do one thing well. He can't do lots of things. If he tries, he will be jack of all trades, and master of none. ~ Socrates,
629:Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close. ~ Margery Allingham,
630:all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors ~ Plato,
631:Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says Thank you. ~ Plato,
632:Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and the inner man be at one. ~ Socrates,
633:But Socrates cannot but have been meditating upon something?... Can he ever remain solitary with himself -- and silent to his very soul! ~ Paul Val ry,
634:It is better to be human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. It is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. ~ John Stuart Mill,
635:Would you rather have your child in a room with the best equipment in the world with an average teacher or an empty room with Socrates? ~ Rafe Esquith,
636:If you put Buddha, Jesus Christ, Socrates, Shakespeare, Arjuna, Krishna at a dinner table together, I can't see them having an argument. ~ Hugh Jackman,
637:No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils. ~ Socrates,
638:Plato didn't have as much experience of humanity as he needed when he wrote a book like the Republic,' Socrates said. 'Perhaps nobody does. ~ Jo Walton,
639:To give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god . ~ Socrates,
640:Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men. ~ Socrates,
641:Man must rise above the Earth - to the top of the atmosphere and beyond - for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives. ~ Socrates,
642:Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happyas possible. ~ Socrates,
643:There you have Socrates’ wisdom; [b] he himself isn’t willing to teach, but he goes around learning from others and isn’t even grateful to them. ~ Plato,
644:And Quell asked, 'Ah, but what is nature?'

Socrates answered, sparks showering, 'God surprising himself with odd miracles of flesh. ~ Ray Bradbury,
645:Anyone who’s really fighting for justice must live as a private citizen and not as a public figure if he’s going to survive even a short time. ~ Socrates,
646:From Socrates through Aquinas, reason meant primarily the understanding of the nature of reality, the knowledge of the essences of things. ~ Peter Kreeft,
647:Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers. ~ Socrates,
648:It is possible that a man could live twice as long if he didn't spend the first half of his life acquiring habits that shortens the other half ~ Socrates,
649:So at that time of day when the early sun still rings haloes on human heads, Socrates is walking through the Agora to his judgement day. ~ Bettany Hughes,
650:The hardest task needs the lightest hand or else its completion will not lead to freedom but to a tyranny much worse than the one it replaces. ~ Socrates,
651:Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." "It is not living that matters, but living rightly. The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates,
652:One quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better. ~ Thomas Harris,
653:The goals of an intelligent life, according to Socrates, is to pursue the philosophic quest—to increase one’s knowledge of self and world. ~ Timothy Leary,
654:...[T]he really important thing is not to live, but to live well... [a]nd to live well means the same thing as to live honourably or rightly... ~ Socrates,
655:am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, “May the outward and inward man be at one. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
656:In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill. ~ Peter Drucker,
657:I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether. ~ Socrates,
658:The uninitiated are those who believe in nothing except what they can grasp in their hands, and who deny the existence of all that is invisible. ~ Socrates,
659:The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics. ~ Richard Rorty,
660:If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood. ~ Socrates,
661:Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles. ~ Socrates,
662:Socrates isguilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing indeities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state. ~ Plato,
663:The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God, will be like unto Him; He being the beginning, middle, and end of all things. ~ Socrates,
664:The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations; these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls. ~ Socrates,
665:Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates. ~ Franz Grillparzer,
666:But already it is time to depart, for me to die, for you to go on living; which of us takes the better course, is concealed from anyone except God. ~ Socrates,
667:Is there anyone to whom you entrust a greater number of serious matters than your wife? And is there anyone with whom you have fewer conversations? ~ Socrates,
668:By all implies marry if you get a great wife/husband, you are going to be pleased. If you get a bad a single, you are going to become a philosopher. ~ Socrates,
669:It was far too cold. The second I got out I had this incredible headache, I'm just not used to it. The last time I saw snow was years and years ago. ~ Socrates,
670:In Socrates’ lifetime more than 800 triremes were launched from Athenian-controlled harbours: the largest manned navy the world had ever known. ~ Bettany Hughes,
671:Paul Levinson has outdone himself: The Plot to Save Socrates is a philosophically rich gem full of big ideas and wonderful time-travel tricks. ~ Robert J Sawyer,
672:Socrates: So was I.
Bertha: Are you saying you're as great as him, then?
Socrates: No, no, on the contrary, I'm assuming just the opposite! ~ Peter Kreeft,
673:Socrates was a wise man. Surveying the goods on a market stall, the great one was said to have remarked, "What a lot of things a man doesn’t need! ~ Ruth Downie,
674:Such as thy words are such will thine affections be esteemed and such as thine affections will be thy deeds and such as thy deeds will be thy life ... ~ Socrates,
675:The atomists , unlike Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle , sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause. ~ Bertrand Russell,
676:Wealth does not bring about excellence (aka areté), but excellence (aka areté) brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings for men. ~ Socrates,
677:for philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. ~ Plato,
678:I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence. ~ Socrates,
679:No rational person would intentionally commit an act of evil, for everyone knows that it would bring the wrath of the community upon him. (Socrates) ~ Karen Essex,
680:The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. ~ Steven Pressfield,
681:If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart. ~ Socrates,
682:If thou continuous to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men. ~ Socrates,
683:I’m pretty sure if Socrates ever met a Kardashian, he’d have gone into the first bar and ordered himself a double hemlock straight up with a twist. ~ Stacey Ballis,
684:The triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble true birth. ~ Socrates,
685:The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone. ~ Socrates,
686:I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust. ~ Gorgias,
687:Socrates had famously said, ‘By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you will become happy. If you get a bad one, you will become a philosopher. ~ Preeti Shenoy,
688:The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold all
kinds of wares. Finally he said, “What a lot of things I don’t need! ~ Jostein Gaarder,
689:When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire . . . ~ Socrates,
690:Would a panel of the wise—Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and Socrates—conceivably approve of our current way of life? ~ William Ophuls,
691:Fellow citizens, why do you burn and scrape every stone to gather wealth and take so little care of your children to whom you must one day relinquish all? ~ Socrates,
692:If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart. ~ Socrates,
693:Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” -Socrates ~ Adrienne Woods,
694:It is extraordinary to think about. We still speak of Socratic or Platonic philosophy, but actually being Plato or Socrates is quite another matter. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
695:The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. ~ Dale Carnegie,
696:The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer. ~ David Antin,
697:A man should inure himself to voluntary labor, and not give up to indulgence and pleasure, as they beget no good constitution of body nor knowledge of mind. ~ Socrates,
698:Get married, in any case. If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself. ~ Socrates,
699:Socrates’ point is that there are only two kinds of people in this world: the wise, who know they are fools, and fools, who think they are wise. Wisdom, ~ Peter Kreeft,
700:The great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson..... have taught man to look within himself to find God. ~ Ernest Holmes,
701:The Great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson... have taught man to look within himself to find God.
   ~ Ernest Holmes,
702:There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. ~ Bertrand Russell,
703:Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective. ~ Christopher Hitchens,
704:We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd,
705:I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate. ~ Jack Kevorkian,
706:Socrates pioneered conversation as a means of intellectual exploration, of questioning assumptions, ones so deeply ingrained we dont even know we have them. ~ Eric Weiner,
707:Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living. ~ Saul Bellow,
708:Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence. ~ Socrates,
709:Why do you wonder that globetrotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason that set you wandering is ever at your heels. ~ Socrates,
710:And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth. ~ Robert Nozick,
711:It is not the purpose of a juryman's office to give justice as a favor to whoever seems good to him, but to judge according to law, and this he has sworn to do. ~ Socrates,
712:O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is. It is strange to think that that which is All cannot be sufficient unto itself! ~ Paul Val ry,
713:Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, took his whole life to get to the point where he said, “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. ~ Miguel Ruiz,
714:The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. ~ Socrates,
715:When Socrates was about 30, and his father was long dead, he was still pursuing the art of sculpture, but from necessity, and without much inclination. ~ Moses Mendelssohn,
716:A system of morality that is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception that has nothing sound in it and nothing true. ~ Socrates,
717:So then there was the Greek, Socrates, he was great... He invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone sort of went, ''Yeah, I suppose so. ~ Eddie Izzard,
718:There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
719:Listen not to a tale-bearer or slanderer, for he tells thee nothing out of good-will; but as he discovereth of the secrets of others, so he will of thine in turn. ~ Socrates,
720:Socrates may have concluded that his most valuable possession was his leisure. “Beware the barrenness of a busy life” is a quote commonly attributed to him. ~ Michael Finkel,
721:You will know that the divine is so great and of such a nature that it sees and hears everything at once, is present everywhere, and is concerned with everything. ~ Socrates,
722:A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. ~ Socrates,
723:Before you speak, think if what you intend to say catches in one of the three sieves:
1. The sieve of truth
2. The sieve of love
3. The sieve of necessity ~ Socrates,
724:I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. ~ Socrates,
725:Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters. ~ Alberto Manguel,
726:(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. ~ Saul Bellow,
727:As Socrates said when his wife first railed at him, and next threw a vessel of foul water upon him, "I thought when I heard the thunder, there would come rain ~ Richard Baxter,
728:I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
729:The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles. ~ Socrates,
730:There are beds and tables in the world - plenty of them, are there not? But there are only two ideas or forms of them - one the idea of a bed, the other of a table. ~ Socrates,
731:How often when they find a sage
As sweet as Socrates or Plato
They hand him hemlock for his wage
Or bake him like a sweet potato!-Taking the Longer View ~ Don Marquis,
732:No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government. ~ Socrates,
733:Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval. ~ Alain de Botton,
734:There is no difference between knowledge and temperance; for he who knows what is good and embraces it, who knows what is bad and avoids it, is learned and temperate. ~ Socrates,
735:God desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only. ~ Socrates,
736:Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates. ~ Harold Bloom,
737:I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us. ~ Plato,
738:Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed. ~ Moses Mendelssohn,
739:the lies of centuries, the lies of love,
the lies of Socrates and Blake and Christ
will be your bedmates and tombstones
in a death that will never end. ~ Charles Bukowski,
740:There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. ~ Socrates,
741:You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a parable. Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all accustomed, I suppose. ~ Plato,
742:And all those who have known, they insist: “Know thyself!” Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, they go on insisting, “Know thyself!” The whole insistence of religion is to know thyself. ~ Osho,
743:Socrates had no system to teach. Throughout, his philosophy was a spiritual exercise, an invitation to a new way of life, active reflection, and living consciousness. ~ Pierre Hadot,
744:But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond. ~ J G Farrell,
745:Eliot tried to popularize Thomas Jefferson and Socrates, too, but people couldn’t remember from one visit to the next who they were. "Which one is which?" they’d say. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
746:Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval. That ~ Alain de Botton,
747:God does not deal directly with man: it is by means of spirits that all the intercourse and communication of gods with men, both in waking life and in sleep, is carried on. ~ Socrates,
748:Socrates' fame spread all over Greece, and the most respected and educated men from all around came to him, in order to enjoy his friendly company and instruction. ~ Moses Mendelssohn,
749:Every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies. ~ Socrates,
750:It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit. ~ Socrates,
751:Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual, so was Michelangelo, Socrates, Shakespeare, and almost every other figure that has formed what we have come to understand as beauty. ~ Reinaldo Arenas,
752:Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul? ~ Socrates,
753:I can't refute you, Socrates," Agathon said, "so I dare say you're right."

"No," said Socrates, "it's the truth you can't refute, my dear Agathon. Socrates is a pushover. ~ Plato,
754:Socrates: This man, on one hand, believes that he knows something, while not knowing [anything]. On the other hand, I – equally ignorant – do not believe [that I know anything]. ~ Plato,
755:Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy. ~ Socrates,
756:Therefore neither you, O judges, nor men in general ought to fear death: they have only to remember one thing, that for a just man there is no ill in life and no ill in death. ~ Socrates,
757:Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb. ~ Socrates,
758:And i wish I didn't have to lie so much. I don't think Frank Socrates would approve of all this lying.

I think Frank would want me to cause a lot more trouble than that. ~ A S King,
759:He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world. ~ Socrates,
760:Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul? ~ Socrates,
761:Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 45,
762:No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable. ~ Socrates,
763:Socrates, when informed of some derogating speeches one had used concerning him behind his back, made only this facetious reply, "Let him beat me too when I am absent. ~ Jean de La Fontaine,
764:An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure. ~ Mark Van Doren,
765:Socrates, indeed, when he was asked of what country he called himself, said, "Of the world"; for he considered himself an inhabitant and a citizen of the whole world. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,
766:Socrates replied: One thing to me is certain, Antiphon; you have conceived so vivid an idea of my life of misery that for yourself you would choose death sooner than live as I do. ~ Xenophon,
767:Socrates used to say, "Philosophers can be happy without music;" and Christians can be happier than philosophers when all outward causes of rejoicing are withdrawn. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon,
768:I do not forget that I am a mechanic. I am proud to own it. Neither do I forget that the apostle Paul was a tentmaker; Socrates was a sculptor; and Archimedes was a mechanic. ~ Andrew Jackson,
769:I have not sought during my life to amass wealth and to adorn my body, but I have sought to adorn my soul with the jewels of wisdom, patience, and above all with a love of liberty. ~ Socrates,
770:The greatest flood has the soonest ebb; the sorest tempest the most sudden calm; the hottest love the coldest end; and from the deepest desire oftentimes ensues the deadliest hate. ~ Socrates,
771:I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin. ~ Russell Kirk,
772:While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying. ~ Emil M Cioran,
773:Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do. ~ Lydia M Child,
774:We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon-this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing. ~ Emil M Cioran,
775:While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. “What use will that be to you?”, he was asked. “At least I will learn this melody before I die. ~ Italo Calvino,
776:But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a correct definition of justice. Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said Polemarchus interposing. I ~ Plato,
777:Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. ~ Socrates,
778:If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition... Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over. ~ Socrates,
779:..Do we have not choice but to agree that in each of us are found the same elements and characteristics as are found in the city? After all, where else could the city have got them from? ~ Socrates,
780:Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest
amount of money and honour and reputation,
and caring so little about wisdom and
truth and the greatest improvement of the soul? ~ Socrates,
781:All of the wisdom of this world is but a tiny raft upon which we must set sail when we leave this earth. If only there was a firmer foundation upon which to sail, perhaps some divine word. ~ Socrates,
782:Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανάτου μελέτη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
783:Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. ~ Ray Bradbury,
784:Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth. ~ Socrates,
785:Easter? Our attention falls more on dying than on death. How we deal with dying is more important to us than how we conquer death. Socrates overcame dying; Christ overcame death. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
786:...[W]hy should we pay so much attention to what 'most people' think? The really reasonable people, who have more claim to be considered, will believe that the facts are exactly as they are. ~ Socrates,
787:I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. ~ Socrates,
788:As for me, all I know is that I know nothing, for when I don't know what justice is, I'll hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy. ~ Socrates,
789:Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive. It’s a lot more complicated. Socrates had a mean, nagging wife; he always said that being married to her was good practice for philosophy. ~ Ryan Holiday,
790:I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses Can't define how I be dropping these mockeries. Lyrically perform armed robbery, Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me. ~ Inspectah Deck,
791:John Adams was a farmer, Abraham Lincoln a small town lawyer. Plato and Socrates were teachers. Jesus was a carpenter. To equate wisdom and judgement with occupation is at best insulting. ~ Mark Sheppard,
792:Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar. ~ James C Collins,
793:Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me? ~ Alain de Botton,
794:Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
795:The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it. ~ Anton Chekhov,
796:Even Socrates, who lived a very frugal and simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without. ~ Jack Kornfield,
797:Socrates and Jesus, two teachers of virtue and love, were executed because of the unsettling, threatening power of their souls, which was revealed in their personal lives and in their words. ~ Thomas Moore,
798:Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain. ~ Clifton Fadiman,
799:To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. ~ Victor Hugo,
800:Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons? ~ Socrates,
801:No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training... what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable. ~ Socrates,
802:In my investigation in the service of the god I found that those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient, while those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable. ~ Socrates,
803:More data flows into the building in a single day than mankind as a whole would have generated in the twenty-three centuries between the death of Socrates and the invention of the telephone. ~ Alain de Botton,
804:The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness. ~ Maggie Nelson,
805:Be of good hope in the face of death. Believe in this one truth for certain, that no evil can befall a good man either in life or death, and that his fate is not a matter of indifference to the gods. ~ Socrates,
806:Socrates: I'm afraid that it might actually be sacrilegious to stand idly by while morality is being denigrated and not try to assist as long as one has breath in one's body and a voice to protest with. ~ Plato,
807:While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul,Christ exclaims,'If it is possible, let this cup pass from me'.Christ in this respect is the self- confession of human sensibility. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
808:As a boy, he had been moved by those words of the dying Socrates, suggesting that if death were just one long, unbroken, dreamless sleep, then a greater boon could hardly be bestowed upon mankind. ~ Colin Dexter,
809:...[I]n any inquiry you are likely to attain more nearly to knowledge of your object in proportion to the care and accuracy with which you have prepared yourself to understand that object in itself[.] ~ Socrates,
810:SOCRATES: For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him? CRITO: Very true. SOCRATES: Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him. ~ Plato,
811:Morality and grammar are related. Human beings live by the word. Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” I’ve had that sentence pinned up over my desk for a long time. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
812:The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be, all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them. ~ Socrates,
813:You are wrong sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong. ~ Socrates,
814:He fascinated because he touched on the agonal instinct of the Hellenes – he introduced a variation into the wrestling-matches among the youths and young men. Socrates was also a great erotic. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
815:It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It’s remembering Socrates’ wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing. ~ Ryan Holiday,
816:When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
817:Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? ~ Socrates,
818:Do it because it's in your heart. Not because you want something in return. Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. ~ Socrates,
819:My method is to call in support of my statements the evidence of a single witness, the man I am arguing with, and to take his vote alone; the rest of the world are nothing to me; I am not talking to them. ~ Socrates,
820:Socrates's daimon (the one who spoke first within him ) whispered to him: no. My daimon, on the contrary, is my stupidity: like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything, in the field of my love. ~ Roland Barthes,
821:SOCRATES: No, I am not sure of anything. I never have been. But the god explained to me why that must be so, starting with the fallibility of the human mind and the unreliability of sensory experience. ~ David Deutsch,
822:The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege. ~ E L Doctorow,
823:To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge. For a man who claims to have knowledge, while actually knowing nothing, is less smarter than you, who claim to know nothing. ~ Socrates,
824:Plato, Socrates’ most celebrated student, assigned a high role to demons: “No human nature invested with supreme power is able to order human affairs,” he said, “and not overflow with insolence and wrong … ~ Carl Sagan,
825:The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use? ~ Dale Carnegie,
826:...[T]he right way is to give one's attention first to the highest good of the young, just as you expect a good gardener to give his attention first to the young plants, and after that to the others. - Socrates ~ Plato,
827:Thus Socrates became perfect, improving himself by everything. attending to nothing but reason. And though you are not yet a Socrates, you ought, however, to live as one desirous of becoming a Socrates. 51. ~ Epictetus,
828:Well, although I do not suppose that either of us know anything really beautiful & good, I am better off than he is- for he knows nothing & thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. ~ Socrates,
829:99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother's face without having it defined. It's just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down. ~ Robert M Pirsig,
830:Socrates: “The corruption of the best things are the worst things.” Or, “The best, when corrupted, become the worst.” As one of your English poets has said, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. ~ Peter Kreeft,
831:The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth. ~ Walter Lippmann,
832:I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It’s only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today ~ Joshua Foer,
833:Socrates worked towards making people question themselves. He like to provoke self-interrogation but wasn't particularly interested in the answers that emerged; he just like to set off the thought process. ~ Eric Cantona,
834:And that might be applied to him which is recorded of Socrates, that he was able both to abstain from, and to enjoy, those things which many are too weak to abstain from, and cannot enjoy without excess. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
835:Aren't you ashamed to be concerned so much about making all the money you can and advancing your reputation and prestige, while for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your souls you have no thought or car? ~ Socrates,
836:Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and to place it in cities, and even to introduce it into homes and compel it to inquire about life and standards and goods and evils. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,
837:One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him. ~ Socrates,
838:The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just. ~ Plato,
839:God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods... ~ Socrates,
840:Socrates says we must be either fools because we think we are wise, or wise because we know we are fools. Christ says we must be either sinners who think we are saints, or saints who know we are sinners. Even ~ Peter Kreeft,
841:Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge. ~ Roger Ebert,
842:Did you know Socrates said we love whatever we lack? Or think we lack? Socrates? If you feel stupid, you'll fall for someone brainy. If you feel ugly, you'll flip your lid for someone who's easy on the eyes. ~ J R Moehringer,
843:If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred. ~ Sylvia Plath,
844:I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say. ~ Socrates,
845:It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute Beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute Beauty, and for no other reason... [I]t is by Beauty that beautiful things are beautiful. ~ Socrates,
846:Plato (or Socrates) also compared men to dogs. One of the great tragedies of modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they were bred to do, what their bodies want to do. ~ Jack Donovan,
847:...[T]hese people... are my dangerous accusers; because those who hear them suppose that anyone who inquires into such matters... theories about the heavens... and everything below the earth... must be an atheist. ~ Socrates,
848:Who said, ‘You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ” she’d asked Ree in last week’s pottery class. “Socrates,” Ree answered promptly. “Really? I was thinking more along the lines of Michelle Obama. ~ Anne Tyler,
849:[F]or as Socrates says that a wise man is a citizen of the world, so I thought that a wise woman was equally at liberty to range through every station or degree of men, to fix her choice wherever she pleased. ~ Sarah Fielding,
850:Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages. ~ Lord Byron,
851:Confronted with the choice between having time and having things, we’ve chosen to have things. Today it is a luxury to read what Socrates said, not because the books are expensive, but because our time is scarce. ~ Gabriel Zaid,
852:Socrates talks to an old duffer about what old age is like. The old duffer says in effect (I can’t put my hands on the book just now) that he feels as though he’d been freed from a cruel and unreasonable master. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
853:My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher." - Socrates (470-399 B.C.) "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't ~ Erica Jong,
854:Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them. ~ Steven Pressfield,
855:It is commonly a dangerous thing for a man to have more sense than his neighbors. Socrates paid for his superiority with his life; and if Aristotle saved his skin, it was by taking to his heels in time. ~ Christoph Martin Wieland,
856:I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us. ~ Sylvia Plath,
857:The love that Socrates bore Phaedo now lay within his reach, love passionate but temperate, such as only finer natures can understand, and he found in Maurice a nature that was not indeed fine, but charmingly willing. ~ E M Forster,
858:Society has always been the free man's greatest enemy. And the free man has been society's greatest friend. How did society treat Jesus, Socrates, Galileo, or Martin Luther King? Yet look what they have left behind. ~ Laurence Boldt,
859:Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. ~ Robert M Pirsig,
860:The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain. ~ Cyril Connolly,
861:In every one of us there are two ruling and directing principles, whose guidance we follow wherever they may lead; the one being an innate desire of pleasure; the other, an acquired judgment which aspires after excellence. ~ Socrates,
862:Socrates made the same remark to one who complained; he said: "Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels. ~ Seneca,
863:SOCRATES: They have differences of opinion, as you say, about good and evil, just and unjust, honourable and dishonourable: there would have been no quarrels among them, if there had been no such differences--would there now? ~ Plato,
864:When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: "Try to bear lightly what needs must be." Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity. ~ Dale Carnegie,
865:It's very important to remember that the philosophers were social dissidents. They were social critics. The man in the street or woman in the street did not particularly cherish what they said. Socrates was killed. ~ Rebecca Goldstein,
866:Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
867:The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates. ~ Christopher Hitchens,
868:A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.--What was that god thinking who counseled, "Know thyself!" Did he perhaps mean,"Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!"--And Socrates?--And "scientific men"? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
869:I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence. ~ Robert Fulghum,
870:What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them? ~ Socrates,
871:all started at the Temple of Apollo In Delphi. One of his friends approached the oracle with the question: “Is anyone wiser than Socrates?” the answer was “No.” Socrates was profoundly puzzled by this episode. He claimed to know ~ Plato,
872:Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding? ~ Socrates,
873:In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. ~ Alexander Hamilton,
874:Socrates splits himself into two, so that there are two Socrates: the Socrates who knows in advance how the discussion is going to end, and the Socrates who travels the entire dialectical path along with his interlocutor. ~ Pierre Hadot,
875:Some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. Some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
876:At all times it has not been the age, but individuals alone, who have worked for knowledge. It was the age which put Socrates to death by poison, the age which burnt Huss. The ages have always remained alike. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
877:don’t confuse scepticism as an attitude, or a method, with scepticism as a philosophy. Socrates was sceptical in temperament, and his method was to question everything. But he believed in absolute truth; he was no sceptic. ~ Peter Kreeft,
878:If what philosophers say of the kinship of God and Man be true, what remains for men to do but as Socrates did:—never, when asked one's country, to answer, "I am an Athenian or a Corinthian," but "I am a citizen of the world. ~ Epictetus,
879:Socrates defines his life’s mission as awakening the Athenians to the supreme importance of attending to their souls. His timeless plea that we connect to ourselves remains the only way for any of us to truly thrive. ~ Arianna Huffington,
880:There is also a tradition about Socrates. He liked walking, it is recorded, until a late hour of the evening, and when someone asked him why he did this he said he was trying to work up an appetite for his dinner. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,
881:And I say let a man be of good cheer about his soul. When the soul has been arrayed in her own proper jewels - temperance and justice, and courage, and nobility and truth - she is ready to go on her journey when the hour comes. ~ Socrates,
882:Men who have seen life and death... as an unbroken continuum, the swinging pendulum, have been able to move as freely into death as they walked through life. Socrates went to the grave almost perplexed by his companions' tears. ~ Voltaire,
883:Socrates used to say that death is like some prankster in a scary mask, dressed as a bogeyman to frighten small children. The wise man carefully removes the mask and, looking behind it, he finds nothing worth fearing. ~ Donald J Robertson,
884:And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls. ~ Socrates,
885:Anything but madmen, Socrates; the young men are much madder who pay them money; and madder still those, their relations, who entrust young people to them; maddest of all, the cities which allow them to come in and do not kick them ~ Plato,
886:Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud.) ~ N D Wilson,
887:When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: "Try to
bear lightly what needs must be." Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and
resignation that touched the hem of divinity. ~ Dale Carnegie,
888:The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it.......Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily. ~ Socrates,
889:I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic but will become one): "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,' they asked, 'to know this tune before you die? ~ Italo Calvino,
890:For who is there but you? - who not only claim to be a good man and a gentleman, for many are this, and yet have not the power of making others good. Whereas you are not only good yourself, but also the cause of goodness in others. ~ Socrates,
891:I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte,
892:Our connection to the teachings of Socrates, for instance, is through the written word of Plato, because Socrates was vehemently against the written word. Socrates thought that the book would do terrible things to our memories. ~ Clay A Johnson,
893:You tell me that good cheer, raiment, riches and luxury are happiness. I believe that the greatest felicity is to desire nothing, and in order to draw near to this supreme happiness, one must habituate oneself to have need of little. ~ Socrates,
894:You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve. ~ Socrates,
895:He is only a philosopher in the manner of Socrates, whom he revered above all others because he left behind no dogma, no teachings, no law, no system, only an example: the man who seeks himself in all and who seeks all in himself. ~ Stefan Zweig,
896:To use words and phrases in an easygoing manner without scrutinizing them too curiously is not in general a mark of ill-breeding. On the contrary, there is something low-bred in being too precise. But sometimes there is no help for it ~ Socrates,
897:You know what I'd love to read? A Dialogue between Bron and Shevek and Socrates. Socrates would love it too. I bet he wanted people who argued. You can tell he did, you can tell that's what he loved really, at least in The Symposium. ~ Jo Walton,
898:Young people nowadays love luxury; they have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for old people... contradict their parents, talk constantly in front of company, gobble their food and tyrannize their teachers. ~ Socrates,
899:dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, something always eluded them. ~ Karen Armstrong,
900:if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then—as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us—they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction. ~ Victor Davis Hanson,
901:He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience--and the truth-- higher than life. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
902:I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. ~ Socrates,
903:No age or condition is without its heroes . The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon , the least confused thinker its Socrates , the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare . ~ George Bernard Shaw,
904:In Plato’s Apology, Socrates defines his life’s mission as awakening the Athenians to the supreme importance of attending to their souls. His timeless plea that we connect to ourselves remains the only way for any of us to truly thrive. ~ Anonymous,
905:Maybe that’s what the quasars that stand sentinel at the end of the universe are all about—they are the spots where people like Socrates and Christ dug through; they are windows into bright and terrible wisdom. They are warnings. ~ Whitley Strieber,
906:Socrates insisted that there's a strong connection between your philosophy (how you interpret the world, what you think is important in life) and your mental and physical health. Different beliefs lead to different emotional states... ~ Jules Evans,
907:Could I climb the highest place in Athens, I would lift up my voice and proclaim, "Fellow citizens, why do you burn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and talk so little care of your children to whom you must one day relinquish all? ~ Socrates,
908:I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. ~ Socrates,
909:It was the first and most striking characteristic of Socrates never to become heated in discourse, never to utter an injurious or insulting word -- on the contrary, he persistently bore insult from others and thus put an end to the fray. ~ Epictetus,
910:The soul then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all . . . all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. ~ Socrates,
911:Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service. ~ Socrates,
912:Persecution cannot harm him who stands by Truth. Did not Socrates fall proudly a victim in body? Was not Paul stoned for the sake of the Truth? It is our inner selves that hurt us when we disobey it, and it kills us when we betray it. ~ Khalil Gibran,
913:Buddha, Confucius, or Socrates can bring us good teaching, moral excellence, and religious philosophy. For this they may be commended as rendering help and aid to humanity. But Jesus Christ is different: He brings us Himself as our Life. ~ Chip Brogden,
914:Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates. ~ Victor Hugo,
915:Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
916:Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does right: that is, does what seems to him good (advantageous) according to the degree of advancement his intellect has attained, which is always the measure of his rational capacity. ~ Anonymous,
917:After they had lost the war with Sparta the Athenians looked for someone to blame. They blamed the old teacher, Socrates. Being a rather groovy guy, he was always hanging around with young people, telling them not to believe in the old gods. ~ Terry Deary,
918:Millions of people, in all walks of life and in every endeavor, create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They’d rather, as Socrates warned, focus on what they have than on what they are. ~ Eric Greitens,
919:As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
920:Nothing that other people can do to you can harm you enough to cancel out the benefit you bestow on yourself by acting rightly. It follows that bad people ultimately harm only themselves: nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death ~ Socrates,
921:The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them. ~ Steven Pressfield,
922:For this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. ~ Socrates,
923:Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
924:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. ~ Eric Greitens,
925:It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own. ~ Paul Goodman,
926:When the disciples of Socrates questioned him concerning the Absolute, he also refused to discuss it, stating that it was beyond his wisdom and that it played no practical part in everyday life. ~ Manly P Hall, What the Ancient Wisdom Expects of Its Disciples,
927:Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
928:Would that the majority could inflict the greatest evils, for they would then be capable of the greatest good, and that would be fine, but now they cannot do either. They cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly. ~ Socrates,
929:You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man. ~ Socrates,
930:Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing. ~ Luce Irigaray,
931:While Socrates and Plato were searching for answers to these important questions over two thousand years ago, it’s a strange situation we find ourselves in when the ‘information age’ has helped to cause millions of people to drown in misinformation. ~ Mark Dice,
932:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. ~ John Stuart Mill,
933:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. ~ Michael J Sandel,
934:Besides, it is a shame to let yourself grow old through neglect before seeing how you can develop the maximum beauty and strength of body; and you can have this experience if your are negligent, because these things don't normally happen by themselves. ~ Socrates,
935:Socrates ... brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man.... It is impossible to go back further and lower. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
936:Socrates had it backward. He thought the unexamined life is not worth living. I think no one's life holds up to examination. The more time you spend thinking the more you notice that everyone else is doing something better or more important than you. ~ David R Dow,
937:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”14 ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert,
938:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”29 ~ Michael J Sandel,
939:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.” Now, ~ Eric Greitens,
940:Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible ~ Samuel Johnson,
941:If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman. ~ Socrates,
942:It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question. ~ John Stuart Mill,
943:Go back to classical times, say classical Greece. Who drank the hemlock? Was it someone who was conforming, obeying the gods? Or was it someone who was disrupting the youth and questioning the faith and belief? Socrates, in other words. It was Socrates. ~ Noam Chomsky,
944:Socrates and then Archesilaus used to make their pupils speak first; they spoke afterwards. 'Obest plerumque iss discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.' [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach] ~ Michel de Montaigne,
945:The examined life, as Socrates articulated millennia ago, entails looking into the root causes of my behaviors, and the patterns and consequences I am piling up. If I am not doing that, then I am most likely living very unconsciously and very reflexively. ~ James Hollis,
946:White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it. ~ Al Sharpton,
947:There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
948:For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles. ~ Socrates,
949:There was a Socratic style of life (which the Cynics were to imitate), and the Socratic dialogue was an exercise which brought Socrates' interlocutor to put himself in question, to take care of himself, and to make his soul as beautiful and wise as possible. ~ Pierre Hadot,
950:Consider the famous syllogism “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.” So far, so good. But just because all men are mortal, it does not follow that all mortals are men, and it certainly does not follow that all men are Socrates. ~ Carol Tavris,
951:I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can...And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same...I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict. ~ Socrates,
952:The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them. ~ Socrates,
953:Socrates
The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion.
To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen to the dictates of reason ~ Alain de Botton,
954:SOCRATES: This, in turn, is to be able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do. In just this way, our two speeches placed all [266] mental derangements into one common kind. ~ Plato,
955:I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can... And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same... I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict. ~ Socrates,
956:humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the Sophists: He raises up a Socrates to answer them. ~ C S Lewis,
957:Let us reflect in this way, too, that there is good hope that death is a blessing, for it is one of two things: either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocation for the soul from here to another place. ~ Socrates,
958:Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
959:Socrates: what will happen to my children if I do what my friends are suggesting? Hume: you can’t always believe what other people tell you. Descartes: when there’s so much disagreement between the authorities, what can we do but go back to basics and start again? ~ Edward Craig,
960:Toen Socrates verteld werd dat iemand niet beter van een reis was teruggekeerd, zei hij: 'Natuurlijk niet, want die man had zichzelf meegenomen.' Waartoe gaan wij naar landen, verwarmd door een vreemde zon? Kan iemand mét zijn land ook zichzelf ontvluchten? ~ Michel de Montaigne,
961:To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. ~ Socrates,
962:A picket frozen on duty—  A mother starved for her brood—  Socrates drinking the hemlock,  And Jesus on the rood;  And millions who, humble and nameless,  The straight, hard pathway trod—  Some call it Consecration,  And others call it God. ~ W. H. Carruth, Evolution,
963:No citizen has any right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training; it is part of his profession as a citizen to keep himself in good condition... [It is] a disgrace for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and the strength of which his body is capable. ~ Socrates,
964:Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher. ~ Demetri Martin,
965:Whereas Socrates would walk up to people in the marketplace and harass them by asking them to define virtue, Pythagoras and his young students in Croton supposedly observed a code of silence, to prevent their secret teachings from being divulged to the uninitiated. ~ Peter Adamson,
966:The Greek period inspired the greatest flowering of knowledge in human history, producing the forefathers of the entire Western intellectual tradition, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid. It changed the world in ways both subtle and profound. ~ Matthew Syed,
967:In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. ~ John Green,
968:Socrates pointed out that we carry on as though death were the greatest of all calamities-yet, for all we know, it might be the greatest of all blessings. What are we going to call good? What are we going to call bad? Good or bad is never our choice, or even the issue. ~ Steve Hagen,
969:The essential nature of Socrates’ art lay in the fact that he did not appear to want to instruct people. On the contrary he gave the impression of one desiring to learn from those he spoke with. So instead of lecturing like a traditional schoolmaster, he discussed. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
970:Stuart Mill wrote, ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert,
971:The mightiest kings have had their minions; Great Alexander loved Hephaestion, The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept; And for Patroclus, stern Achilles drooped. And not kings only, but the wisest men: The Roman Tully loved Octavius, Grave Socrates, wild Alcibiades. ~ Christopher Marlowe,
972:The more highly a man is developed on the intellectual and moral side, the more independent he is, the more pleasure life gives him. Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius, were joyful, not sorrowful. And the Apostle tells us: 'Rejoice continually'; 'Rejoice and be glad. ~ Anton Chekhov,
973:The more highly a man is developed on the intellectual and moral side, the more independent he is, the more pleasure life gives him. Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius, were joyful, not sorrowful. And the Apostle tells us: ‘Rejoice continually’; ‘Rejoice and be glad. ~ Anton Chekhov,
974:Socrates was famous in Athens for saying, “Know thyself.” It is said that one of his students said to him: “Socrates, you go around saying ‘Know thyself,’ but do you know yourself?” Socrates was said to have replied, “No, but I understand something about this not knowing. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn,
975:Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse? Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be answering? Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep. What makes you say that? I replied. ~ Plato,
976:For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. ~ Peter Kreeft,
977:Serenity, regularity, absence of vanity,Sincerity, simplicity, veracity, equanimity, Fixity, non-irritability, adaptability, Humility, tenacity, integrity, nobility, magnanimity, charity, generosity, purity. Practise daily these eighteen "ities" You will soon attain immortality. ~ Socrates,
978:One's character is one's habitual way of behaving. We all have patterns of behavior or habits, and often we are quite unaware of them. When Socrates urged us to Know thyself, he clearly was directing us to come to know our habitual ways of responding to the world around us. ~ Thomas Lickona,
979:Dionysus had already been scared form the tragic stage, by a demonic power speaking through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether newborn demon, called Socrates. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
980:Do you believe in the existence of Socrates? Alexander the Great? Julius Caesar? If historicity is established by written records in multiple copies that date originally from near contemporaneous sources, there is far more proof for Christ's existence than for any of theirs. ~ Dinesh D Souza,
981:If all the misfortunes of mankind were cast into a public stack in order to be equally distributed among the whole species, those who now think themselves the most unhappy would prefer the share they are already possessed of before that which would fall to them by such a division. ~ Socrates,
982:I've recovered my tenderness by long looking;
I'm a Socrates of small fury.
The waves bends with the fish. I'm taught
As water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,
I can hear light on a dry day.
The world is where we fling it; I'm leaving where I am. ~ Theodore Roethke,
983:Miss Gregory took nearly everything. Her clothes. New girls don't have the privilege of wearing their own clothes. Her books. Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare? Much too stimulating. No wonder you have Ideas. Certainly, you don't wish to become a bluestocking! ~ Suzanne Lazear,
984:You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is, whether he is acting justly or unjustly, like a good man or a bad one. ~ Socrates,
985:Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ and the other represented by Sanches,* when he says, ‘I don’t even know if I know nothing. ~ Fernando Pessoa,
986:...one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act: that is, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover. ~ Socrates,
987:Reality wasn’t a syllogism like “Socrates is a man—all men are mortal—hence Socrates is mortal,” but more like “Helga is a human being—all telephone booths have been vandalized—hence Helga must die.” Or like: “Hitler is a human being—all Jews are animals—hence all Jews must die. ~ Harry Mulisch,
988:Socrates (770-399 B.C.[E.]) is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
989:Westerners may wonder, “Who are these gods?” If we were to adapt this to our cultural context, the verse might be, “Homage to you adored by Jesus, Mary, Moses, Abraham, Mohammed, Zeus, Socrates, Plato, Rambo, Madonna, Freud, Dr. Laura, Clinton, Bush, and everyone in Star Wars. ~ Thubten Chodron,
990:Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world—in doing what we would now call science. Although Socrates studied science as a young man, he abandoned it to focus his attention on the human condition. ~ William B Irvine,
991:It is our nasty twentieth-century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it? Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul. ~ Brenda Ueland,
992:Reason = virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight – the daylight of reason. One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards… ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
993:According to Plato, Socrates believed all knowledge came from a divine state, but humans had forgotten it. Most lived in a cave of ignorance, but one could become enlightened by climbing out of the darkness and understanding the divide between the spiritual and material planes. ~ Gwendolyn Womack,
994:SOCRATES: What evidence could be appealed to, supposing we were asked at this very moment whether we are asleep or awake?

THEAETETUS: Indeed, Socrates, I do not see by what evidence it is to be proved; for the two conditions correspond in every circumstance like exact counterparts. ~ Plato,
995:When people asked Socrates, ‘What is wisdom?’ he always gave the same answer: ‘I don’t know’. In fact, Socrates never claimed to know much of anything except how to ask questions. And by asking questions, he would prove to other people that they didn’t know what they thought they knew. ~ Jim Rohn,
996:Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
997:Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,--these are some of our astronomers. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
998:In the period between Homer and Socrates most philosophers wrote in verse, and Plato, writing in the great age of Athenian tragedy and comedy, composed dramatic dialogue. Aristotle, an exact contemporary of the greatest Greek orator Demosthenes, preferred to write in prose monologue. ~ Anthony Kenny,
999:Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful. ~ Socrates,
1000:Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end. ~ John Ortberg,
1001:The only analogy I have before me is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task, to revise the definition of what it is to be a Christian. For my part I do not call myself a "Christian" (thus keeping the ideal free), but I am able to make it evident that the others are still less than I. ~ Soren Kierkegaard,
1002:If we pursue our habit of eating animals, and if our neighbour follows a similar path, will we need to go to war against our neighbour to secure greater pasturage, because ours will not be enough to sustain us, and our neighbour will have a similar need to wage war on us for the same reason. ~ Socrates,
1003:Reason and
truth themselves that are in question?

Socrates never visited these terrifying heights and depths; they are distinctively modern and post-Christian. Socrates was a simple virgin; Christians are like married women (married to God), and modernists are like divorcees. ~ Peter Kreeft,
1004:Historian Richard Nixon knew the vice could be fatal for civilization: “You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six emperors were fags.” Civilizer ~ Eduardo Galeano,
1005:As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question. ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert,
1006:...[W]hen death comes to a man, the mortal part of him dies, but the immortal part retires at the approach of death and escapes unharmed and indestructible... [I]t is as certain as anything can be... that soul is immortal and imperishable, and that our souls will really exist in the next world. ~ Socrates,
1007:The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think 'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody's wife. ~ James Lee Burke,
1008:Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood." -Is it so bad, then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood... ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1009:A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
1010:There are a great many of these accusers, and they have been accusing me now for a great many years, and what is more, they approached you at the most impressionable age, when some of you were children or adolescents; and literally won their case by default, because there was no one to defend me. ~ Socrates,
1011:Though it may be the peculiar happiness of Socrates and other geniuses of his stamp, to reason themselves into virtue, the human species would long ago have ceased to exist, had it depended entirely for its preservation on the reasonings of the individuals that compose it." Par 1, 36 ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
1012:Wherever authority is still part of accepted usage and one does not ‘give reasons’ but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously. – Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what was really happening when that happened? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1013:Is it any wonder that Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, that of pre-empting the teaching function, which, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone. ~ John Taylor Gatto,
1014:To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not. For it is to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessings of human beings. And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil. ~ Socrates,
1015:The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason. ~ Jacques Louis David,
1016:A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter. ~ Socrates,
1017:Glaucon’s story posed a moral question: could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon seemed to think the answer was no. But Paul Feldman sides with Socrates and Adam Smith—for he knows that the answer, at least 87 percent of the time, is yes. ~ Steven D Levitt,
1018:Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge. ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1019:...[B]y observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether... [like] when [people] watch and study an eclipse of the sun; they really do sometimes injure their eyes, unless they study its reflection in water or some other medium. ~ Socrates,
1020:Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. ~ Ray Bradbury,
1021:I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man... ~ Socrates,
1022:Most people, [Socrates] suggested, sleepwalk through life, never asking themselves what they're doing or why they're doing it. They absorb the values and beliefs of their parents, or their culture, and accept them unquestioningly. But if they happen to absorb wrong beliefs, it will make them sick. ~ Jules Evans,
1023:Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hem-lock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. ~ Ray Bradbury,
1024:The man has to learn ‘what each specific thing means’, as Socrates often said, and stop casually applying preconceptions to individual cases.
This is the cause of everyone’s troubles, the inability to apply common preconceptions to particulars. Instead the opinions of men as to what is bad diverge. ~ Epictetus,
1025:I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like 'what is a good life?' Socrates famously said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I started asking these questions from the starting point of 'what is success?' ~ Arianna Huffington,
1026:Socrates: “Know thyself.” For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. ~ Peter Kreeft,
1027:Undoubtedly, on his death bed, at
that moment when, ever since Socrates, it has been proper to pronounce certain elevated words, he told
his wife, as one of my uncles told his, who
had watched beside him for twelve nights, "I do not thank you, Therese; you have only done your
duty. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,
1028:Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution. ~ Mark Twain,
1029:In order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. Hence there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing. ~ Socrates,
1030:Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure ~ Socrates,
1031:We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn't matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage. ~ Christopher Hitchens,
1032:Haven’t you forgotten the first and most important lesson in all of philosophy, the lesson taught to all of us by Socrates, the father of philosophy? That you are wise only when you are humble, that the very first bit of wisdom and the prerequisite for all others is the realization that we are not wise ~ Peter Kreeft,
1033:Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on 'The Survival of the Fittest.' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution. ~ Mark Twain,
1034:Nuestra juventud de ahora ama el lujo. Tiene malos modales, desprecia la autoridad; le falta el respeto a sus
mayores y le encanta charlar en lugar de trabajar; ya no se levanta cuando un adulto entra en la sala; contradice a sus padres, charla ante las visitas, engulle la comida y tiraniza a sus maestros ~ Socrates,
1035:Which is recorded of Socrates, that he was able both to abstain from, and to enjoy, those things which many are too weak to abstain from, and cannot enjoy without excess. But to be strong enough both to bear the one and to be sober in the other is the mark of a man who has a perfect and invincible soul. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1036:Either Plato and Xenophon are involved in a massive cover-up, or there were factors peculiar to Athenian State religion which make Socrates guilty as charged. We can only hope that the former alternative is not the case, since Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts are practically our only evidence on Socrates’ views. ~ Xenophon,
1037:Esteemed friend, citizen of Athens, the greatest city in the world, so outstanding in both intelligence and power, aren't you ashamed to care so much to make all the money you can, and to advance your reputation and prestige--while for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul you have no care or worry? ~ Socrates,
1038:Life is legal tender, and individual character stamps its value. We are from a thousand mints, and all genuine. Despite our infinitely diverse appraisements, we make change for one another. So many ideals planted are worth the great gold of Socrates; so many impious laws broken are worth John Brown. ~ Louise Imogen Guiney,
1039:Certain characteristics of the subject are clear. To begin with, we do not in this subject deal with particular things or particular properties: we deal formally with what can be said about any thing or any property. We are prepared to say that one and one are two, but not that Socrates and Plato are two. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1040:Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1041:Plato is widely believed to have been a student of Socrates and to have been deeply influenced by his teacher's unjust death. Plato's brilliance as a writer and thinker can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious ~ Plato,
1042:Education derives from the verb educe, which means “to draw forth from within.” The original teaching method of Socrates has been largely displaced by professorial deference to received scholarly authority. By and large, our students are taught how to take exams but not to think, write, or find their own path. ~ James Hollis,
1043:He that makes himself famous by his eloquence, justice or arms illustrates his extraction, let it be never so mean; and gives inestimable reputation to his parents. We should never have heard of Sophroniscus, but for his son, Socrates; nor of Ariosto and Gryllus, if it had not been for Xenophon and Plato. ~ Seneca the Younger,
1044:It is a base thing for a man to wax old in careless self-neglect before he has lifted up his eyes and seen what manner of man he was made to be, in the full perfection of bodily strength and beauty. But these glories are withheld from him who is guilty of self-neglect, for they are not wont to blaze forth unbidden. ~ Socrates,
1045:...{I]f everything that has some share of life were to die, and if after death the dead remained in that form and did not come to life again, would it not be quite inevitable that in the end everything should be dead and nothing alive?... [W]hat possible means could prevent their number from being exhausted by death? ~ Socrates,
1046:No one can teach, if by teaching we mean the transmission of knowledge, in any mechanical fashion, from one person to another. The most that can be done is that one person who is more knowledgeable than another can, by asking a series of questions, stimulate the other to think, and so cause him to learn for himself. ~ Socrates,
1047:[n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired] This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects ~ Thomas Jefferson,
1048:Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer. ~ Italo Calvino,
1049:Such a Jesus has no need of a church. Worship is at best a hollow service and at worst an act of blasphemy if it is directed toward a dead teacher of morality. We have no church for Socrates. We sing no hymns to Cicero. We say no prayers to Aristotle. If Jesus is a mere human teacher, neither should we worship Him. ~ R C Sproul,
1050:Epictetus is not superior to Socrates; but if he is not inferior, this is enough for me; for I shall never be a Milo, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor shall I be a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, do we neglect looking after anything because we despair of reaching the highest degree. ~ Epictetus,
1051:Since all of us desire to be happy, and since we evidently become so on account of our use—that is our good use—of other things, and since knowledge is what provides this goodness of use and also good fortune, every man must, as seems plausible, prepare himself by every means for this: to be as wise as possible. Right? ~ Socrates,
1052:Do you suppose that I should have lived as long as I have if I had moved in the sphere of public life, and conducting myself in that sphere like an honorable man, had always upheld the cause of right, and conscientiously set this end above all other things? Not by a very long way, gentlemen; neither would any other man. ~ Socrates,
1053:There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery. ~ George Bernard Shaw,
1054:I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know. ~ Socrates,
1055:And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar,
1056:Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of -- for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. ~ Socrates,
1057:It must be granted that in every syllogism, considered as an argument to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii. When we say, All men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal; it is unanswerably urged by the adversaries of the syllogistic theory, that the proposition, Socrates is mortal. ~ John Stuart Mill,
1058:Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps it's time to inventory the imprints and anchors in our own life. Even if they once were completely reasonable, are they still reasonable? Once the old choices are reconsidered, we can open ourselves to new decisions-and the new opportunities of a new day. ~ Dan Ariely,
1059:I cannot favour laws such as that of Idaho, which allows sterilization of 'mental defectives, epileptics, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sex perverts.' The last two categories here are very vague . . . The law of Idaho would have justified the sterilization of Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, and St. Paul. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1060:If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.’ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves. ~ James Joyce,
1061:Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of - for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. ~ Socrates,
1062:...[T]hose who care about their souls and do not subordinate them to the body dissociate themselves firmly from these others and refuse to accompany them on their haphazard journey; and, believing that it is wrong to oppose philosophy with her offer of liberation and purification, they turn and follow her wherever she leads... ~ Socrates,
1063:SOCRATES: Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice. THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls? ~ Plato,
1064:I'm wiser than that person. For it's likely that neither of us knows anything fine and good, but he thinks he knows something he doesn't know, whereas I, since I don't in fact know, don't think that I do either. At any rate, it seems that I'm wiser than he in just this one small way: that what I don't know, I don't think I know. ~ Socrates,
1065:The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. ~ Norman Cousins,
1066:Go back to Socrates: "Know thyself." For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the prophets, there are only two kinds of people: saints, who know they are sinners; and sinners, who think they are saints. Which are you? ~ Peter Kreeft,
1067:To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know. No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessing for a human being; and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that is is the greatest of evil." (Socrates in The Apology) ~ Plato,
1068:You seem, Antiphon, to imagine that happiness consists in luxury and extravagance. But my belief is that to have no wants is divine; to have as few as possible comes next to the divine; and as that which is divine is supreme, so that which approaches nearest to its nature is nearest to the supreme. ~ Xenophon, Socrates in Memorabilia, 1.6.1,
1069:So I withdrew and thought to myself: 'I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know. ~ Socrates,
1070:The shortest way to arrive at glory should be to do that for conscience which we do for glory. And the virtue of Alexander appears to me with much less vigor in his theater than that of Socrates in his mean and obscure. I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates I cannot. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
1071:...[W]e must not let it enter our minds that there may be no validity in argument. On the contrary we should recognize that we ourselves are still intellectual invalids; but that we must brace ourselves and do our best to become healthy... No greater misfortune could happen to anyone than that of developing a dislike for argument. ~ Socrates,
1072:But the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. ~ Plato,
1073:SOCRATES: Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice.
THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls? ~ Plato,
1074:The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress. ~ Socrates,
1075:An envious man waxeth lean with the fatness of his neighbors. Envy is the daughter of pride, the author of murder and revenge, the beginner of secret sedition and the perpetual tormentor of virtue. Envy is the filthy slime of the soul; a venom, a poison, or quicksilver which consumeth the flesh and drieth up the marrow of the bones. ~ Socrates,
1076:What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said: "This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless. ~ Plato,
1077:God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. ~ Socrates,
1078:And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings. You are quite right, Socrates. And such a presiding genius will be always required in our State if the government is to last. Yes, ~ Plato,
1079:Certainly I wouldn't be writing this book, on this subject, if living with freedom were easy. The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them. ~ Steven Pressfield,
1080:For each of them, men, is able, going into each of the cities, to persuade the young-who can associate with whomever of their own citizens they wish to for free-they persuade these young men to leave off their associations with the latter, and to associate with themselves instead, and to give them money and acknowledge gratitude besides. ~ Socrates,
1081:...[F]rom me you shall hear the whole truth; not, I can assure you, gentlemen, in flowery language... decked out with fine words and phrases; no, what you will hear will be a straightforward speech in the first words that occur to me, confident as I am in the justice of my cause; and I do not want any of you to expect anything different. ~ Socrates,
1082:Thus such another will not easily come to you, men, but if you believe me, you will spare me; but perhaps you might possibly be offended, like the sleeping who are awakened, striking me, believing Anytus, you might easily kill, then the rest of your lives you might continue sleeping, unless the god caring for you should send you another. ~ Socrates,
1083:His mood is one of strenuous weariness; he does his duty as a good soldier, waiting for the sound of the trumpet which shall sound the retreat; he has not that cheerful confidence which led Socrates through a life no less noble, to a death which was to bring him into the company of gods he had worshipped and men whom he had revered. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1084:Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know. ~ Socrates,
1085:Socrates was also seductive for these young men because they could admire his sort of virtue. His virtue was, in essence, independence and freedom. He was poor not because he had to be, but because he knew that an utterly destitute man can, paradoxically, be more self-sufficient than a man who has to worry about his wealth and hangers-on. ~ Peter Adamson,
1086:To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death wheather it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to man; but people dread it as though they were certain it is the greatest evil." -The Last Days of Socrates ~ Plato,
1087:From Pythagoras (whether by way of Socrates or not) Plato derived the Orphic elements in his philosophy: the religious trend, the belief in immortality, the other-worldliness, the priestly tone, and all that is involved in the simile of the cave; also his respect for mathematics, and his intimate intermingling of intellect and mysticism. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1088:[n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired]
This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects (Works, Vol. iv, p. 327). ~ Thomas Jefferson,
1089:Philosophy is the art of dying.Philosophy is an activity that has always been concerned with how one seizes hold of one's mortality, and I see myself continuing a very ancient tradition that goes back to Socrates and Epicurus, which is that to be a philosopher is to try and learn how to die. In learning how to die, one learns how to live. ~ Simon Critchley,
1090:...in the acquisition of this blessing human nature can find no better helper than Love. I declare that it is the duty of every man to honour Love, and I honour and practice the mysteries of Love in an especial degree myself, and recommend the same to others, and I praise the power and valour of Love to the best of my ability both now and always. ~ Socrates,
1091:If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true; but to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best - although my actions are controlled by Mind - would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression. ~ Socrates,
1092:It is a celebrated thought of Socrates, that if all the misfortunes of mankind were cast into a public stock, in order to be equally distributed among the whole species, those who now think themselves the most unhappy would prefer the share they are already possessed of, before that which would fall to them by such a division. —Addison. ~ Orison Swett Marden,
1093:It is a fact, indeed, that most of
the great teachers of mankind have been not writers
but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates,
the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of
Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I
remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist
who invented Socrates ~ Jorge Luis Borges,
1094:Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. Socrates made the same point 2,400 years ago: "He is richest who is content with least, for contentment is the wealth of nature. ~ Christopher Ryan,
1095:Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert. ~ Walter Isaacson,
1096:When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love. ~ Socrates,
1097:Xenophon’s Socrates appeals to the political interests of his audience in making this point: he says that choosing an ignorant man to be the leader of a city would be like choosing an ignorant man as one’s doctor. We don’t let untrained men experiment on our bodies, and neither should we let men without knowledge experiment on the body politic. ~ Peter Adamson,
1098:Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature. ~ Susan Sontag,
1099:We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life. For what do we, who love truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by the life of the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us?
The wise man seeks death all his life and therefore death is not terrible to him. ~ Socrates,
1100:Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience. ~ Rebecca Goldstein,
1101:Socrates said that personal fame counts for nothing if your life isn't itself of virtue, and the same goes for political power. We could certainly demand more virtue from our politicians, starting with a more respectful attitude towards each other as legitimately elected members of parliament, and an inflexible commitment to always telling the truth. ~ Hugh Mackay,
1102:We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime. ~ Socrates,
1103:Do not trouble about those who practice philosophy, whether they are good or bad; but examine the thing itself well and carefully. And if philosophy appears a bad thing to you, turn every man from it, not only your sons; but if it appears to you such as I think it to be, take courage, pursue it, and practice it, as the saying is, 'both you and your house. ~ Socrates,
1104:For instance, the majority of people are terrified of dying, but, as Epictetus points out, Socrates wasn’t afraid of death. Although he may have preferred to live, he was relatively indifferent to dying as long as he met his death with wisdom and virtue. This used to be known as the ideal of a “good death,” from which our word “euthanasia” derives ~ Donald J Robertson,
1105:It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarefied for us to breathe... The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them. ~ Steven Pressfield,
1106:The day man will be conscious, alert, and aware there will not be any repetition anymore. Socrates will not be poisoned, Jesus will not be crucified, Al-Hillaj Mansoor will not be murdered and butchered. And these are our best flowers, they are our highest peaks. They are our destinies, they are our future. They are our intrinsic potential that has become actual. ~ Osho,
1107:I understand what you are feeling,” he said. “As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine. ~ Mary McCarthy,
1108:Then a slice of our neighbours’ land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage,
and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of
necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?
That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?
Most certainly, he replied. ~ Plato,
1109:Wherefore also Cleanthes, in the second book, On Pleasure, says that Socrates everywhere teaches that the just man and the happy are one and the same, and execrated the first man who separated the just from the useful, as having done an impious thing. For those are in truth impious who separate the useful from that which is right' according to the law. ~ Clement of Alexandria,
1110:Easter? We’re paying more attention to dying than to death. We’re more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death. Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as ‘the last enemy’ (I Cor. 15.26). There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
1111:Socrates nói rằng sinh viên không thể tiếp nhận được tối đa các thông tin mà giáo viên hoặc một người nào đó dạy cho anh ta. Tri thức chi tích lũy và trí tuệ chỉ phát triển khi sinh viên đó tự mình xử lý thông tin. Nói cách khác, Socrates cho rằng vai trò đích thực của một nhà giáo dục là khích lệ sinh viên tự mình suy nghĩ về mọi vấn đề thông qua quá trình tự truy vấn. ~ Anonymous,
1112:They see nothing indecent in sexual intercourse, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and indulge in it quite openly, in full view of everyone. The only exception was Socrates, who was always swearing that his relations with young men were purely Platonic, but nobody believed him for a moment, and Hyacinthus and Narcissus gave first-hand evidence to the contrary. ~ Lucian of Samosata,
1113:Myrtle can’t grow in the shade. It would wither and die. Someone has made it grow in the dark.” “How?” “Magic. How else?” Alcibiades shrugged, and Socrates said, “How else? That’s a serious question. If you don’t believe in magic, how did this sprig grow here? Perhaps the gods wanted it to. If so, they may have left it for us as a sign.” “What kind of sign?” “An omen. ~ Deepak Chopra,
1114:If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality. ~ Socrates,
1115:After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); ~ William Dalrymple,
1116:And do you think, you fool," added Socrates, "that kisses of love are not venomous, because you perceive not the poison? Know that a beautiful person is a more dangerous animal than scorpions, because these cannot wound unless they touch us; but beauty strikes at a distance: from what place soever we can but behold her, she darts her venom upon us, and overthrows our judgment. ~ Xenophon,
1117:Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre,
1118:[Regarding legislative assemblies,] the number ought at most to be kept within a certain limit, in order to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude. In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. ~ James Madison,
1119:For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest. Thrasymachus, ~ Plato,
1120:When I was young, I believed that life might unfold in an orderly way, according to my hopes and expectations. But now I understand that the Way winds like a river, always changing, ever onward.. My journeys revealed that the Way itself creates the warrior; that every path leads to peace, every choice to wisdom. And that life has always been, and will always be, arising in Mystery. ~ Socrates,
1121:No man on earth who conscientiously opposes either you or any other organized democracy, and flatly prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly escape with his life. The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone. ~ Socrates,
1122:Since Christ is the Word of God and the Truth of God, he may be received even by those who have not heard of his manifestation in the flesh... We have, therefore. the hope that even among the heathen there may be some, like Socrates, who, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit working through the truth of nature and conscience, have found the way of life and salvation. ~ Augustus Hopkins Strong,
1123:Virtue is the nursing-mother of all human pleasures, who, in rendering them just, renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses, whets our desires to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if not to lassitude. ~ Socrates,
1124:Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition. ~ Gilles Deleuze,
1125:We are in bondage in proportion as what happens to us is determined by outside causes, and we are free in proportion as we are self-determined. Spinoza, like Socrates and Plato, believes that all wrong action is due to intellectual error: the man who adequately understands his own circumstances will act wisely, and will even be happy in the face of what to another would be misfortune. ~ Anonymous,
1126:And that might be applied to him which is recorded of Socrates, that he was able both to abstain from, and to enjoy, those things which many are too weak to abstain from, and cannot enjoy without excess. But to be strong enough both to bear the one and to be sober in the other is the mark of a man who has a perfect and invincible soul, such as he showed in the illness of Maximus. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1127:This emphasis on the situation was particularly important in order to show that what was central for Socrates was not a fixed point but an ubique et nusquam. It was needed in order to point up the Socratic sensibility which under the subtlest and weakest contact immediately discerned the presence of the Idea, immediately felt the electricity pervading the whole existence. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,
1128:To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know? ~ Socrates,
1129:No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1130:I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man). ~ Karl Popper,
1131:Obligation sends the children to bed on time, but love tucks the covers in around their necks and passes out kisses and hugs. Yesterday is about experience; tomorrow is about hope; today is about transitioning from one to the other. The happiest people on earth don't have the best of everything... they make the best of everything I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. ~ Socrates,
1132:The Apology (of Socrates) is Plato's version of the speech given by Socrates as he defends himself against the charges of being a man "who corrupted the young, did not believe in the gods, and created new deities". "Apology" here has its earlier meaning (now usually expressed by the word "apologia") of speaking in defense of a cause or of one's beliefs or actions (from the Greek απολογία). ~ Voltaire,
1133:I don't mind the homosexuality. I understand it. Nevertheless, goddamn, I don't think you glorify it on public television, homosexuality, even more than you glorify whores. We all know we have weaknesses. But, goddammit, what do you think that does to kids? You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates. ~ Richard M Nixon,
1134:The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. ~ Socrates,
1135:We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life”, said Socrates when preparing for death. “For what do we, who love truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by the life of the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us? “The wise man seeks death all his life and therefore death is not terrible to him. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1136:A real philosopher, Sophie, is completely different kettle of fish - the direct opposite, in fact. A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
1137:Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they ever taste of pure and abiding pleasure. ~ Socrates,
1138:The Stoics can teach you how to find a sense of purpose in life, how to face adversity, how to conquer anger within yourself, moderate your desires, experience healthy sources of joy, endure pain and illness patiently and with dignity, exhibit courage in the face of your anxieties, cope with loss, and perhaps even confront your own mortality while remaining as unperturbed as Socrates. ~ Donald J Robertson,
1139:when Dandamys the Wise heard accounts of the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes, he said that they were in every way great personalities, except for their being too subject to venerating the Law: for, to support Law with its authority, true virtue must doff much of its original vigour; and many vicious deeds are done not merely with the Law’s permission but at its instigation:13 ~ Michel de Montaigne,
1140:I am quite ready to acknowledge . . . that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of this I am as certain as I can be of any such matters), and to men departed who are better than those whom I leave behind. And therefore I do not grieve as I might have done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead. ~ Socrates,
1141:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan,
1142:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan,
1143:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based – or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug – it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan,
1144:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan,
1145:And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry. ~ Socrates,
1146:And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight’s being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry. ~ Socrates,
1147:One of dem otters,” Ana said, and waved toward the bay. She had a skull in her little pink hands, and Josie noticed with horror that it had not been picked clean. There was still cartilage on it, and whiskers, and fur, something viscous, too. Josie conjured Socrates and thought of a question. “Why in hell did you pick this up?” In solidarity, the dogs lifted their heads to Ana and Paul, then ran off. ~ Dave Eggers,
1148:student Theaetetus to imagine the mind as a block of wax “on which we stamp what we perceive or conceive.” Whatever is impressed upon the wax, Socrates said, we remember and know, provided the image remains in the wax, but “whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know.”1 A metaphor so suggestive and widespread that we still say that an experience “made an impression. ~ Martin Lindstrom,
1149:The notion that a university should protect all of its students from ideas that some of them find offensive is a repudiation of the legacy of Socrates, who described himself as the “gadfly” of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend. ~ Greg Lukianoff,
1150:Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man. ~ Hannah Arendt,
1151:Our society is falling back increasingly on rampant consumerism and self-promoting social media as a way for people to feel that their lives matter - self-centered means of numbing the questions of mattering. Culture has relapsed back into the self-aggrandizing, glorifying answers that the Athenians had presumed, which had Socrates railing against them until he got so annoying that they killed him. ~ Rebecca Goldstein,
1152:Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself. ~ Will Durant,
1153:While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence. ~ Emil M Cioran,
1154:This was Josie’s preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little. ~ Dave Eggers,
1155:There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? ~ Henry Ward Beecher,
1156:Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
1157:Upon graduation, go out into the world and try to find yourself. What do I mean by that? Read Socrates, no. Get a job? Not yet. Go out and do some crazy stuff. Don't hurt anybody including yourself, but take some risks. Travel a little bit. Make big mistakes that you have to apologize for. Do stuff that will make you relatable to the world. And whatever jobs you settle into, you will be better at it, for it. ~ Megyn Kelly,
1158:The invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. ~ Socrates,
1159:There is nothing so inconvenient in this world as an absolutely truthful person, who can both speak and write, and has the courage of his convictions. One can always arrange matters with liars ... But with the man or woman who holds truth dearer than life, and honor more valuable than advancement, there is nothing to be done, now that governments cannot insist on the hemlock-cure, as in the case of Socrates. ~ Marie Corelli,
1160:A science can diagnose a cancer and can even find a cure for it, but it can't, and a scientist will be the first to say, it's can't help you to deal with the stress and disappointment and terror that comes with a diagnosis, and nor can it help you to die well, like Socrates, kindly, not railing against faith, but in possession of your own death. For these imponderable questions people have turned to mythos. ~ Karen Armstrong,
1161:So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family. ~ Rebecca Goldstein,
1162:There was a young man favorably endowed as an Alcibiades. He lost his way in the world. In his need he looked about for a Socrates but found none among his contemporaries. Then he requested the gods to change him into one. But now--he who had been so proud of being an Alcibiades was so humiliated and humbled by the gods' favor that, just when he received what he could be proud of, he felt inferior to all. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,
1163:And therefore if the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first and essential thing. And the care of the soul, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance comes and stays, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body. ~ Socrates,
1164:No one seriously doubts Socrates' maxim: The unexamined life isn't worth living. Self-assessment and attempts at self-improvement are essential aspects of "the good life." Yes, we should engage in ruthless self-reflection and harsh scrutiny, but we should simultaneously acknowledge that such introspection will, at best, only result in a partial view of our minds at work. Complete objectivity is not an option. ~ Robert A Burton,
1165:Simmias brings up the Pythagorean opinion that the soul is a harmony, and urges: if the lyre is broken, can the harmony survive? Socrates replies that the soul is not a harmony, for a harmony is complex, but the soul is simple. Moreover, he says, the view that the soul is a harmony is incompatible with its pre-existence, which was proved by the doctrine of reminiscence; for the harmony does not exist before the lyre. ~ Anonymous,
1166:It is unfortunate for us, that, of some of the greatest men, we know least, and talk most. Homer, Socrates, and Shakespere have, perhaps, contributed more to the intellectual enlightenment of mankind than any other three writers who could be named, and yet the history of all three has given rise to a boundless ocean of discussion, which has left us little save the option of choosing which theory or theories we will follow. ~ Homer,
1167:Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.'
Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers. ~ Jostein Gaarder,
1168:As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life. ~ Desiderius Erasmus,
1169:Nothing very new. By taking good care of yourselves you are of service to me and my family as well as yourselves, no matter what you do, even if you don't think so at present. But if you neglect yourselves and are unwilling to live, as though following tracks, in accordance with what we now say and have said in the past too, then no matter how much or how seriously you agree with me at present you will accomplish next to nothing. ~ Socrates,
1170:Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero who must defend his actions with arguments and counterarguments and in the process often risks the loss of our tragic pity; for who could mistake the optimistic element in the nature of the dialectic, which celebrates a triumph with every conclusion and can breathe only in cool clarity and consciousness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1171:The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want. ~ David Foster Wallace,
1172:I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)] ~ James A Michener,
1173:Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all. Bertha: What's that? Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they? Bertha: In the philosophy department. Socrates: Philosophy is not department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers. Socrates: Are they dangerous? Bertha: Of course not. Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers. ~ Peter Kreeft,
1174:Apollo at Delphi, through the oracular utterance of his priestess, pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Of him it is related that he said with sagacity and great learning that the human breast should have been furnished with open windows, so that men might not keep their feelings concealed, but have them open to the view. Oh that nature, following his idea, had constructed them thus unfolded and obvious to the view. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio,
1175:I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you
all day long and everywhere I find myself in your company. ~ Socrates,
1176:And I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name as an illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. ~ Plato,
1177:Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society - Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line. ~ Rollo May,
1178:—Did he even grasp this himself, this cleverest of all self-outwitters? Did he tell himself this in the end, in the wisdom of his courage in the face of death? . . . Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he gave himself the poison cup, he forced Athens to give him the poison cup . . . “Socrates is no doctor,” he said to himself softly, “death is the only doctor here . . . Socrates himself has just been sick for a long time. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1179:Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?'

I might fairly reply to him, 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action--that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one. ~ Socrates,
1180:From Hinduism to the monotheisms through to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the common message is that we are all, naturally and potentially, inclined to reject the other, and to be intolerant and racist. Left to our own devices and our own emotions, we can be deaf, blind, dogmatic, closed and xenophobic: we are not born open-minded, respectful and pluralist. We become so through personal effort, education, self-mastery and knowledge. ~ Tariq Ramadan,
1181:Humor is an important quality that makes one cheerful in all walks of life. To cultivate this quality is very important. When the poison was given to Socrates, he was very humorous and made a few jokes. When the cup of hemlock was given to him he said, “Can I share a bit of it with the gods?” Then he smiled and said, “Poison has no power to kill a sage, for a sage lives in reality, and reality is eternal.” He smiled and took the poison. ~ Swami Rama,
1182:Plato (or Socrates) also compared men to dogs. One of the great tragedies of modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they were bred to do, what their bodies want to do. They could be Plato’s noble puppies, but they are chained to a stake in the ground—left to the madness of barking at shadows in the night, taunted by passing challenges left unresolved and whose outcomes will forever be unknown. ~ Jack Donovan,
1183:Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
1184:A man might have applied that to him, which is recorded of Socrates, that he knew how to want, and to enjoy those things, in the want whereof, most men show themselves weak; and in the fruition, intemperate: but to hold out firm and constant, and to keep within the compass of true moderation and sobriety in either estate, is proper to a man, who hath a perfect and invincible soul; such as he showed himself in the sickness of Maximus. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1185:Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates, but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body, nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property, nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest. ~ Epictetus,
1186:Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1187:'Wars, factions, and fighting,' said Socrates as he looked forward from his last hour, 'have no other origin than this same body and its lusts... We must set the soul free from it; we must behold things as they are. And having thus got rid of the foolishness of the body, we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and shall in our own selves have complete knowledge of the Incorruptible which is, I take it, no other than the very truth. ~ Socrates,
1188:Neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. ~ Socrates,
1189:If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded. ~ Socrates,
1190:[N]either in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. ~ Socrates,
1191:These elements of the Side-by-Side approach—asking questions during a shared moment, and then deepening the conversation with more questions—are as powerful as communication gets: so powerful that they form the core of the Socratic Method. Socrates never told anybody anything; he just walked around town with people asking them questions until they figured out the answers themselves, and in the process he helped create Western civilization. ~ Mark Goulston,
1192:Socrates claimed famously that one never loses by doing the right thing. Stephen Post and his contributors claim, a little less boldly, that at least the generous will, probably, stay healthy—and, improving on Socrates, they support this claim with careful empirical science, impressive for its comprehensive detail. Here ethics and religion join science and enjoin us to be more caring and healthy. A seminal work, with an urgent message. ~ Holmes Rolston III,
1193:But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescant spirit of the man! ~ Robert D Richardson Jr,
1194:Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history ; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death , and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1195:But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615. The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realize that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable. ~ Mark Forsyth,
1196:None of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates," Fen added dryly, "suggest that our judgements are scarcely infallible...And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn't a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage. ~ Edmund Crispin,
1197:If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. He would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does Schiller's, or Dostoevsky's, or even Socrates’, whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie. ~ Lev Shestov,
1198:It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarefied for us to breathe. Certainly I wouldn't be writing this book, on this subject, if living with freedom were easy. The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them. ~ Steven Pressfield,
1199:Gee, I’m really glad I came.”
Jess turned to Leslie in unbelief.
“It was better than a movie.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not.” And she wasn’t. He could tell by her face. “That whole Jesus thing is really interesting, isn’t it?”
“What d’you mean?”
“All those people wanting to kill him when he hadn’t done anything to hurt them.” She hesitated. “It’s really kind of a beautiful story—like Abraham Lincoln or Socrates—or Aslan. ~ Katherine Paterson,
1200:Whilst he was very young, he was a soldier in the expedition against Potidaea, where Socrates lodged in the same tent with him, and stood next him in battle. Once there happened a sharp skirmish, in which they both behaved with signal bravery; but Alcibiades receiving a wound, Socrates threw himself before him to defend him, and beyond any question saved him and his arms from the enemy, and so in all justice might have challenged the prize of valor. But ~ Plutarch,
1201:The Gorgias presented by Plato would agree with this. He tells Socrates that if a doctor and a rhetorician debate in front of an audience about how best to cure a patient, the audience will agree with the rhetorician and not the doctor (456b–c). He gives examples to prove his point: for instance, it was the great orator Pericles who persuaded the Athenians to build a defensive wall, not a bunch of stonemasons, who are experts in wall-building (455e). ~ Peter Adamson,
1202:I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this? ~ Socrates,
1203:Socrates proved the immortality of the soul from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as sickness of the body consumes the body. So also we can demonstrate the eternal in man from the fact that despair cannot consume his self, that this precisely is the torment of contradiction in despair. If there were nothing eternal in a man, he could not despair; but if despair could consume his self, there would still be no despair. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,
1204:Again and again the schools which form the twentieth century’s elites throughout the West refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian’s case every answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of his academy. ~ John Ralston Saul,
1205:If Confucius can serve as the Patron Saint of Chinese education, let me propose Socrates as his equivalent in a Western educational context - a Socrates who is never content with the initial superficial response, but is always probing for finer distinctions, clearer examples, a more profound form of knowing. Our concept of knowledge has changed since classical times, but Socrates has provided us with a timeless educational goal - ever deeper understanding. ~ Howard Gardner,
1206:When Socrates lay close to death, a youth --
Who was his student in the search for truth --
Said: ‘Master, when we’ve washed the man we knew
And brought your shroud, where should we bury you?’
He said: ‘If you can find me when I’ve died,
Then bury me wherever you decide --
I never found myself; I cannot see
How when I’m dead you could discover me.
Throughout my life not one small particle
Had any knowledge of itself at all! ~ Attar of Nishapur,
1207:If Confucius can serve as the Patron Saint of Chinese education, let me propose Socrates as his equivalent in a Western educational context - a Socrates who is never content with the initial superficial response, but is always probing for finer distinctions, clearer examples, a more profound form of knowing. Our concept of knowledge has changed since classical times, but Socrates has provided us with a timeless educational goal - ever deeper understanding. ~ Howard Gardner,
1208:Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza's remark, 'One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man'. In ancient Athens, when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by exclaiming, 'Your vanity shows forth from every whole in your coat'. ~ Rollo May,
1209:Plato asked Socrates what is love...
Socrates: Go into the field and get me the most special leaf...
Plato returned with no leaf at hand
said: I found the most beautiful leaf in the field but I didn't pick it up for I might find a better one, but when I returned to the place, it was gone...
Socrates: We always look for the best in life. When we finally see it, we take it for granted and expecting a better one...

NOT KNOWING IT WAS THE BEST AND LAST!!! ~ Plato,
1210:One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his mind is, and always will be, essentially unpopular. That is why Socrates was unpopular, though he did not use any special terms, for to grasp and hold his 'ignorance' requires greater vital effort than understanding the whole of Hegel's philosophy. ~ Soren Kierkegaard,
1211:Socrates.- If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason... The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him... Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed the finer intellect. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1212:The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man? ~ H P Blavatsky,
1213:Whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man - whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation. ~ Socrates,
1214:If the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up. Even Colin could only name a handful of people who lived, say, 2,400 years ago. In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything - there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. But there's another way. There are stories. ~ John Green,
1215:Whatever has been said about you by others, simply drop it. It is absolutely crap. They don’t know about themselves; what can they say about you which can be truthful? And the opinions that you have collected from others … just try to watch from whom you are collecting your opinions. They are not from a Gautam Buddha, or from a Jesus, or from a Socrates; they are from people who are as ignorant as you are. They are simply passing on others’ opinions that have been given to them. ~ Osho,
1216:In essence, love makes no sense, In fact, there is more nonsense than sense in love.
Great philosophers - Socrates, Plato and Aristotle alike, could only ponder on this delicate and mystifying subject, and that was way before I graced this planet with my own messed up resonance of amour. Perhaps, in an effort to make sense out of nonsense, the meaning of love was lost in translation over time, or by the mere fact that, to this day there has ben no valid interpretation. ~ Devi Di Guida,
1217:The ancient Greeks worshipped the human capacity for insight. Scott Berkun, in examining the topic of innovation, pointed out that the Greek religious pantheon included nine goddesses who represented the creative spirit. Leading philosophers such as Socrates and Plato visited temples dedicated to these goddesses, these muses, who were a source of inspiration. We honor this tradition when we visit a museum, a “place of the muses,” and when we enjoy music, the “art of the muses ~ Gary Klein,
1218:-"Socrates, how do I stop my thoughts, my mind - other than by developing a sense of humor?"
-"First you need to understand where your thoughts come from, how they arise in the first place. For example, you have a cold now; Its physical symptoms tell you when your body needs to rebalance itself, to restore its proper relationship with sunlight, fresh air, simple food. Just so, Stressful thoughts reflect a conflict with reality. Stress happens when the mind resists what is. ~ Dan Millman,
1219:A Jesus had to be crucified because he was an alive man. He must have called in his childhood, "Jesus, don't be befooled by others." And he was not befooled, so others had to crucify him, because he was not part of the game. Socrates had to be poisoned and killed, Mansoor had to be murdered. These are people who have escaped from the prison, and whatsoever you say you cannot persuade them to come back. They will not come into the prison. They have known the freedom of the open sky. ~ Rajneesh,
1220:Anyhow, the criterion of common sense was never applicable to the history of the human race. Averroës, Kant, Socrates, Newton, Voltaire, could any of them have believed it possible that in the twentieth century the scourge of cities, the poisoner of lungs, the mass murderer and idol of millions would be a metal receptacle on wheels, and that people would actually prefer being crushed to death inside it during frantic weekends exoduses instead of staying, safe and sound, at home? ~ Stanis aw Lem,
1221:My idea of philosophy is that if it is not relevant to human problems, if it does not tell us how we can go about eradicating some of the misery in this world, then it is not worth the name of philosophy. I think Socrates made a very profound statement when he asserted that the raison d'etre of philosophy is to teach us proper living. In this day and age 'proper living' means liberation from the urgent problems of poverty, economic necessity and indoctrination, mental oppression. ~ Angela Davis,
1222:But, among the disciples of Socrates, Plato was the one who shone with a glory which far excelled that of the others, and who not unjustly eclipsed them all. (…) And, as he had a peculiar love for his master Socrates, he made him the speaker in all his dialogues, putting into his mouth whatever he had learned, either from others, or from the efforts of his own powerful intellect, tempering even his moral disputations with the grace and politeness of the Socratic style. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo,
1223:My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
1224:what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin—that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and, ~ William Dalrymple,
1225:There is one way, then, in which a man can be free from all anxiety about the fate of his soul - if in life he has abandoned bodily pleasures and adornments, as foreign to his purpose and likely to do more harm than good, and has devoted himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge, and so by decking his soul not with a borrowed beauty but with its own - with self-control, and goodness, and courage, and liberality, and truth - has fitted himself to await his journey in the next world. ~ Socrates,
1226:We should realize that, if [Socrates] demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men; in fact, he was skeptical of all professional learnedness, whether it was that of the philosophers or of the learned men of his own generation, the Sophists. The wisdom he meant was of a different kind. It was simply the realization: how little do I know! Those who did not know this, he taught, knew nothing at all. This is the true scientific spirit. ~ Karl Popper,
1227:When it is time to leave the sun and moon behind, how will you react? [34] Will you sit down and cry, like an infant? Did nothing that you heard and studied in school get through to you? Why did you advertise yourself as a philosopher when you might have told the truth: ‘I made it through a couple of primers, then read a little Chrysippus – but I hardly crossed the threshold of philosophy.’ [35] How can you associate yourself with Socrates, who lived and died as he did, or with Diogenes? ~ Epictetus,
1228:Plato wrote in Phaedrus that Socrates felt the written language would result in ‘men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows’. Socrates saw a core truth in learning from artifacts like books. We cannot become complacent with knowledge and just store it away. It has a shelf life and needs to be used, tested, and experienced. It should be shared amongst people who understand that they are only seeing a fragment of each others’ knowledge. ~ Anonymous,
1229:In the previous essay we saw how replacing terms with definitions could reveal the empirical unproductivity of the classical Aristotelian syllogism. All humans are mortal (and also, apparently, featherless bipeds); Socrates is human; therefore Socrates is mortal. When we replace the word “human” by its apparent definition, the following underlying reasoning is revealed: All [mortal, ¬feathers, biped] are mortal; Socrates is a [mortal, ¬feathers, biped]; Therefore Socrates is mortal. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
1230:FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
1231:Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu. ~ Daniel J Boorstin,
1232:Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history. ~ A C Grayling,
1233:Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings....the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of all arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art....So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense...madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human. ~ Socrates,
1234:How strange it is that Socrates, after having made the children common, should hinder lovers from carnal intercourse only, but should permit love and familiarities between father and son or between brother and brother, than which nothing can be more unseemly, since even without them love of this sort is improper. How strange, too, to forbid intercourse for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, as though the relationship of father and son or of brothers with one another made no difference. ~ Aristotle,
1235:Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all.

Bertha: What's that?

Socrates: Philosophy.

Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here.

Socrates: Where are they?

Bertha: In the philosophy department.

Socrates: Philosophy is not department.

Bertha: Well, we have philosophers.

Socrates: Are they dangerous?

Bertha: Of course not.

Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers. ~ Peter Kreeft,
1236:I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny? ~ Socrates,
1237:Antiphon, as another man gets pleasure from a good horse, or a dog, or a bird, I get even more pleasure from good friends. And if I have something good, I teach it to them, and I introduce them to others who will be useful to them with respect to virtue. And together with my friends I go through the treasures of wise men of old which they left behind written in books, and we peruse them. If we see something good, we pick it out and hold it to be a great profit, if we are able to prove useful to one another. ~ Socrates,
1238:If some should accuse us as if we held that people born before the time of Christ were not accountable to God for their actions, we shall anticipate and answer such a difficulty. We have been taught that Christ is the first-begotten of God, and we have declared him to be the Logos of which all mankind partakes. Those, therefore, who lived according to reason (logos) were really Christians, even though they were thought to be atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus and others like them. ~ Justin Martyr,
1239:The state arises, Socrates explains, "out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants." Division of labor then provides the needed services, while allowing each person to do what he is best fitted for. So the community has farmers, weavers, builders, merchants, shoemakers, and all the rest. And as the state expands to meet multiplying wants, it must have a standing army. Yet, until the refinements of culture have been added, this is no better than a "city of pigs. ~ Daniel J Boorstin,
1240:Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness? ~ Erich Fromm,
1241:Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness? ~ Erich Fromm,
1242:In Plato's time, dialectics was a debating technique subject to precise rules. A "thesis" was proposed-an interrogative proposition such as: Can virtue be taught? One of the two interlocutors attacked the thesis; the other defended it. The former attacked by interrogating-that is, he asked the defender skillfully chosen questions with the aim of forcing him to admit the contradictory of the thesis he wanted to defend. The interrogator had no thesis, and this was why Socrates was in the habit of playing that role. ~ Pierre Hadot,
1243:Socrates dies with honor, surrounded by his disciples listening to the most tender words -the easiest death that one could wish to die. Jesus dies in pain, dishonor, mockery, the object of universal cursing - the most horrible death that one could fear. At the receipt of the cup of poison, Socrates blesses him who could not give it to him without tears; Jesus, while suffering the sharpest pains, prays for His most bitter enemies. If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a god. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
1244:2. Socrates made the same remark to one who complained; he said: "Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels." What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you. 3. ~ Seneca,
1245:For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. ~ Plato,
1246:Socrates poisoned, Aristides ostracized, Aristotle fleeing for his life, Jesus crucified, Paul beheaded, Peter crucified head downward, Savonarola martyred, Spinoza hunted, tracked and cursed, and an order issued that no man should speak to him not supply him food or shelter, Bruno burned, Galileo imprisoned, Huss, Wyclif, Latimer and Tyndale used for kindling - all this in the name of religion, institutional religion, the one thing that has caused more misery, heartaches, bloodshed, war, than all other causes combined. ~ Thomas Paine,
1247:For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. I ~ Plato,
1248:Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country?
Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.
Socrates: How so, Plato?
Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is a
sculptor.
Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they have
no need to be reminded.
Plato: That is correct.
Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders. ~ E A Bucchianeri,
1249:Can I admit I’m a little freaked out that Socrates only has one name? I know that’s how it was done in those days, but it bugs me. I can’t tell if it’s his last name or his first name or what. And it can’t be shortened—except to Sock, which is completely stupid. I want him to have a more familiar name—something laid back and modern, so I can relate to him better. So I stare at the picture in my book of the curly-bearded guy with the pug nose, and by the end of study hall, I name him Frank. Frank Socrates. Makes him more huggable. ~ A S King,
1250:I did not care for the things that most people care about– making money, having a comfortable home, high military or civil rank, and all the other activities, political appointments, secret societies, party organizations, which go on in our city . . . I set myself to do you– each one of you, individually and in private– what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and as rational as possible. ~ Socrates,
1251:Concerning the Gods, there are those who deny the very existence of the Godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself not has forethought far anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those that cry: -- I move not without Thy knowledge! ~ Epictetus,
1252:I'm grateful to my readers. Readers who buy and support authors, especially career authors, are the patrons who fund art, genius, innovation, and creativity. Out of all the books published, there will emerge the next Plato, Socrates, Einstein, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Edison, Churchill, Tolstoy, and Tolkien. My readers help with my creative process because they help create the positive and supportive environment that allows me to keep writing the books and series my readers love. Thank You!" - Kailin Gow, Strong. ~ Kailin Gow,
1253:Socrates’ dialectic was a Greek, rational version of the Indian brahmodya, the competition that attempted to formulate absolute truth but always ended in silence. For the Indian sages, the moment of insight came when they realized the inadequacy of their words, and thus intuited the ineffable. In that final moment of silence, they had sensed the brahman, even though they could not define it coherently. Socrates was also trying to elicit a moment of truth, when his interlocutors appreciated the creative profundity of human ignorance. ~ Anonymous,
1254:Concerning the Gods, there are those who deny the very existence of the Godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself not has forethought far anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those that cry: --
I move not without Thy knowledge! ~ Epictetus,
1255:Socrates: Now do you imagine he would have attempted to inquire or learn what he thought he knew, when he did not know it, until he had been reduced to the perplexity of realizing that he did not know, and had felt a craving to know? Meno: I think not, Socrates.  Socrates: Then the torpedo's shock was of advantage to him?  Meno: I think so.  Socrates: Now you should note how, as a result of this perplexity, he will go on and discover something by joint inquiry with me, while I merely ask questions. ~ As quote by Plato in Meno section 84c,
1256:What folly, Socrates, has taken possession of you all? And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to one another? I say that if you want really to know what justice is, you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer; for there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer. And now I will not have you say that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or interest, for this sort of nonsense will not do for me; I must have clearness and accuracy. I ~ Plato,
1257:Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are harder to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I’ll take a chance. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
1258:There are outrages and there are outrages, and some are more outrageous than others.
Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.
The Death of Socrates had no effect upon the history of Athens. If anything, the reputation of the city has been improved by it.
The death of no person is as important to the future as the literature about it.
You will learn nothing from history that can be applied, so don't kid yourself into thinking you can.
'History is bunk', said Henry Ford. ~ Joseph Heller,
1259:There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them. ~ Jason Silva,
1260:What does the name of an author on the jacket matter? Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors’ names will be remembered? Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; other authors’ names will still be well know, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer. ~ Italo Calvino,
1261:...I do not think that it is right for a man to appeal to the jury or to get himself acquitted by doing so; he ought to inform them of the facts and convince them by argument. The jury does not sit to dispense justice as a favour, but to decide where justice lies; and the oath which they have sworn is not to show favour at their own discretion, but to return a just and lawful verdict... Therefore you must not expect me, gentlemen, to behave towards you in a way which I consider neither reputable nor moral nor consistent with my religious duty. ~ Socrates,
1262:In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. ~ Anonymous,
1263:Socrates refused to neatly define the self he had in mind, just as Buddha refused to use a word like "God." Their reasons were the same: it defeats the truth to use words, since words imply that you know what you are looking for. Instead, truth is an experience. It cannot be anticipated, any more than one can anticipate, at age five, what it will be like to go to college, get married, have children. Experience is fresh and new (or should be); thus truth is fresh and new. From there, it's a small step to demanding that God be fresh and new. ~ Deepak Chopra,
1264:Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tougher on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
1265:The error of Socrates must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and of the state, but in some respects only. For there is a point at which a state may attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or at which, without actually ceasing to exist, it will become an inferior state, like harmony passing into unison, or rhythm which has been reduced to a single foot. The state, as I was saying, is a plurality which should be united and made into a community by education ~ Aristotle,
1266:In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man's life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. ~ Piper Kerman,
1267:In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. ~ Piper Kerman,
1268:This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates’ “Know thyself” has as much value as the “Be virtuous” of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate. ~ Albert Camus,
1269:Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like. v One could wish no easier death than that of Socrates, calmly discussing philosophy with his friends; one could fear nothing worse than that of Jesus, dying in torment, among the insults, the mockery, the curses of the whole nation. In the midst of these terrible sufferings, Jesus prays for his cruel murderers. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
1270:I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love? ~ Madeleine L Engle,
1271:Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! It's true that many people around you now may think you are weird or even a danger to society, but you don't care. Once you've tasted the truth, you won't ever want to go back to being ignorant ~ Socrates,
1272:Monument of our own age's shame,
On thy country casting endless blame,
Rousseau's grave, how dear thou art to me
Calm repose be to thy ashes blest!
In thy life thou vainly sought'st for rest,
But at length 'twas here obtained by thee!

When will ancient wounds be covered o'er?
Wise men died in heathen days of yore;
Now 'tis lighteryet they die again.
Socrates was killed by sophists vile,
Rousseau meets his death through Christians' wile,
Rousseauwho would fain make Christians men!

~ Friedrich Schiller, Rousseau
,
1273:These notions about waiting and playing hard to get have been around for ages. According to Greek historian Xenophon, a prostitute once went to Socrates* for advice and he told her: “You must prompt them by behaving as a model of propriety, by a show of reluctance to yield, and by holding back until they are as keen as can be; for then the same gifts are much more to the recipient than when they are offered before they are desired.” Conversely, Socrates knew that people tend to discount and sometimes even reject the things that are always available. I ~ Aziz Ansari,
1274:For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one know whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows that he does not know? And in this respect only I believe myself to differ from men in general, and may perhaps claim to be wiser than they are: that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know... ~ Socrates,
1275:In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. Stoicism ~ Piper Kerman,
1276:Confucius, the philosopher and politician who was born in the sixth century B.C.E. He acquired a place in Chinese history akin to that of Socrates in the West, in part because his ideology encouraged order and loyalty. “There is government,” Confucius said, “when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.” Confucius linked morality to the strength of the state: “He who exercises government by means of virtue may be compared to the North Star, which holds its place while all other stars turn around it. ~ Evan Osnos,
1277:Examining the Homeric epics from the perspective of when and by whom they were composed, Vico refutes generations of interpreters who had assumed that because Homer was revered for his great epics he must also have been a wise sage like Plato, Socrates, or Bacon. Instead Vico demonstrates that in its wildness and willfulness Homer’s mind was poetic, and his poetry barbaric, not wise or philosophic, that is, full of illogical fantasy, gods who were anything but godlike, and men like Achilles and Patrocles, who were most uncourtly and extremely petulant. ~ Erich Auerbach,
1278:I honor and love you: but why do you who are citizens of the great and mighty nation care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor And reputation, and so little amount wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul? Re you not ashamed of these?... I do nothing but go about persuading you all, not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by more, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man. ~ Socrates,
1279:With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1280:To what extent have I accepted other people’s definition of who I am and what I could be? How ignorant am I of the values held by people of different cultures? Or more prosaically: Do I actually like the highly advertised values of my car? Is the company I work for deserving of my loyalty? Is working seventy hours a week really the best investment of my life energy? Is a slim figure, a youthful look the highest peak of human accomplishment? It was for asking similar questions that Socrates had to drink hemlock, and Savonarola was burned at the stake. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
1281:Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own views. It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and of one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others or himself. ~ Epictetus,
1282:The imperfect, yet very venerable, goodness of Socrates led to the easy death of the hemlock, and the perfect goodness of Christ led to the death of the cross, not by chance but for the same reason; because goodness is what it is, and because the fallen world is what it is. If Plato, starting from one example and from his insight into the nature of goodness and the nature of the world, was led on to see the possibility of a perfect example, and thus to depict something extremely like the Passion of Christ, this happened not because he was lucky but because he was wise. ~ C S Lewis,
1283:One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. ~ James Gleick,
1284:In Plato’s Republic, Socrates expresses great fear about democracy because it is, in his mind, synonymous with freedom. The result is tyranny. But modern times have brought us a different understanding of democracy as an ideal. It is how to give the appearance of democracy yet deny it in practice, ensuring that democracy in its false form gives consent by the people to a small group, the oligarchs. This is accomplished through a combination of the people’s silence and a rigged system that changes a working democracy of public participation and deliberation to a charade. ~ Noam Chomsky,
1285:Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1286:Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober - minded men. ~ Socrates,
1287:When you are come by ways emptied of light
You'll say goodby, in that indifferent gloom,
To the quick draughts of old, yet with polite
Anguish of pride recall as an heirloom
A dawn when stars dropped gold about your head
And, so amazed, you knew not were you dead.
For, brother, know that this is art, and you
With a cold incautious sorrow stricken dumb,
Have your own vanishing slit of light let through,
Passionate as winter, where only a few may come:
Not idiots in the street find out the lees
In the last drink of dying Socrates.
~ Allen Tate,
1288:The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. . . . The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice? ~ Harold Bloom,
1289:What disturbs men's minds is not events but their judgements on events: For instance, death is nothing dreadful, or else Socrates would have thought it so. No, the only dreadful thing about it is men's judgement that it is dreadful. And so when we are hindered, or disturbed, or distressed, let us never lay the blame on others, but on ourselves, that is, on our own judgements. To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education; to accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun; to accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete. ~ Epictetus,
1290:What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and condemn those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg.7 Or does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you are a Glauconian. ~ Jonathan Haidt,
1291:Plato and Aristotle (both disciples of Socrates) are the fathers of contemporary Christian education.1030 To use a biblical metaphor, present-day Christian education, whether it be seminarian or Bible college, is serving food from the wrong tree: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil rather than the tree of life.1031 Contemporary theological learning is essentially cerebral. It can be called “liquid pedagogy.”1032 We pry open people’s heads, pour in a cup or two of information, and close them up again. They have the information, so we mistakenly conclude the job is complete. ~ Frank Viola,
1292:...[I]f at the time of its release the soul is tainted and impure, because it has always associated with the body and cared for it and loved it, and has been so beguiled by the body and its passions and pleasures that nothing seems real to it but those physical things which can be touched and seen and eaten and drunk and used for sexual enjoyment; and if it is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid what is invisible and hidden from our eyes, but intelligible and comprehensible by philosophy - if the soul is in this state, do you think that it will escape independent and uncontaminated? ~ Socrates,
1293:... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others? ~ Wallace Stegner,
1294:Among foragers, where property is shared, poverty tends to be a nonissue. In his classic book Stone Age Economics, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that “the world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”20 Socrates made the same point 2,400 years ago: “He is richest who is content with least, for contentment is the wealth of nature. ~ Christopher Ryan,
1295:MENO: And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? SOCRATES: I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that a man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire (Compare Aristot. Post. Anal.). ~ Plato,
1296:Not only were the Jews expecting the birth of a Great King, a Wise Man and a Saviour, but Plato and Socrates also spoke of the Logos and of the Universal Wise Man 'yet to come'. Confucius spoke of 'the Saint'; the Sibyls, of a 'Universal King'; the Greek dramatist, of a saviour and redeemer to unloose man from the 'primal eldest curse'. All these were on the Gentile side of the expectation. What separates Christ from all men is that first He was expected; even the Gentiles had a longing for a deliverer, or redeemer. This fact alone distinguishes Him from all other religious leaders. ~ Fulton J Sheen,
1297:[I]t's necessary to exert very great foresight every time you go to blame or praise a man, so that you won't speak incorrectly. . . . For you shouldn't suppose that, while stones are sacred and pieces of wood, and birds, and snakes, human beings are not. Rather of all these things, the most sacred is the good human being, while the most polluted is the wicked."

Speech attributed to Socrates in Plato, Minos 319a, trans. Thomas L. Pangle, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 63. ~ Plato,
1298:Nil sub sole novum, says Solomon; amor omnibus idem, says Virgil; and Carabine mounts with Carabin into the bark at Saint-Cloud, as Aspasia embarked with Pericles upon the fleet at Samos. One last word. Do you know what Aspasia was, ladies? Although she lived at an epoch when women had, as yet, no soul, she was a soul; a soul of a rosy and purple hue, more ardent hued than fire, fresher than the dawn. Aspasia was a creature in whom two extremes of womanhood met; she was the goddess prostitute; Socrates plus Manon Lescaut. Aspasia was created in case a mistress should be needed for Prometheus. ~ Victor Hugo,
1299:Socrates believed that the sort of relationship he had with his daimonion was accessible to anyone. Even though he had been granted this gift in childhood, he offers clear guidance on how to develop this inner contact: by understanding the world and all experiences within it as direct expressions of the gods, by recognizing the divine spirits according to their deeds and creations, and by not waiting to be granted a direct vision of them. Thus next to dreams and oracles35 any experience in life can become an encounter with the divine. Hidden in the book of nature is the voice of our daimonion. ~ Frater Acher,
1300:Colin laughed as Hassan returned to counting the pennies of victory, but Colin's brain was spinning with the implications: if the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up. Even Colin could only name a handful of people who lived, say, 2,400 years ago. In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything - there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

But there's another way. There are stories. ~ John Green,
1301:Deductive reasoning goes from the general to the specific – Socrates is mortal – because that is what predators do. If you were to program a lion with syllogisms, it might come out something like this: I am hungry. My hunger is satisfied with meat. All zebras are made of meat. The slowest zebras are the easiest to catch. I will stalk and chase the slowest zebra. This zebra is the slowest zebra; I will stalk and chase this one. You see how this works? The lion is going from the general to the specific – from all zebras to one particular zebra that satisfies the criterion for appeasing the lion’s hunger. ~ Stefan Molyneux,
1302:In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants. ~ Piper Kerman,
1303:If the soul is immortal, it demands our care not only for that part of time which we call life, but for all time: and indeed it would seem now that it will be extremely dangerous to neglect it. If death were a release from everything, it would be a boon for the wicked. But since the soul is clearly immortal, it can have no escape or security from evil except by becoming as good and wise as it possibly can. For it takes nothing with it to the next world except its education and training: and these, we are told, are of supreme importance in helping or harming the newly dead at the very beginning of his journey there. ~ Socrates,
1304:If the soul is immortal, it demands our care not only for that part of time which we call life, but for all time; and indeed it would seem now that it will be extremely dangerous to neglect it. If death were a release from everything, it would be a boon for the wicked, because by dying they would be released not only from the body but also from their own wickedness together with the soul; but as it is, since the soul is clearly immortal, it can have no escape of security from evil except by becoming as good and wise as it possibly can. For it takes nothing with it to the next world except its education and training... ~ Socrates,
1305:They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is not true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.” Socrates ~ Joshua Foer,
1306:Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing -- that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems... Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often, the rationalization of evil actions. ~ David Brin,
1307:Who hasn't thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It's an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they'd be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn't be responsible for them anymore. I'd have left behind something that spoke for itself. ~ Ned Vizzini,
1308:In Plato's Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a 'great daemon' (202d). She goes on to explain that 'everything daemonic is between divine and mortal' (202d-e), and she describes daemons as 'interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above...' (202e). In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a 'divine something')[16] that frequently warned him-in the form of a 'voice'-against mistakes but never told him what to do.
   ~ Wikipedia, Daemon,
1309:Socrates ... made all his philosophy subservient to morality, ... and took more pains to rectify the tempers than replenish the understandings of his pupils; and looked upon all knowledge as useless speculation that was not brought to this end, to make us wiser and better men. And, without doubt, if in the academy the youth has once happily learned the great art of managing his temper, governing his passions, and guarding his foibles, he will find a more solid advantage from it in afterlife, than he could expect from the best acquaintance with all the systems of ancient and modern philosophy. ~ John Mason, A Treatise on Self-Knowledge (1745),
1310:Nox Borealis
If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly,
if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion,
if the wind can learn to read our minds
and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket,
surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.
Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming
unimaginable dreams in hollow trees,
even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us
with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.
Listen to me now: think of something you love
but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us
only what we can afford to lose.
~ Campbell McGrath,
1311:You too must be of good hope as regards death, gentlemen of the jury, and keep this one truth in mind, that a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods. What has happened to me now has not happened of itself, but it is clear to me that it was better for me to die now and to escape from trouble. That is why my divine sign did not oppose me at any point. So I am certainly not angry with those who convicted me, or with my accusers. Of course that was not their purpose when they accused and convicted me, but they thought they were hurting me, and for this they deserve blame. ~ Socrates,
1312:And where," Socrates smiled, "is the universe?"
"The universe is well, there are theories about how it's shaped..."
"That's not what I asked. Where is it?"
"I don't know - how can I answer that?"
"That is the point. You cannot answer it, and you never will. There is no knowing about it. You are ignorant of where the universe is, and thus, where you are. In fact, you have no knowledge of where anything is or of What anything is or how is came to be. Life is a mystery.
"My ignorance is based on this understanding. Your understanding is based on ignorance. This is why I am a humorous fool, and you are a serious jackass. ~ Dan Millman,
1313:And a thing is not seen because it is visible, but
conversely, visible because it is seen; nor is a thing led because
it is in the state of being led, or carried because it is in the
state of being carried, but the converse of this. And now I think, Euthyphro, that my meaning will be intelligible; and my
meaning is, that any state of action or passion implies previous
action or passion. It does not become because it is becoming,
but it is in a state of becoming because it becomes; neither
does it suffer because it is in a state of suffering, but it is in a
state of suffering because it suffers. Do you not agree? ~ Socrates,
1314:Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. ~ Walter J Ong,
1315:When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by experimenting, making mistakes, sketching out freaks and other non-viable monsters that he has to tear up unless they disintegrate of their own accord. But the operative image is the one that's left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future. It doesn't matter whether or not the image corresponds to what they were really like: they managed to wrest a powerful image from that reality. ~ Jean Genet,
1316:said: 'Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,—nor the human race, as I believe,—and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.' Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing. Socrates, ~ Plato,
1317:Serve the gods and you will experience how they are looking after you and that they are sending you mentors.27 With Socrates and Plato, the idea of a personal daimon becomes part of the historical record, though most likely the notion had already been around for quite some time.28 While Socrates’ confident claim of a personal daimonion that advised him throughout his life ultimately led to his death sentence, he refused to give details about this being or inner voice during his apologia at court. Indeed, his daimonion had advised him not to defend himself; thus he appeared unprepared during his trial and even rejected an apologia offered to him by the speaker Lysias. ~ Frater Acher,
1318:The law presumably says that it is finest to keep as quiet as possible in misfortunes and not be irritated, since the good and bad in such things aren't plain, nor does taking it hard get one anywhere, not are any of the human things worthy of great seriousness.... One must accept the fall of the dice and settle one's affairs accordingly-- in whatever way argument declares would be best. One must not behave like children who have stumbled and who hold on to the hurt place and spend their time in crying out; rather one must always habituate the soul to turn as quickly as possible to curing and setting aright what has fallen and is sick, doing away with lament by medicine. ~ Socrates,
1319:A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1320:And a saint put it a saintly way: [The arranging of funerals, the choosing of tombs and the pomp of obsequies are consolations for the living rather than supports for the dead.] That is why Socrates (when Crito asked him in his final moments how he wanted to be buried) replied, ‘Just as you wish.’
If I had to trouble myself further, I would find it more worthy to imitate those who set about enjoying the disposition and honour of their tombs while they are still alive and breathing, and who take pleasure in seeing their dead faces carved in marble. Happy are they who can please and delight their senses with things insensate – and who can live off their death. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
1321:It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon.
First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake.

Understanding is forever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge,
1322:Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people and the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. ~ Ray Bradbury,
1323:Să te temi de moarte, cetăţeni, nu este nimic altceva decât să-ţi închipui că eşti înţelept fără să fii, înseamnă să crezi că ştii ceea ce nu ştii. Căci nimeni nu ştie ce este moartea şi nici dacă nu e cumva cel mai mare bine pentru om, dar toţi se tem de ea ca şi cum ar fi siguri că e cel mai mare rău. Iar acest fel de a gândi cum să nu fie tocmai prostia aceea vrednică de dispreţ - de a crede că ştii ceea ce nu ştii? Eu însă, atenieni, poate că tocmai prin aceasta şi în acest punct mă deosebesc de cei mai mulţi (chiar dacă ar însemna să spun că într-o privinţă sunt mai înţelept decât altul), şi anume că, dacă nu ştiu mare lucru despre cele din Hades, îmi şi dau seama că nu ştiu. ~ Socrates,
1324:Do we say that one must never willingly do wrong, or does it depend upon the circumstances? Is it true, as we have often agreed before, that there is no sense in which wrongdoing is good or honourable? Or have we jettisoned all our former convictions in these last few days? Can you and I at our age, Crito, have spent all these years in serious discussions without realizing that we were no better than a pair of children? Surely the truth is just what we have always said. Whatever the popular view is, and whether the alternative in pleasanter than the present one or even harder to bear, the fact remains that to do wrong is in every sense bad and dishonourable for the person who does it. ~ Socrates,
1325:It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit. ~ D H Lawrence,
1326:Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you’re all to yourself that way, you’re really proud of yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. ~ Ray Bradbury,
1327:A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance,
1328:According to Bertrand Russell, the virtuous stoic was one whose will was in agreement with the natural order. He described the basic idea like this: In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man’s life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. ~ Piper Kerman,
1329:A less negative carbon ideologue then I might interpret the lonely wariness of Mr. Winkler and of Sharon Carlisle as proof of wrongheaded irrelevance. Socrates was equally irrelevant once the Athenians had served him his hemlock. The insipidities of the hollowed out Greeley Tribune, the no comment of most people to whom I “reached out,” and the typical anomie of an American metropolis, whose citizens I rarely saw except in their cars, in retail establishments or at the Fourth of July parade, operated synergistically to create the usual hot wide silence—about fracking, climate change, democracy and every other thing. A certain form of economic development held sway, and that was that. ~ William T Vollmann,
1330:Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind’s ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. ~ Neel Burton,
1331:For the bystanders always believe that I am wise myself in the matters on which I test another; but the truth really is, gentlemen, that the god in fact is wise, and in this oracle he means that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and it appears that he does not say this of Socrates, but simply adds my name to take me as an example, as if he were to say that this one of you human beings is wisest, who like Socrates knows that he is in truth worth nothing as regards wisdom. This is what I still, even now, go about searching and investigating in the god’s way, if ever I think one of our people, or a foreigner, is wise; and whenever I don’t find him so, I help the god by proving that the man is not wise. ~ Plato,
1332:Is there not one true coin for which all things ought to exchange?- and that is wisdom; and only in exchange for this, and in company with this, is anything truly bought or sold, whether courage, temperance or justice. And is not all true virtue the companion of wisdom, no matter what fears or pleasures or other similar goods or evils may or may not attend her? But the virtue which is made up of these goods, when they are severed from wisdom and exchanged with one another, is a shadow of virtue only, nor is there any freedom or health or truth in her; but in the true exchange there is a purging away of all these things, and temperance, and justice, and courage, and wisdom herself, are a purgation of them. ~ Socrates,
1333:Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds and in the end, none of them knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do … I read Socrates. This guy knocked off little Greek boys. What the Hell’s he got to teach me? And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It’s not worth it. And Freud, another great pessimist. I was in analysis for years and nothing happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated, the guy finally put in a salad bar. Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer. ~ Woody Allen,
1334:Do you know that the spectator is the last of the rings which, as I am saying, receive the power of the original magnet from one another? The rhapsode like yourself and the actor are intermediate links, and the poet himself is the first of them. Through all these the God sways the souls of men in any direction which he pleases, and makes one man hang down from another. Thus there is a vast chain of dancers and masters and undermasters of choruses, who are suspended, as if from the stone, at the side of the rings which hang down from the Muse. And every poet has some Muse from whom he is suspended, and by whom he is said to be possessed, which is nearly the
Ion 5
same thing; for he is taken hold of. ~ Socrates,
1335:At my father's club, sitting before the fire, we had spoken of 'moments made eternity', meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time--moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus-the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end, the going down from Oxford foreseen...Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus. Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours: perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little....Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now. ~ Sheldon Vanauken,
1336:SOCRATES: Then let me raise another question; there is such a thing as ‘having learned’? GORGIAS: Yes. SOCRATES: And there is also ‘having believed’? GORGIAS: Yes. SOCRATES: And is the ‘having learned’ the same as ‘having believed,’ and are learning and belief the same things? GORGIAS: In my judgment, Socrates, they are not the same. SOCRATES: And your judgment is right, as you may ascertain in this way:— If a person were to say to you, ‘Is there, Gorgias, a false belief as well as a true?’—you would reply, if I am not mistaken, that there is. GORGIAS: Yes. SOCRATES: Well, but is there a false knowledge as well as a true? GORGIAS: No. SOCRATES: No, indeed; and this again proves that knowledge and belief differ. ~ Plato,
1337:That Socrates should ever have been so treated by the Athenians!"

Slave! why say "Socrates"? Speak of the thing as it is: That ever then the poor body of Socrates should have been dragged away and haled by main force to prision! That ever hemlock should have been given to the body of Socrates; that that should have breathed its life away!—Do you marvel at this? Do you hold this unjust? Is it for this that you accuse God? Had Socrates no compensation for this? Where then for him was the ideal Good? Whom shall we hearken to, you or him? And what says he?

"Anytus and Melitus may put me to death: to injure me is beyond their power."

And again:—

"If such be the will of God, so let it be. ~ Epictetus,
1338:For this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance? And this is the point in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men, - that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know: but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonorable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil. ~ Socrates,
1339:We have never sought power. We have sought to disperse power, to set men and women free. That really means: to help them to discover that they are free. Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' "Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can break the bottle at any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry. It's right out in the open all the time. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,
1340:Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charge, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fucking. In the Phaedrus, the written word is also notoriously called pharmakon. The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it- whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness. ~ Maggie Nelson,
1341:The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces. ~ Scott Berkun,
1342:Night is fair Virtue's immemorial friend.
The conscious moon through every distant age
Has held a lamp to Wisdom, and let fall
On Contemplation's eye her purging ray.
The famed Athenian, he who wooed from heaven
Philosophy the fair, to dwell with men,
And form their manners, not inflame their pride;
While o'er his head, as fearful to molest
His laboring mind, the stars in silence slide,
And seem all gazing on their future guest,
See him soliciting his ardent suit,
In private audience; all the livelong night
Rigid in thought and motionless he stands,
Nor quits his theme or posture, till the sun
Disturbs his nobler intellectual beam,
And gives him to the tumult of the world.
~ Edward Young, Socrates
,
1343:["F]or it's not possible," [Socrates] said, "for anybody to experience a greater evil than hating arguments. Hatred of arguments and hatred of human beings come about in the same way. For hatred of human beings arises from artlessly trusting somebody to excess, and believing that human being to be in every way true and sound and trustworthy, and then a little later discovering that this person is wicked and untrustworthy - and then having this experience again with another. And whenever somebody experiences this many times, and especially at the hands of just those he might regard as his most intimate friends and comrades, he then ends up taking offense all the time and hates all human beings and believes there's nothing at all sound in anybody. ~ Plato,
1344:I want first of all... to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact--to borrow from the language of the saints--to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and inward man be one." I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
1345:Socrates
Night is fair Virtue's immemorial friend.
The conscious moon through every distant age
Has held a lamp to Wisdom, and let fall
On Contemplation's eye her purging ray.
The famed Athenian, he who wooed from heaven
Philosophy the fair, to dwell with men,
And form their manners, not inflame their pride;
While o'er his head, as fearful to molest
His laboring mind, the stars in silence slide,
And seem all gazing on their future guest,
See him soliciting his ardent suit,
In private audience; all the livelong night
Rigid in thought and motionless he stands,
Nor quits his theme or posture, till the sun
Disturbs his nobler intellectual beam,
And gives him to the tumult of the world.
~ Edward Young,
1346:The House Of Socrates
FOR Socrates a House was built,
Of but inferiour Size;
Not highly Arch'd, nor Carv'd, nor Gilt;
The Man, 'tis said, was Wise.
But Mob despis'd the little Cell,
That struck them with no Fear;
Whilst Others thought, there should not dwell
So great a Person there.
How shou'd a due Recourse be made
To One, so much Admir'd?
Where shou'd the spacious Cloth be laid,
Or where the Guests retir'd?
Believe me, quoth the list'ning Sage,
'Twas not to save the Charge;
That in this over-building Age,
My House was not more large.
But this for faithful Friends, and kind,
Was only meant by me;
Who fear that what too streight you find,
Must yet contracted be.
~ Anne Kingsmill Finch,
1347:Socrates : So you see that ignorance of certain things is for certain persons in certain states a good, not an evil, as you supposed just now.
Alcibiades : It seems to be.
Socrates : Then if you care to consider the sequel of this, I daresay it will surprise you.
Alcibiades :What may that be, Socrates?
Socrates : I mean that, generally speaking, it rather looks as though the possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not include possession of the science of the best, will in a few instances help, but in most will harm, the owner. Consider it this way: must it not be the case, in your opinion, that when we are about to do or say anything, we first suppose that we know, or do really know, the thing we so confidently intend to say or do?
[144d] ~ Plato,
1348:Although there is some controversy about whether Plato or Socrates held the position that if a person knows what the good life is, he/she will not act immorally, in what follows we shall speak as if this is Plato’s own view. According to this position, evil is due to lack of knowledge. If people can discover what is right, Plato believes, they will never act wickedly. But the problem is to discover what is right, or as Plato calls it, “the good.” How can this be done when people differ so greatly in their opinions about the good life? Plato’s answer is that finding the nature of the good life is an intellectual task very similar to the discovery of mathematical truths. Just as the latter cannot be discovered by untrained people, so the former cannot be either. ~ Anonymous,
1349:Aristophanes, in Plato's "Symposium", is purported to suggest that human form was not always as it is today:

Originally, humans were spherical, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on either side of a single head. (In evolutionary terms, it's hard to see the advantage of this construction.) Such was their hubris that they dared to challenge the gods themselves. Zeus, in his wisdom, split the upstarts in two, each half becoming a distinct entity.

Since then, men and women have been running around in a panic, searching for their lost counterparts, in a desire to be whole again.

(Plato makes clear what he thinks of this theory by having Socrates casually dismiss it. We should at least give some credit to Aristophanes for originality.) ~ David Mazzucchelli,
1350:Socrates is talking not about memory in general, nor especially the art of mnemonics practiced by masters of memory. In Socrates’s reckoning, she writes, the ancient Egyptians possessed memory of the deepest kind: memory of the Ideas—the living universal realities of which all things, passions, sensations, and sundry states of affairs are but passing shadows. Memory in this view is no apparatus for the collation and curation of trivia but the imperishable recollection of the knowledge we possessed before we are born—the foundation of knowledge itself. “A Platonic memory,” Yates concludes, “would have to be organised, not in the trivial manner of . . . mnemotechnics, but in relation to the realities.” Memory in the Platonic definition is not about storage but revelation. ~ Matthew Battles,
1351:Perhaps someone may say 'But surely, Socrates, after you have left us you can spend the rest of your life in quietly minding your own business.' This is the hardest thing of all to make some of you understand. If I say that this would be disobedience to God, and that is why I cannot 'mind my own business', you will not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless, that is how it is, gentlemen, as I maintain; though it is not easy to convince you of it. ~ Socrates,
1352:Socrates sat up on the bed, bent his leg and rubbed it with his hand,
and as he rubbed he said: "What a strange thing that which men call
pleasure seems to be, and how astonishing the relation it has with what
is thought to be its opposite, namely pain! A man cannot have both at the
same time. Yet if he pursues and catches the one, he is almost always
bound to catch the other also, like two creatures with one head. I think
c that if Aesop had noted this he would have composed a fable that a god
wished to reconcile their opposition but could not do so, so he joined their
two heads together, and therefore when a man has the one, the other
follows later. This seems to be happening to me. My bonds caused pain
in my leg, and now pleasure seems to be following. ~ Plato,
1353:The philosopher Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” If a common philosopher could think that, how much more we Christians ought to listen to the Holy Spirit when He says, “Examine yourself.” An unexamined Christian lies like an unattended garden. Let your garden go unattended for a few months, and you will not have roses and tomatoes but weeds. An unexamined Christian life is like an unkempt house. Lock your house up as tight as you will and leave it long enough, and when you come back you will not believe the dirt that got in from somewhere. An unexamined Christian is like an untaught child. A child that is not taught will be a little savage. It takes examination, teaching, instruction, discipline, caring, tending, weeding and cultivating to keep the life right. ~ A W Tozer,
1354:If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: 'Know thyself! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
1355:A young man asked Socrates the secret to success. Socrates told the young man to meet him near the river the next morning. They met and Socrates asked the young man to walk with him toward the river. When the water got up to their necks, Socrates took the young man by surprise and pushed him under the water. The boy struggled to get out but Socrates kept him there. When the boy started turning blue, Socrates raised the boy’s head out of the water. The first thing the boy did was to take a deep breath of air. Socrates asked, “What did you want the most when you were under water?” The boy replied, “Air.” Socrates said, “That is the secret to success. When you want success as badly as you wanted air underwater, you will have it.” There is no other secret. This is called the burning desire. ~ Shiv Khera,
1356:BOOKS AND SUCCESS. Ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. —Shakespeare. Prefer knowledge to wealth; for the one is transitory, the other perpetual. —Socrates. If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. —Franklin. My early and invincible love of reading, I would not exchange for the treasures of India. —Gibbon. If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all. —Fénelon. Who of us can tell What he had been, had Cadmus never taught The art that fixes into form the thought,— Had Plato never spoken from his cell, Or his high harp blind Homer never strung? —Bulwer. ~ Orison Swett Marden,
1357:How do we know that Telauges wasn’t a better man than Socrates? It’s not enough to ask whether Socrates’ death was nobler, whether he debated with the sophists more adeptly, whether he showed greater endurance by spending the night out in the cold, and when he was ordered to arrest the man from Salamis decided it was preferable to refuse, and “swaggered about the streets” (which one could reasonably doubt). What matters is what kind of soul he had. Whether he was satisfied to treat men with justice and the gods with reverence and didn’t lose his temper unpredictably at evil done by others, didn’t make himself the slave of other people’s ignorance, didn’t treat anything that nature did as abnormal, or put up with it as an unbearable imposition, didn’t put his mind in his body’s keeping. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1358:But I want first of all—in fact, as an end to these other desires—to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact—to borrow from the language of the saints—to live “in grace” as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, “May the outward and inward man be at one.” I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
1359:I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some similar medium. ...I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried by the help of my senses to apprehend them. And I thought that I had better had recourse to ideas, and seek in them truth in existence. I dare to say that the simile is not perfect--for I am far from admitting that he who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas, sees them only "through a glass darkly," any more than he who sees them in their working and effects. ~ Socrates,
1360:In his discussions of such matters as “What is justice?” or “What is virtue?” he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. (This is called “Socratic irony,” for Socrates knew very well that he knew a great deal more than the poor souls he was picking on.) By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn’t know what they were talking about.

It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn’t till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison. ~ Isaac Asimov,
1361:Socrates would ask penetrating questions, analyzing everything, and everybody in Athens became angry. This man was trying to prove that everybody is a fool. They killed him. Had he met Chuang Tzu – and at that time Chuang Tzu was alive in China, they were contemporaries – then Chuang Tzu would have told him the secret: “Don’t try to prove that anybody is foolish because fools don’t like this. Don’t try to prove to a madman that he is mad, because no madman likes it. He will get angry, arrogant, aggressive. He will kill you if you prove too much. If you come to the point where it can be proved, he will take revenge.” Chuang Tzu would have said, “It is better to be foolish yourself, then people enjoy you, and then by a very subtle methodology you can help them change. Then they are not against you.” That’s ~ Osho,
1362:By exercising restraint, we learn to only eat when genuinely hungry, drink when thirsty, and so on. Appetite and thirst are the natural ‘sauce’ of life and the secret to making even coarse bread and plain water seem delicious. Self-control is healthier and actually leads to more enjoyment than self-indulgence, particularly with regard to the most common sources of pleasure in daily life. By contrast, Socrates said that anything that impels us to eat when not hungry or drink when not thirsty ‘ruined stomachs and heads and characters’. Hopefully, this seems more like common sense than self-mortification, although it flies in the face of modern attitudes towards food and drink – we’re constantly bombarded with advertising for more convenient and enticing, but often unhealthy, things to consume. ~ Donald J Robertson,
1363:Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now
Socrates ghost must haunt me now,
Notorious death has let him go,
He comes to me with a clumsy bow,
Saying in his disused voice,
That I do not know I do not know,
The mechanical whims of appetite
Are all that I have of conscious choice,
The butterfly caged in eclectic light
Is my only day in the world's great night,
Love is not love, it is a child
Sucking his thumb and biting his lip,
But grasp it all, there may be more!
From the topless sky to the bottomless floor
With the heavy head and the fingertip:
All is not blind, obscene, and poor.
Socrates stands by me stockstill,
Teaching hope to my flickering will,
Pointing to the sky's inexorable blue
---Old Noumenon, come true, come true!
~ Delmore Schwartz,
1364:All known great religions have had an exoteric aspect, that is, exterior, profane, for the masses of believers, and another esoteric, for a restricted select minority of initiates. So it was with the Egyptian and Greek cults. Those ignorant people who pompously speak to us about Aristotle, Socrates, Plato and the 'rational thought of the Greeks' ignore the fact that behind their ideas one finds the Eleusinian Mysteries of Delphi and elsewhere, in which these same philosophers, above all Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides took part, though they could not speak of it in public. The Orphic cults and mythology are the foundation of the philosophical thought of Ancient Greece. The word esoteric itself comes from the Greek work eisoteo and means 'to enter into' and 'to open a door' (towards the Gods: Theo, eiso-theo). ~ Miguel Serrano,
1365:13084
Tonight I came back to the hotel alone; the other has decided to return later on. The anxieties are already here, like the poison already prepared (jealousy, abandonment, restlessness); they merely wait for a little time to pass in order to be able to declare themselves with some propriety. I pick up a book and take a sleeping pill, "calmly." The silence of this huge hotel is echoing, indifferent, idiotic (faint murmur of draining bathtubs); the furniture and the lamps are stupid; nothing friendly that might warm ("I'm cold, let's go back to Paris). Anxiety mounts; I observe its progress, like Socrates chatting (as I am reading) and feeling the cold of the hemlock rising in his body; I hear it identify itself moving up, like an inexorable figure, against the background of the things that are here. ~ Roland Barthes,
1366:But still I must say, Socrates, that if you are allowed to go on in this way you will entirely forget the other question which at the commencement of this discussion you thrust aside:—Is such an order of things possible, and how, if at all? For I am quite ready to acknowledge that the plan which you propose, if only feasible, would do all sorts of good to the State. I will add, what you have omitted, that your citizens will be the bravest of warriors, and will never leave their ranks, for they will all know one another, and each will call the other father, brother, son; and if you suppose the women to join their armies, whether in the same rank or in the rear, either as a terror to the enemy, or as auxiliaries in case of need, I know that they will then be absolutely invincible; and there are many domestic advantages which ~ Plato,
1367:In the first place, he is thought just, and therefore bears rule in the city; he can marry whom he will, and give in marriage to whom he will; also he can trade and deal where he likes, and always to his own advantage, because he has no misgivings about injustice; and at every contest, whether in public or private, he gets the better of his antagonists, and gains at their expense, and is rich, and out of his gains he can benefit his friends, and harm his enemies; moreover, he can offer sacrifices, and dedicate gifts to the gods abundantly and magnificently, and can honour the gods or any man whom he wants to honour in a far better style than the just, and therefore he is likely to be dearer than they are to the gods. And thus, Socrates, gods and men are said to unite in making the life of the unjust better than the life of the just. I ~ Plato,
1368:In the life of an individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man's life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Other men have power only over externals; virtue, which alone is truly good, rests entirely with the individual. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. It is only through false judgments that such desires prevail; the sage whose judgments are true is master of his fate in all that he values, since no outside force can deprive him of virtue. ~ Anonymous,
1369:Nor have the lives of great men been exciting except at a few great moments. Socrates could enjoy a banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe, taking a constitutional in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting a few friends by the way. Kant is said never to have been more than
ten miles from from konigsberg in all his life. Darwin, after going round the world, spent the whole of the rest of his life in his own house. Marx, after stirring up a few revolutions, decided to spend the remainder
of his days in the British Museum. Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been
of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1370:A fine statue of a naked Theseus stands proudly today in Athens' central place of assembly, the city's hub, Syntagma Square. Even today he is a focus of Athenian identity and pride. The ship he brought back from his adventures in the Labyrinth of Crete remained moored in the harbour at Piraeus, a visitor attraction right up to the days of historical ancient Athens, the time of Socrates and Aristotle. Its continuous presence there for such a long time caused the Ship of Theseus to become a subject of intriguing philosophical speculation. Over hundreds of years, its rigging, its planks, its hull, deck, keel, prow, stern and all its timbers had been replaced so that not one atom of the original remained. Could one call it the same ship? Am I the same person I was fifty years ago? Every molecule and cell of my body has been replaced many times over. ~ Stephen Fry,
1371:Are you conscious of a growing failure of your bodily powers? Do you expect to suffer long nights of languishing and days of pain? O be not sad! That bed may become a throne to you. You little know how every pang that shoots through your body may be a refining fire to consume your dross--a beam of glory to light up the secret parts of your soul. Are the eyes growing dim? Jesus will be your light. Do the ears fail you? Jesus' name will be your soul's best music, and His person your dear delight. Socrates used to say, "Philosophers can be happy without music;" and Christians can be happier than philosophers when all outward causes of rejoicing are withdrawn. In Thee, my God, my heart shall triumph, come what may of ills without! By thy power, O blessed Spirit, my heart shall be exceeding glad, though all things should fail me here below. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon,
1372:Still our old question of the comparative advantage of justice and injustice has not been answered: Which is the more profitable, to be just and act justly and practise virtue, whether seen or unseen of gods and men, or to be unjust and act unjustly, if only unpunished and unreformed? In my judgment, Socrates, the question has now become ridiculous. We know that, when the bodily constitution is gone, life is no longer endurable, though pampered with all kinds of meats and drinks, and having all wealth and all power; and shall we be told that when the very essence of the vital principle is undermined and corrupted, life is still worth having to a man, if only he be allowed to do whatever he likes with the single exception that he is not to acquire justice and virtue, or to escape from injustice and vice; assuming them both to be such as we have described? ~ Plato,
1373:It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question. ~ John Stuart Mill,
1374:Saint, Revolutionist
Saint, revolutionist,
God and sage know well,
That there is a place
Where that much-rung bell,
The well-beloved body,
And its sensitive face
Must be sacrificed.
There is, it seems, in this
A something meaningless,
Hanging without support
And yet too dear to touch,
That life should seek its end
Where no will can descend,
Facing a gun to see
Long actuality.
What is this that is
The good of nothingness,
The death of Socrates
And that strange man on the cross
Seeking out all loss?
For men love life until
It shames both face and will.
Neither in hell nor heaven
Is the answer given,
Both are a servant's pay:
But they wish to know
how far the will can go,
Lest their infinite play
And their desires be
Shadow and mockery.
~ Delmore Schwartz,
1375:Keep this constantly in mind: that all sorts of people have died—all professions, all nationalities. Follow the thought all the way down to Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Now extend it to other species. We have to go there too, where all of them have already gone: . . . the eloquent and the wise—Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates . . . . . . the heroes of old, the soldiers and kings who followed them . . . . . . Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes . . . . . . the smart, the generous, the hardworking, the cunning, the selfish . . . . . . and even Menippus and his cohorts, who laughed at thewhole brief, fragile business. All underground for a long time now. And what harm does it do them? Or the others either—the ones whose names we don’t even know? The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1376:So those are the direct answers human wisdom gives when it answers the question of life. "The life of the body is evil and a lie. And therefore the destruction of this life of the body is something good, and we must desire it," says Socrates. "Life is that which ought not be - an evil - and the going into nothingness is the sole good of life," says Schopenhauer. "Everything in the world - folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and happiness and grief - all is vanity and nonsense. Man will die and nothing will remain. And that is foolish," says Solomon. "One must not live with awareness of the inevitability of suffering, weakness, old age, and death - one must free oneself from life, from all possibility of life," says Buddha. And what these powerful intellects said was said and thought and felt by millions and millions of people like them. And I too thought and felt that. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1377:Then let us put a speech into the mouths of our opponents. They will say: 'Socrates and Glaucon, no adversary need convict you, for you yourselves, at the first foundation of the State, admitted the principle that everybody was to do the one work suited to his own nature.' And certainly, if I am not mistaken, such an admission was made by us. 'And do not the natures of men and women differ very much indeed?' And we shall reply: Of course they do. Then we shall be asked, 'Whether the tasks assigned to men and to women should not be different, and such as are agreeable to their different natures?' Certainly they should. 'But if so, have you not fallen into a serious inconsistency in saying that men and women, whose natures are so entirely different, ought to perform the same actions?'—What defence will you make for us, my good Sir, against any one who offers these objections? That ~ Plato,
1378:To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.  No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.  And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.  It is perhaps on this point and in this respect, gentlemen, that I differ from the majority of men, and if I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have.  I do know, however, that it is wicked and shameful to do wrong, to disobey one's superior, be he god or man.  I shall never fear or avoid things of which I do not know, whether they may not be good rather than things that I know to be bad. ~ Socrates,
1379:I wonder if you've ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? ~ Daniel Quinn,
1380:The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. 'Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock....Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.' The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death. ~ James H Cone,
1381:Therefore Socrates says: "You must be 'pure-hearted' if your shrewdness is to be valued." At this point begins the second period of Greek liberation of the mind, the period of purity of heart. For the first was brought to a close by the Sophists in their proclaiming the omnipotence of the understanding. But the heart remained worldly-minded, remained a servant of the world, always affected by worldly wishes. This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on - the era of culture of the heart. But how is the heart to be cultivated? What the understanding; this one side of the mind, has reached - namely, the capability of playing freely with and over every concern - awaits the heart also; everything worldly must come to grief before it, so that at last family, commonwealth, fatherland, and the like, are given up for the sake of the heart, that is, of blessedness, the heart's blessedness. ~ Max Stirner,
1382:There was not a philosopher of any notoriety who did not hold to this doctrine of metempsychosis, as taught by the Brahmans, Buddhists, and later by the Pythagoreans, in its esoteric sense, whether he expressed it more or less intelligibly. Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus, Synesius and Chalcidius, all believed in it; and the Gnostics, who are unhesitatingly proclaimed by history as a body of the most refined, learned, and enlightened men, * were all believers in metempsychosis. Socrates entertained opinions identical with those of Pythagoras; and both, as the penalty of their divine philosophy, were put to a violent death. The rabble has been the same in all ages. Materialism has been, and will ever be blind to spiritual truths. These philosophers held, with the Hindus, that God had infused into matter a portion of his own Divine Spirit, which animates and moves every particle. They ~ Helena Petrovna Blavatsky,
1383:Socrates : Then would he not be conceding that his own opinion is false, if he grants that the opinion of those who think he is in error is true?
Theodorus : Necessarily.
Socrates : But the others do not concede that they are in error, do they?
Theodorus : No, they do not.
Socrates : And he, in turn, according to his writings, grants that this opinion also is true.
Theodorus : Evidently.
Socrates : Then all men, beginning with Protagoras, will dispute—or rather, he will grant, after he once concedes that the opinion of the man who holds the opposite view is true—even Protagoras himself, I say, will concede that neither a dog nor any casual man is a measure of anything whatsoever that he has not learned. Is not that the case?
Theodorus : Yes.
Socrates : Then since the “truth” of Protagoras is disputed by all, it would be true to nobody, neither to anyone else nor to him.
[171b-c] ~ Plato,
1384:For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His
Hands
Athlete, virtuoso,
Training for happiness,
Bend arm and knee, and seek
The body's sharp distress,
For pain is pleasure's cost,
Denial is route
To speech before the millions
Or personal with the flute.
The ape and great Achilles,
Heavy with their fate,
Batter doors down, strike
Small children at the gate,
Driven by love to this,
As knock-kneed Hegel said,
To seek with a sword their peace,
That the child may be taken away
From the hurly-burly and fed.
Ladies and Gentlemen, said
The curious Socrates,
I have asked, What is this life
But a childermass,
As Abraham recognized,
A working with the knife
At animal, maid and stone
Until we have cut down
All but the soul alone:
Through hate we guard our love,
And its distinction's known.
~ Delmore Schwartz,
1385:Helen’s era was quite different from what most people think of when they hear the words ancient Greece. The Parthenon, the graceful statues, the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, all came nearly a thousand years after Helen’s time, during the classical era. In the Bronze Age, no one yet knew how to make brittle iron flexible enough to use for tools and weapons. Art, especially sculpture of the human form, was stiffer and more stylized. Few people could read or write. Instead of signing important papers, you would use a stone seal to leave an impression on clay tablets. The design on the seal would be as unique as a signature. There was a kind of writing in Bronze Age Greece, but it was mostly used to keep track of financial matters, such as royal tax records. Messages, poems, songs, and stories were not written down but were memorized and passed along by word of mouth. ~ Esther M Friesner,
1386:It is the thought, not the incidentals of expression, that essentially makes an exposition unpopular. A systematic ribbon and button maker can become unpopular but essentially is not at all, inasmuch as he does not mean much by the very odd things he says (alas, and this is a popular art!). Socrates, on the other hand, was the most unpopular in Greece because he said the same thing as the simplest person but meant infinitely much by it. To be able to stick to one thing, to stick to it with ethical passion and undauntedness of spirit, to see the intrinsic duplexity of this one thought with the same impartiality, and at one and the same time to see the most profound earnestness and the greatest jest, the deepest tragedy and highest comedy―this is unpopular in any age for anyone who has not realized that immediacy is over. But neither can what is essentially unpopular be learned by rote. More on that later. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,
1387:conversation. In Laches, he discusses the meaning of courage with a couple of retired generals seeking instruction for their kinsmen. In Lysis, Socrates joins a group of young friends in trying to define friendship. In Charmides, he engages another such group in examining the widely celebrated virtue of sophrosune, the “temperance” that combines self-control and self-knowledge. (Plato’s readers would know that the bright young man who gives his name to the latter dialogue would grow up to become one of the notorious Thirty Tyrants who briefly ruled Athens after its defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.) None of these dialogues reaches definite conclusions. They end in aporia, contradictions or other difficulties. The Socratic dialogues are aporetic: his interlocutors are left puzzled about what they thought they knew. Socrates’s cross-examination, or elenchus, exposes their ignorance, but he exhorts his fellows to ~ Plato,
1388:Hippocrates cured many illnesses—and then fell ill and
died. The Chaldaeans predicted the deaths of many others; in
due course their own hour arrived. Alexander, Pompey,
Caesar—who utterly destroyed so many cities, cut down so
many thousand foot and horse in battle—they too departedthis life. Heraclitus often told us the world would end in fire.
But it was moisture that carried him off; he died smeared
with cowshit. Democritus was killed by ordinary vermin,
Socrates by the human kind.
And?
You boarded, you set sail, you’ve made the passage. Time
to disembark. If it’s for another life, well, there’s nowhere
without gods on that side either. If to nothingness, then you no
longer have to put up with pain and pleasure, or go on
dancing attendance on this battered crate, your body—so
much inferior to that which serves it.
One is mind and spirit, the other earth and garbage. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1389:Retaliation does not balance things, since it harms the soul of the retaliator and creates a more severe imbalance. Socrates noticed this peril and wrote: “It is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one.” This is because the body and mind are damaged by injustice from others, but it is our own soul that is damaged by revenge. A spiritually evolved adult is not cutthroat and does not believe that all is fair in love and war. He does not claw his way to the top but acts kindly at any rung of the ladder. He has personal ambition but not at the expense of others. This is an example of a moral standard becoming more important than success in the material world. The joy of a good conscience is the highest value for those who want to grow spiritually. With spiritual practice, our attitude toward an aggressor becomes compassion for the suffering dimension in his aggression. This response also serves to quiet him down. ~ David Richo,
1390:Alexandros points to the bronze sculpture of Socrates. "His society didn't collapse because of an outside aggressor. It collapsed from within, from the complete breakdown of communication between citizens, and the breakdown of loving sentiment for one another. They ganged up and got rid of Socrates because he was an uncomfortable reminder of the glory days of ancient Athens, when /demokratia/--'people power'--reigned and citizens worked toward a greater good. He epitomized the fact that you're meant to stay open to all views, to all human experiences, because that's how you deepen your love for people and of wisdom. That amazing man sacrificed his life in the name of classic Athenian values of excellence and honor and compassion, so one day they might live on. And they did, here in America, for more than two centuries. I'm worried my beloved America is becoming as loveless as ancient Athens in its days of decline. ~ Christopher Phillips,
1391:To The Works Of:
   Aristotle, Cassius J. Keyser, Eric T. Bell, G. W. Leibnitz, Eugen Bleuler, J. Locke, Niels Bohr, Jacques Loeb, George Boole, H. A. Lorentz, Max Born, Ernst Mach, Louis De Brogue, J. C. Maxwell, Georg Cantor, Adolf Meyer, Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Minkowsja, Charles M. Child, Isaac Newton, C. Darwin, Ivan Pavlov, Rene Descartes, Giuseppe Peano, P. A. M. Dirac, Max Planck, A. S. Eddington, Plato, Albert Einstein, H. Poincare, Euclid, M. Faraday, Sigmund Freud, Josiah Royce, Karl F. Gauss, G. Y. Rainich, G. B. Riemann, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Graham, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Haas, E. Schrodinger, Wm. R. Hamilton, C. S. Sherrington, Henry Head, Socrates, Werner Heisenberg, Arnold Sommerfeld, C. Judson Herrick, Oswald Veblen, E. V. Huntington, Wm. Alanson White, Smith Ely Jeluffe, Alfred N. Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein
   Which Have Creatly Influenced My Enquiry
   This System Is Dedicated ~ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity,
1392:...why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life... Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people and the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. As Samuel Spaudling, Esquire, once said, 'Dig in the earth, delve in the soul.' Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. ~ Ray Bradbury,
1393:All Hellenistic schools seem to define [wisdom] in approximately the same terms: first and foremost, as a state of perfect peace of mind. From this viewpoint, philosophy appears as a remedy for human worries, anguish, and misery brought about, for the Cynics, by social constraints and conventions; for the Epicureans, by the quest for false pleasures; for the Stoics, by the pursuit of pleasure and egoistic self-interest; and for the Skeptics, by false opinions. Whether or not they laid claim to the Socratic heritage, all Hellenistic philosophers agreed with Socrates that human beings are plunged in misery, anguish, and evil because they exist in ignorance. Evil is to be found not within things, but in the value judgments with people bring to bear upon things. People can therefore be cured of their ills only if they are persuaded to change their value judgments, and in this sense all these philosophies wanted to be therapeutic. ~ Pierre Hadot,
1394:But Pandarus, incited by an immoderate defire of riches and power,* leaps to unjufl: energies, the poet all but exclaiming in the very words of Socrates in the Republic', " that many things are extended to fouls from the univerfe, which aftonifh the flupid, and caufe them to err refpe6iing the eledions of lives/' As therefore the prophet extends a tyrannic life, and he who firft choofes this is faid to be flupid, although he by whom it was extended was entirely a divine nature; fo here, when Minerva offers to the choice of Pandarus a more powerful and rich condition with impiety, or one entirely contrary to this, he makes choice of the worfe. And in this cafe Minerva is not the caufe of the elecflion, but the improbity of him by whom the ele61ion is made. For neither is the prophet in Plato the caufe of a tyrannic life, but the intemperance of him that chofc it. Hence Pandarus, in obeying Minerva, is faid to fuffer this through his ftupidity. ~ Anonymous,
1395:From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.                 I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ~ Anonymous,
1396:Things external to her may have their own weight and dimension: but within inside us she gives them such measures as she wills: death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, consciousness, authority, knowledge, beauty and their opposites doff their garments as they enter the soul and receive new vestments, coloured with qualities of her own choosing: brown or green; light or dark; bitter or sweet, deep or shallow, as it pleases each of the individual souls, who have not agreed together on the truth of their practices, rules or ideas. Each soul is Queen in her own state. So let us no longer seek excuses from the external qualities of anything, the responsibility lies within ourselves. Our good or our bad depends on us alone. So let us make our offertories and our vows to ourselves not to Fortune: she has no power over our behaviour, on the contrary our souls drag Fortune in their train and mould her to their own idea. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
1397:A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout—I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!” His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence.” “That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.” Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight. “And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.” The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Socrates’s injunction “Know thyself” speaks to this keystone of emotional intelligence: awareness of one’s own feelings as they occur. ~ Daniel Goleman,
1398:Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishing the path of enamoration from the Road to Damascus; subsequently ensnared, held fast, immobilised, nose stuck to the image (the mirror). In that moment when the other's image comes to ravish me for the first time, I am nothing more than the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner's wonderful Hen: feet tied, the hen went to sleep with her eyes fixed on the chalk line, which was traced not far from her beak; when she was untied, she remained motionless, fascinated, "submitting to her vanquisher," as the Jesuit says (1646); yet, to waken her from her enchantment, to break off the violence of her Image-repertoire (vehemens animalis imaginatio), it was enough to tap her on the wing; she shook herself and began pecking in the dust again. ~ Roland Barthes,
1399:A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. The monk replied with scorn, "You're nothing but a lout - I can't waste my time with the likes of you!"
His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled "I could kill you for your impertinence."
"That," the monk calmly replied, "is hell."
Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.
"And that,"said the monk "is heaven."

The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Socrates's injunction "Know thyself" speaks to the keystone of emotional intelligence: awareness of one's own feelings as they occur. ~ Daniel Goleman,
1400:..."Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe."

-Review of the book, Happiness, by (Professor) William Lyon Phelps. Review title: The Professor Goes in for Sweetness and Light; November 5, 1927 ~ Dorothy Parker,
1401:Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life.

One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy.

Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy.

A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government. ~ Will Durant,
1402:Baccalaureate
A year or two, and grey Euripides,
And Horace and a Lydia or so,
And Euclid and the brush of Angelo,
Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees,
The nose and Dialogues of Socrates,
Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo,
How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go,-All shall be shard of broken memories.
And there shall linger other, magic things,-The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotton harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,
The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings
About the college yard, where endlessly
The dead go up and down. These things shall be
Enchantment of our heart's rememberings.
And these are more than memories of youth
Which earth's four winds of pain shall blow away;
These are earth's symbols of eternal truth,
Symbols of dream and imagery and flame,
Symbols of those same verities that play
Bright through the crumbling gold of a great name.
~ Archibald MacLeish,
1403:He did not say, 'Define me envy', and then, when the man defined it, 'You define it ill, for the terms of the definition do not correspond to the subject defined.' Such phrases are technical and therefore tiresome to the lay mind, and hard to follow, yet you and I cannot get away from them. We are quite unable to rouse the ordinary man's attention in a way which will enable him to follow his own impressions and so arrive at admitting or rejecting this or that. And therefore those of us who are at all cautious naturally give the subject up, when we become aware of this incapacity; while the mass of men, who venture at random into this sort of enterprise, muddle others and get muddled themselves, and end by abusing their opponents and getting abused in return, and so leave the field. But the first quality of all in Socrates, and the most characteristic, was that he never lost his temper in argument, never uttered anything abusive, never anything insolent, but bore with abuse from others and quieted strife. ~ Epictetus,
1404:I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ~ Sylvia Plath,
1405:One day, the old wise Socrates walks down the streets, when all of the sudden a man runs up to him "Socrates I have to tell you something about your friend who..."
"Hold up" Socrates interrupts him "About the story you're about to tell me, did you put it trough the three sieves?"
"Three sieves?" The man asks "What three sieves?"
"Let's try it" Socrates says.
"The first sieve is the one of truth, did you examine what you were about to tell me if it is true?" Socrates asks.
"Well no, I just overheard it" The man says.
"Ah, well then you have used the second sieve, the sieve of good?" Socrates asks "Is it something good what you're about to tell me?"
"Ehm no, on the contrary" the man answers.
"Hmmm" The wise man says "Let's use the third sieve then, is it necessary to tell me what you're so exited about?"
"No not necessary" the man says.
"Well" Socrates says with a smile "If the story you're about to tell me isn't true, good or necessary, just forget it and don't bother me with it. ~ Socrates,
1406:There was not a philosopher of any notoriety who did not hold to this doctrine of metempsychosis, as taught by the Brahmans, Buddhists, and later by the Pythagoreans, in its esoteric sense, whether he expressed it more or less intelligibly. Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus, Synesius and Chalcidius, all believed in it; and the Gnostics, who are unhesitatingly proclaimed by history as a body of the most refined, learned, and enlightened men, were all believers in metempsychosis. Socrates entertained opinions identical with those of Pythagoras; and both, as the penalty of their divine philosophy, were put to a violent death. The rabble has been the same in all ages. Materialism has been, and will ever be blind to spiritual truths. These philosophers held, with the Hindus, that God had infused into matter a portion of his own Divine Spirit, which animates and moves every particle. ~ H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, The veil of Isis, p.12, (1877),
1407:In the third century, and in the centuries after the barbarian invasion, western civilization came near to total destruction. It was fortunate that, while theology was almost the sole surviving mental activity, the system that was accepted was not purely superstitious, but preserved, though sometimes deeply buried, doctrines which embodied much of the work of Greek intellect and much of the moral devotion that is common to the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. This made possible the rise of the scholastic philosophy, and later, with the Renaissance, the stimulus derived from the renewed study of Plato, and thence of the other ancients. On the other hand, the philosophy of Plotinus has the defect of encouraging men to look within rather than to look without: when we look within we see nous, which is divine, while when we look without we see the imperfections of the sensible world. This kind of subjectivity was a gradual growth; it is to be found in the doctrines of Protagoras, Socrates, and Plato, as well as ~ Bertrand Russell,
1408:St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul. ~ Lev Shestov,
1409:I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them. ~ Gustave Flaubert,
1410:Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art

Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art

Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me. ~ Charles Bukowski,
1411:I was astonished at her words, and said: 'Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?' And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;-think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,' she said, 'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal. ~ Plato,
1412:...I have had a remarkable experience. In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me, as you can see, which might be thought and is commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in court, nor at any point in any part of my speech did the divine sign oppose me. In other discussions it has often checked me in the middle of a sentence; but this time it has never opposed me in any part of this business in anything that I have said or done. What do I suppose to be the explanation? I will tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result. ~ Socrates,
1413:the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD . . . for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations. PSALM 22:27–28 NOVEMBER 4 It is said that the United States of America was formed by the convergence of two streams of history. One took its rise in the thinking of the philosophers of classical antiquity: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. These men believed that the human mind must always be free. The other stream took its rise when Moses addressed a nation of slaves and told them that they were children of God, that other men should not put shackles on their wrists or lay whips to their backs. The confluence of these two great streams of thought formed a government predicated upon the greatness of the human mind and the sovereignty of the human soul. I have enormous faith in the continuity of these ideals in the American people. You cannot break a nation built upon such foundations, unless that nation becomes arrogant, forgets its great heritage, and, worse than all else, turns away from God. ~ Norman Vincent Peale,
1414:So impossible it is for a man who looks no further than the present world to fix himself long in a contemplation where the present world has no part; he has no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never expect to remove the earth he rests upon while he has no support besides for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand. To talk of bearing pain and grief without any sort of present or future hope cannot be purely greatness of spirit; there must be a mixture in it of affectation and an alloy of pride, or perhaps is wholly counterfeit.

It is true there has been all along in the world a notion of rewards and punishments in another life, but it seems to have rather served as an entertainment to poets or as a terror of children than a settled principle by which men pretended to govern any of their actions. The last celebrated words of Socrates, a little before his death, do not seem to reckon or build much upon any such opinion; and Caesar made no scruple to disown it and ridicule it in open senate. ~ Jonathan Swift,
1415:Socrates could enjoy a banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe, taking a constitutional in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting with a few friends by the way. Kant is said never to have been more than ten miles from Konigsberg in all his life. Darwin, after going round the world, spent the whole rest of his life in his own house. Marx, after stirring up a few revolutions, decided to spend the remainder of his days in the British Museum. Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye. No great achievement is possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement, except such as serve to recuperate physical energy during holidays, of which Alpine climbing may serve as the best example. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1416:All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD . . . for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations. PSALM 22:27–28 NOVEMBER 4 It is said that the United States of America was formed by the convergence of two streams of history. One took its rise in the thinking of the philosophers of classical antiquity: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. These men believed that the human mind must always be free. The other stream took its rise when Moses addressed a nation of slaves and told them that they were children of God, that other men should not put shackles on their wrists or lay whips to their backs. The confluence of these two great streams of thought formed a government predicated upon the greatness of the human mind and the sovereignty of the human soul. I have enormous faith in the continuity of these ideals in the American people. You cannot break a nation built upon such foundations, unless that nation becomes arrogant, forgets its great heritage, and, worse than all else, turns away from God. ~ Norman Vincent Peale,
1417:Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived. Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were, back almost to the ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1418:''He is a great spirit,151 Socrates. All spirits are intermediate between god and mortal''.
''What is the function of a spirit?'' I asked.
''Interpreting and conveying all that passes between gods and humans: from humans, petitions and sacrificial offerings, and from gods, instructions and the favours they return. Spirits, being intermediary, fill the space between the other two, so that all are bound together into one entity. It is by means of spirits that all divination can take place, the whole craft of seers and priests, with their sacrifices, rites and spells, and all prophecy and magic. Deity and humanity are completely separate, but through the mediation of spirits all converse and communication from gods to humans, waking and sleeping, is made possible. The man who is wise in these matters is a man of the spirit,152 whereas the man who is wise in a skill153 or a manual craft,154 which is a different sort of expertise, is materialistic.155 These spirits are many and of many kinds, and one of them is Love''. ~ Plato, Symposium, 202e,
1419:It's a thought," I said with a grin.
"That's exactly what it is, Dan - a thought - no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not In the body; the body is In Consciousness. And you Are that Consciousness - no the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your visions revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is Already yours, but not in the same way you imagined or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is in Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair.
"I'm not sure all of that sank in."
"Of course not." He laughed. "Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you'll be free at last. ~ Dan Millman,
1420:[...] I who do not even dare to say, when one is added to one, whether the one to which the addition was made has become two, or the one which was added, or the one which was added and the one to which it was added became two by the addition of each to the other. I think it is wonderful that when each of them was separate from the other, each was one and they were not then two, and when they were brought near each other this juxtaposition was the cause of their becoming two. And I cannot yet believe that if one is divided, the division causes it to become two; for this is the opposite of the cause which produced two in the former case; for then two arose because one was brought near and added to another one, and now because one is removed and separated from other. And I no longer believe that I know by this method even how one is generated or, in a word, how anything is generated or is destroyed or exists, and I no longer admit this method, but have another confused way of my own. ~ Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, translated by Harold North Fowler (1966).,
1421:They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice. Now ~ Plato,
1422:AFFIRMATION CREED OF THE ARRIVIST: I am God, and all other gods are my imagery. I gave birth to myself. I am millions of forms excreating; eternal; and nothing exists except through me; yet I am not them—they serve me. I am inconceivable because I make the conceivable as I so will. I am beyond Law, for my casualness rationalizes all things to my pleasure. I am the stranger, ever. We, the new Arrivists have a lusty heritage from the hierocracy of ancient Egypt, and such great familiars as Lao-Tzu, Pythagoras, Sappho, Socrates, Zeno and others who have substantiated their beliefs (and like them we have been spat on by the ugliest denominators): our great copula is the giving. 'Arrivism' formulates from our integrals: our 'thisness' into 'as if becoming 'as now'—the intentional becoming extentional; action by spontaneity conforming everything critical and subvertive to itself, which is the mechanism of evoking our 'thisness'. 'As now' has no pendency: things are, because we are always the potential of what we last were. The gospel of the Arrivist is always his own. ~ Anonymous,
1423:Thus, the philosopher dislikes marriage as well as what might persuade him into it??marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibtniz, Kant, Schopenhauer?? None of these got married. What`s more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that`s my principle. And Socrates, the exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, got married ironically to demonstrate this very principle.

Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth his son, "Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me." (Rahula here means "a little demon"). To every "free spirit" there must come a reflective hour, provided that previously he has had a one without thought, of the sort that came then to Buddha - "Life in a house," he thought to himself, "is narrow and confined, a polluted place. Freedom consists of abandoning houses;" "because he thought this way, he left the house. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1424:The gentleman was asking what you thought of democracy, sir,’ said Vidal, smiling. ‘Alas I cannot tell you, sir,’ said Stephen, returning the smile. ‘For although it would not be proper to call this barque or vessel a King’s ship except in the largest sense, we nevertheless adhere strictly to the naval tradition which forbids the discussion of religion, women, or politics in our mess. It has been objected that this rule makes for insipidity, which may be so; yet on the other hand it has its uses, since in this case for example it prevents any member from wounding any other gentleman present by saying that he did not think the policy that put Socrates to death and that left Athens prostrate was the highest expression of human wisdom, or by quoting Aristotle’s definition of democracy as mob-rule, the depraved version of a commonwealth.’ ‘Can you suggest a better system?’ asked Dutourd. ‘Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘my words were those of some hypothetical person: where my own views are concerned, tradition seals my mouth. As I have told you, we do not discuss politics at this table. ~ Patrick O Brian,
1425:And what about these, Socrates? Things that might seem absurd, like hair and mud and dirt, or anything else totally undignified and worthless? Are [d] you doubtful whether or not you should say that a form is separate for each of these, too, which in turn is other than anything we touch with our hands?” “Not at all,” Socrates answered. “On the contrary, these things are in fact just what we see. Surely it’s too outlandish to think there is a form for them. Not that the thought that the same thing might hold in all cases hasn’t troubled me from time to time. Then, when I get bogged down in that, I hurry away, afraid that I may fall into some pit of nonsense and come to harm; but when I arrive back in the vicinity of the things we agreed a moment ago have forms, I linger there and occupy myself with them.” [e] “That’s because you are still young, Socrates,” said Parmenides, “and philosophy has not yet gripped you as, in my opinion, it will in the future, once you begin to consider none of the cases beneath your notice. Now, though, you still care about what people think, because of your youth. ~ Plato,
1426:In logic class, I opened my textbook—the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration—and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man.                 Therefore, Socrates is mortal. But Carroll’s were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way: 1) Babies are illogical. 2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. 3) Illogical persons are despised.                      Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles. And: 1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste. 2) No modern poetry is free from affectation. 3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles. 4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste. 5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.                      Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting. ~ Steve Martin,
1427:In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates describes how the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing, came to Thamus, the king of Egypt, and offered to bestow his wonderful invention upon the Egyptian people. “Here is a branch of learning that will ... improve their memories,” Theuth said to the Egyptian king. “My discovery provides a recipe for both memory and wisdom.” But Thamus was reluctant to accept the gift. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,” he told the god. “They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men. ~ Anonymous,
1428:All this is, of course, the old philosophic distinction between reason and passion; but Spinoza adds vitally to Socrates and the Stoics. He knows that as passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead. “An emotion can neither be hindered nor removed except by a contrary and stronger emotion.”95 Instead of uselessly opposing reason to passion—a contest in which the more deeply rooted and ancestral element usually wins—he opposes reasonless passions to passions coördinated by reason, put into place by the total perspective of the situation. Thought should not lack the heat of desire, nor desire the light of thought. “A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it, and the mind is subject to passions in proportion to the number of adequate ideas which it has.”96 All appetites are passions only so far as they arise from inadequate ideas; they are virtues . . . when generated by adequate ideas”;97 all intelligent behavior—i.e., all reaction which meets the total situation—is virtuous action; and in the end there is no virtue but intelligence. ~ Will Durant,
1429:But for now, if
we have been right in how we investigated and what we said, virtue turns out to be
neither innate nor earned. It is something that comes to those who possess it as a free
gift from the gods – with understanding not included; unless, that is, you can point to
some statesmen who could make another man a statesman. If there were such a one, he
could be said to rank among the living as Homer said Teiresias ranked among the dead:
namely, ‘he alone kept his wits collected while the others flitted about like shadows.’
In the same way such a man would, as far as virtue is concerned, stand forth as
someone of substance – opposed, as it were, to mere shadows.

M: I think that is an excellent way to put it, Socrates

S: It follows from this whole line of reasoning, Meno, that virtue appears present in
those who have it only as a gift from the gods. We will only really know about this,
however, if and when we try to investigate what virtue itself is – an investigation that
must come before that of how it comes to be in men. But the time has come for me to go. ~ Plato,
1430:This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate. ~ Albert Camus,
1431:...[Y]ou know very well the truth of what I [say]... I have incurred a great deal of bitter hostility; and this is what will bring about my destruction, if anything does... the slander and jealousy of a very large section of the people. They have been fatal to a great many other innocent men, and I suppose will continue to be so; there is no likelihood that they will stop at me. But perhaps someone will say 'Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death-penalty?' I might fairly reply to him 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one...['] The truth of the matter is this, gentlemen. Where a man has once taken up his stand, either because it seems best to him or in obedience to his orders, there I believe he is bound to remain and face the danger, taking no account of death or anything else before dishonour. ~ Socrates,
1432:It becomes ever increasingly clear to many students of man and of the contemporary scene that the crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical over-maturity and emotional backwardness? ~ Erich Fromm,
1433:One might wonder how on earth learning came to be seen primarily a result of teaching. Until quite recently, the world’s great teachers were understood to be people who had something fresh to say about something to people who were interested in hearing their message. Moses, Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus—these were people who had original insights, and people came from far and wide to find out what those insights were. One can see most clearly in Plato’s dialogues that people did not come to Socrates to “learn philosophy,” but rather to hear Socrates’ version of philosophy (and his wicked and witty attacks on other people’s versions), just as they went to other philosophers to hear (and learn) their versions. In other words, teaching was understood as public exposure of an individual’s perspective, which anyone could take or leave, depending on whether they cared about it. No one in his right mind thought that the only way you could become a philosopher was by taking a course from one of those guys. On the contrary, you were expected to come up with your own original worldview if you aspired to the title of philosopher. ~ Russell L Ackoff,
1434:All the dilemmas and questions of today were known in ethics more than 2,000 years ago. All the greatest teachers of mankind whether prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad or non-prophets such as Confucius , Gautama, Buddha, Socrates, Kant, Tolstoy , and Martin Buber, covering a period from the sixth century BC up to the present ( Martin Buber died in 1965) have taught essentially the same morals. As distinguished from rules about social orders and ways of production , moral truths are constant. The reason for this lies in the fact that the riddle had been established at the moment of creation in the "prologue in heaven" in the act preceding the whole of human history. Intelligence, education, and experience do not in themselves help us approach or better understand all of that. Jesus pronounced his truth when he was a child and was slightly more than thirty when he was condemned. He needed neither knowledge nor experience for his great, capital truths about God and man because these truths could not be reached by knowledge or experience. Are they not "Hidden from the wise and the learned and revealed to the little ? ~ Alija Izetbegovi,
1435:The observation and experiments necessary for the pursuit of alchemy did not comport with the Greek idea of philosophy. This is shown by the saying of Socrates, that the nature of external objects could be discovered by thought without observation, and by the renunciation of all natural sciences by the Cynics. This came largely from the fact that they saw in the nature around them the mutable only. Plato separated logic, as the knowledge of the immutable, from physics, the knowledge of the mutable. That which was subject to indefinite change would not repay observing nor recording, therefore they could not conceive of astronomy and physics as serious objects of mental occupation. There was nothing to be learned from fields and trees and stones. One of the philosophers is said to have gone to the length of putting out his eyes, in order that his mind might not be influenced by external objects, but might wholly give itself to pure contemplation. The intellectual power and grasp of these philosophers were wonderful, but faulty and misleading, since the real and practical was left out. ~ Francis Preston Venable, A Short History of Chemistry (1894) pp. 9-10.,
1436:I have a religion, my own religion, and I even have more religion than all of them, with their mummery and hocus-pocus. I adore God! I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever He is, it doesn't matter to me, who has placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizens and as fathers; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates and empty my pocket to fatten a lot of humbugs who are better fed than we are! For one can honor Him just as well in the woods, in a field, or even by contemplating the vault of the heavens, as the ancients did. My personal God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, Voltaire, and Béranger. I'm for the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar and the immoral principles of '89! So I don't admit any old codger of a God who walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a groan and comes to life at the end of three days: absurdities in themselves and, furthermore, completely opposed to all physical laws; which proves, by the way, that the priests have always beens sunk in a mire of ignorance in which they force the populace to wallow with them. ~ Gustave Flaubert,
1437:This Socratic possibility of beginning wherever he might find himself — although when actualized in life it would as often as not go unnoticed by the multitude, for whom it always remained a mystery how they had come to discuss this or that subject, since their investigations more often began and ended at a stagnated horse pond; this steady Socratic perspective for which no subject was so compact that he could not instantly see the Idea in it — and this not hesitatingly but with immediate certainty, yet also having a practised eye for the apparent abbreviations of perspective and so did not draw the object to him surreptitiously, but simply retained the same ultimate prospect while it emerged step by step for the listener and onlooker; this Socratic parsimony which formed such a biting opposition to the empty noise and undigested fodder of the Sophists — all this is what one must wish that Xenophon had let us feel in Socrates. And what a life would thereby have been depicted when in the midst of the busy labour of the artisans, the braying of the pack animals, one had seen the divine web which Socrates worked into the very fibre of existence. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,
1438:1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation. 11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation. 13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
1439:Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' [quoting M. Alexandre Kojève] of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born. The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems. But the philosopher does not necessarily succumb to this danger, as is shown by Socrates, who never belonged to a sect and never founded one. And even if the philosophic friends are compelled to be members of a sect or to found one, they are not necessarily members of one and the same sect: Amicus Plato. ~ Leo Strauss,
1440:XIV. Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own; all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt32 with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters? ~ Giordano Bruno,
1441:War and battle' are the opening words of the Gorgias, and the declaration of war against the corrupt society is its content. Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, is in Athens as the guest of Callicles, an enlightened politician. It is a day of audience. Gorgias receives visitors and is ready to answer all questions addressed to him. Socrates, with his pupil Chaerephon, calls at Callicles’ house in order to see the great man. The ultimate motif of the battle is not statedexplicitly but indicated, as so frequently with Plato, through the form of the dialogue. Gorgias is somewhat exhausted by the stream of visitors and the hours of conversation, and he lets his follower Polus open the discussion; Socrates leaves the opening game to Chaerephon. The battle is engaged in as a struggle for the soul of the younger generation. Who will form the future leaders of the polity: the rhetor who teaches the tricks of political success, or the philosopher who creates the substance in soul and society?

The substance of man is at stake, not a philosophical problem in the modern sense. Socrates suggests to Chaerephon the first question: Ask him “Who he is” (447d). ~ Eric Voegelin,
1442:When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The memecomplexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong. ~ Richard Dawkins,
1443:…money and honour have no attraction for them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help — not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present… ~ Socrates,
1444:How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things; in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despise the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their the thread of the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where telescopes end, the microscopes begin. Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant hill of stars. ~ Victor Hugo,
1445:During World War I, a play would have had short shrift here which showed up General Pershing for a coward; ridiculed the Allies’ cause; brought in Uncle Sam as a blustering bully; glorified the peace party. But when Athens was fighting for her life, Aristophanes did the exact equivalent of all these things many times over and the Athenians, pro-and anti-war alike, flocked to the theatre. The right of a man to say what he pleased was fundamental in Athens. “A slave is he who cannot speak his thought,” said Euripides. Socrates drinking the hemlock in his prison on the charge of introducing new gods and corrupting the youth is but the exception that proves the rule. He was an old man and all his life he had said what he would. Athens had just gone through a bitter time of crushing defeat, of rapid changes of government, of gross mismanagement. It is a reasonable conjecture that he was condemned in one of those sudden panics all nations know, when the people’s fears for their own safety have been worked upon and they turn cruel. Even so, he was condemned by a small majority and his pupil Plato went straight on teaching in his name, never molested but honored and sought after. ~ Edith Hamilton,
1446:9. We Can Do Better Than Happiness. We live at a time when the search for happiness has taken center stage as never before. Books, TV shows, and websites are constantly offering pointers about how to finally achieve and sustain this elusive and sought-after state of being. If only we were happy, everything would be okay. Imagine a drug that would make you perfectly happy, but remove any interest you might have in doing anything more than simple survival. You would lead a thoroughly boring treadmill of a life, from the outside—but inside you would be blissfully happy, romping through imaginary adventures and always-successful romantic escapades. Would you take the drug? Think of Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Or Michelangelo, Beethoven, Virginia Woolf. Is “happy” the first word that comes to mind when you set out to describe them? They may have been—and surely were, from time to time—but it’s not their defining characteristic. The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life. ~ Sean Carroll,
1447:These names of virtues, with their precepts, were: 1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation. 11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation. 13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
1448:For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge. To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They lack clarity about themselves and their culture. They can fathom only their own personal troubles. They do not see their own bases or the causes of their own frustrations. They are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic, social, and political structure and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster. They have been rendered mute and ineffectual. “What we cannot speak about” Ludwig Wittgenstein warned “we must pass over in silence. ~ Chris Hedges,
1449:How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates. ~ Epictetus,
1450:For The One Who Would Take Man's Life In His Hands
Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword,
Threw it down, became a lamb.
Swift spat upon the species, but
Took two women to his heart.
Samson who was strong as death
Paid his strength to kiss a slut.
Othello that stiff warrior
Was broken by a woman's heart.
Troy burned for a sea-tax, also for
Possession of a charming whore.
What do all examples show?
What must the finished murderer know?
You cannot sit on bayonets,
Nor can you eat among the dead.
When all are killed, you are alone,
A vacuum comes where hate has fed.
Murder's fruit is silent stone,
The gun increases poverty.
With what do these examples shine?
The soldier turned to girls and wine.
Love is the tact of every good,
The only warmth, the only peace.
"What have I said?" asked Socrates.
"Affirmed extremes, cried yes and no,
Taken all parts, denied myself,
Praised the caress, extolled the blow,
Soldier and lover quite deranged
Until their motions are exchanged.
-What do all examples show?
What can any actor know?
The contradiction in every act,
The infinite task of the human heart."
~ Delmore Schwartz,
1451:Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind.

"Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed -- incidentally, deliberately -- imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.' ~ Robert Macfarlane,
1452:Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice—how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility—I find the grammar of justice maddening. It’s always “rendered,” “served,” or “done.” It always swoops down from on high—from God, from the state—like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth’s final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia “justice” has meant both “retribution” and “equality,” as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.

If you really want to know what justice is, don’t only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is. When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away. ~ Maggie Nelson,
1453:How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
   From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.
   ~ Epictetus, (From Manual 51),
1454:The names of virtues, with their precepts, were:
1. Temperance. Eat not do dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloths, or habitation.
11. Tranquillity. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
1455:So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
1456:In this way, as it seems to me, he said: "One might make the same
argument about harmony, lyre and strings, that a harmony is something
invisible, without body, beautiful and divine in the attuned lyre, whereas
the lyre itself and its strings are physical, bodily, composite, earthy and
akin to what is mortal. Then if someone breaks the lyre, cuts or breaks
the strings and then insists, using the same argument as you, that the
harmony must still exist and is not destroyed because it would be impossi-
ble for the lyre and the strings, which are mortal, still to exist when the
strings are broken, and for the harmony, which is akin and of the same
nature as the divine and immortal, to be destroyed before that which is
mortal; he would say that the harmony itself still must exist and that the
wood and the strings must rot before the harmony can suffer. And indeed
Socrates, I think you must have this in mind, that we really do suppose
the soul to be something of this kind; as the body is stretched and held
together by the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist and other such
things, and OUR soul is a mixture and harmony of those things when they
are mixed with each other rightly and in due measure. ~ Plato,
1457:What do you consider to
be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?
One, he said, of which I could not expect easily to convince others. For let me
tell you, Socrates, that when a man thinks himself to be near death, fears and
cares enter into his mind which he never had before; the tales of a world be-
low and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here were once
a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the thought that they
may be true: either from the weakness of age, or because he is now drawing
nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and
alarms crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what
wrongs he has done to others. And when he finds that the sum of his transgres-
sions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep for fear, and
he is filled with dark forebodings. But to him who is conscious of no sin, sweet
hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age:
’Hope,’ he says, ’cherishes the soul of him who lives in justice and holiness,
and is the nurse of his age and the companion of his journey;– hope which is
mightiest to sway the restless soul of man. ~ Plato,
1458:Our way would seem quite familiar to the Romans, more by far than the Greek way. Socrates in the Symposium, when Alcibiades challenged him to drink two quarts of wine, could have done so or not as he chose, but the diners-out of Horace's day had no such freedom. He speaks often of the master of the drinking, who was always appointed to dictate how much each man was to drink. Very many unseemly dinner parties must have paved the way for that regulation. A Roman in his cups would've been hard to handle, surly, quarrelsome, dangerous. No doubt there had been banquets without number which had ended in fights, broken furniture, injuries, deaths. Pass a law then, the invariable Roman remedy, to keep drunkenness within bounds. Of course it worked both ways: everybody was obliged to empty the same number of glasses and the temperate man had to drink a great deal more than he wanted, but whenever laws are brought in to regulate the majority who have not abused their liberty for the sake of the minority who have, just such results come to pass. Indeed, any attempt to establish a uniform average in that stubbornly individual phenomenon, human nature, will have only one result that can be foretold with certainty: it will press hardest on the best. ~ Edith Hamilton,
1459:To these statements, Socrates, no one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling passes over the minds of your hearers: They fancy that they are led astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned upside down. And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up by their more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they too find themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in this new game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time they are in the right. The observation is suggested to me by what is now occurring. For any one of us might say, that although in words he is not able to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact that the votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only in youth as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years, most of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues, and that those who may be considered the best of them are made useless to the world by the very study which you extol. ~ Plato,
1460:The moment you know, you destroy all poetry. The moment you know, and think that you know, you have created a barrier between yourself and that which is. Then everything is distorted. Then you don’t hear with your ears, you translate. Then you don’t see with your eyes, you interpret. Then you don’t experience with your heart, you think that you experience. Then all possibility of meeting with existence in immediacy, in intimacy, is lost. You have fallen apart. This is the original sin. And this is the whole story, the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once they have eaten the fruit of knowledge they are driven out of paradise. Not that somebody drove them out, not that God ordered them to get out of paradise, they themselves fell. Knowing they were no more innocent, knowing they were separate from existence, knowing they were egos…knowing created such a barrier, an iron barrier. You ask me, “What is innocence?” Vomit knowledge! The fruit of the tree of knowledge has to be vomited. That’s what meditation is all about. Throw it out of your system: it is poison, pure poison. Live without knowledge, knowing that “I don’t know.” Function out of this state of not knowing and you will know what beauty is. Socrates ~ Osho,
1461:Many say that Western Civ and this kind of Great Books education is an elitist enterprise dominated by dead white males. But Western Civ was and remains radicalism—a subversive, revolutionary counterculture that makes it impossible to remain fat and happy within the status quo. Western Civ is Socrates, a man so dangerous, his city couldn’t tolerate him living within it. Western Civ offers ways to step out of the cave and see reality in its true colors, not just as the shadows that ideologues are content to see. Western Civ took me outside the assumption of my time, outside the values of the modern meritocracy and America’s worship of success. Western Civ inspired me to spend my life pursuing a philosophy—to spend decades trying to find a worldview that could handle the complexity of reality, but also offer a coherent vision that could frame my responses to events and guide me through the vicissitudes of life. Western Civ is the rebel base I return to when I want to recharge my dissatisfactions with the current world. Once you’ve had a glimpse of the highest peaks of the human experience, it’s hard to live permanently in the flatlands down below. It’s a little hard to be shallow later in life, no matter how inclined in that direction you might be. ~ David Brooks,
1462:This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of religion. In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price. In wandering through the forests of ignorance, one necessarily fell upon the famous old bear that scared children at play; but, even had the animal shown more logic than its victim, one had learned from Socrates to distrust, above all other traps, the trap of logic -- the mirror of the mind. Yet the search for a unit of force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of thousands of educations had found their end. Generation after generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, in company with the most famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had ever found a logical highroad of escape. ~ Henry Adams,
1463:When would someone feel the need to strengthen the argument with the emphatic phrase “by definition”? (E.g. “Humans are vulnerable to hemlock by definition!”) Why, when the inferred characteristic has been called into doubt—Socrates has been seen consulting herbologists—and so the speaker feels the need to tighten the vise of logic. So when you see “by definition” used like this, it usually means: “Forget what you’ve heard about Socrates consulting herbologists—humans, by definition, are mortal!” People feel the need to squeeze the argument onto a single course by saying “Any P, by definition, has property Q!,” on exactly those occasions when they see, and prefer to dismiss out of hand, additional arguments that call into doubt the default inference based on clustering. So too with the argument “X, by definition, is a Y!” E.g., “Atheists believe that God doesn’t exist; therefore atheists have beliefs about God, because a negative belief is still a belief; therefore atheism asserts answers to theological questions; therefore atheism is, by definition, a religion.” You wouldn’t feel the need to say, “Hinduism, by definition, is a religion!” because, well, of course Hinduism is a religion. It’s not just a religion “by definition,” it’s, like, an actual religion. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
1464:The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong.

The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. 'If I am the wisest man,' said Socrates, 'it is because I alone know that I know nothing.' The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

Alas, none of this was new to me. (There is very little that is new to me; I wish my correspondents would realize this.) This particular theme was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who specialized in irritating me. He also told me that all theories are proven wrong in time.

My answer to him was, 'John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. ~ Isaac Asimov,
1465:I went to interview a man with a high reputation for wisdom, because I felt that here if anywhere I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to my divine authority 'You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I am.' Well, I gave a thorough examination to this person... and in conversation with him I formed the impression that although in many people's opinion, and especially in his own, he appeared to be wise, in fact he was not. Then when I began to try to show him that he only thought he was wise and was not really so, my efforts were resented both by him and by many of the other people present. However, I reflected as I walked away: 'Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know... [A]s I pursued my investigation at the god's command,... my honest impression was... that the people with the greatest reputations were almost entirely deficient, while others who were supposed to be their inferiors were much better qualified in practical intelligence. ~ Socrates,
1466:...I do not believe that the law of God permits a better man to be harmed by a worse. No doubt my accuser might put me to death or have me banished or deprived of civic rights; but even if he thinks, as he probably does (and others to, I dare say), that these are great calamities, I do not think so... For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable. This, I take it, gentlemen, is the degree, and this is the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbour in any respect, it would be in this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it. But I do know that to do wrong and to disobey my superior, whether God or man, is wicked and dishonourable; and so I shall never feel more fear or aversion for something which, for all I know, may really be a blessing, than for those evils which I know to be evils. ~ Socrates,
1467:Dar să adâncim puţin judecata ce e întemeiată pe nădejdea de a socoti moartea un bine. în adevăr, din două lucruri unul este a fi mort: sau este tot una cu a nu fi deloc, şi atunci cel mort n-are nici o simţire pentru nimic, sau este, după cum spun unii, numai o schimbare şi o trecere a sufletului dintr-un loc într-altul. Şi dacă în moarte nu-i nici o simţire, ci este aşa ca un somn adânc, când cineva doarme fără măcar să aibă un vis, atunci moartea se înfăţişează ca un minunat câştig. Căci eu socotesc că dacă şi-ar alege cineva o noapte în care a dormit aşa de bine că n-a fost tulburat nici măcar de un vis, dacă apoi ar compara acea noapte cu toate celelalte nopţi şi zile ale vieţii sale şi, cercetându-le întru sine, ar trebui să spună câte zile şi câte nopţi din viaţa lui a trăit mai liniştit şi mai plăcut decât în noaptea aceea, socotesc că nu numai un om de rând, dar însuşi Marele Rege ar găsi că acestea sunt prea puţine la număr faţă de celelalte zile şi nopţi.
Dacă moartea este aşa ceva, eu o numesc câştig. Căci atunci întreaga veşnicie nu pare a fi altceva decât o singură noapte senină. Dacă însă moartea este ca şi o călătorie de aici în alt loc, dacă sunt adevărate cele ce se spun, că acela este locul de întâlnire al tuturor care au murit, atunci ce bine s-ar putea închipui mai mare decât moartea, o, judecătorii mei? ~ Socrates,
1468:I am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is most apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do injustice are the most miserable—that is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace—they who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest. ~ Plato,
1469:At first glance, young John Adams’s obsession with recognition seems odd. In contrast to the great mass of his contemporaries, his yearning was exceptional. Yet when Adams is compared to other high achievers of his generation, his behavior appears more normal. Young Washington sought recognition just as fervently, and he impatiently pursued a commission in the British army during the French and Indian War as the most rapid means of procuring attention. The youthful Thomas Jefferson dreamed of someday sitting on the King’s Council in Virginia, while Alexander Hamilton, born too late to soldier in the war in the 1750s, announced: “I contemn the grovling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune, &c., contemns me.” He wished for war, through which he could be catapulted into notoriety; his hero was James Wolfe, the British general who died in the assault on Quebec in 1759. Benjamin Franklin, who grew up earlier in Boston, exhibited the same industriousness and ambition that Adams would evince. He mapped out an extensive regimen of self-improvement, as did Adams, and found his role models in Jesus and Socrates. Adams, and many others who would subsequently play an important role in the affairs of early America, were the sort of men that historian Douglass Adair aptly describes as “passionately selfish and self-interested,” men who shared a common attribute, a love of fame.23 ~ John Ferling,
1470:KANT: The traditional religious foundation for morality may be ontologically stronger, but I say it is not logically or epistemologically stronger. It cannot be proved by speculative, theoretical reason. It cannot be known with certainty. I wanted to construct an absolute and certain ethics; that’s why I confined myself to the parameters of reason alone—and of practical reason alone, for I believe that practical reason can do much more than theoretical reason. I cut down the bushes and weeds of theoretical reason to make room for the garden of practical faith. SOCRATES: So both your structure and your strategy depend on your epistemology of theoretical reason. Your ethics depends on your epistemology. KANT: Yes. We have already established that. SOCRATES: Then I fear it is a beautiful building with a questionable foundation. KANT: That is your final judgment on my work? SOCRATES: Alas, it is. KANT: I have two questions I would like to ask you in conclusion, if they are allowed. SOCRATES: We do not forbid questions here. KANT: You have told me what you think of my philosophy. Can you assure me that God agrees with your judgment on my philosophy? And can you tell me His judgment on me? On how I am known to God? Can you tell me my Heavenly identity? SOCRATES: Can I do these two things? I can answer both of those questions with the same answer. KANT: And the answer is . . . ? SOCRATES: I. Kant. ~ Peter Kreeft,
1471:There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment...
... There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put devils into them and make them rush down the hill to the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but he chooses to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. 'He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time for figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: "No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever,"...and Peter... saith unto Him: "Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away".' This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in matter of wisdom or in matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1472:Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well. Take water. It’s common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world’s oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid. Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived. Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were, back almost to the beginning of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view. Want ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1473:As the following pages deal with the practising life, they lead - in accordance with their topic - to an expedition into the little-explored universe of human vertical tensions. The Platonic Socrates had opened up the phenomenon for occidental culture when he stated expressis verbis that man is a being potentially 'superior to himself'. I translate this remark into the observation that all 'cultures', 'subcultures' or 'scenes' are based on central distinctions by which the field of human behavioural possibilities is subdivided into polarized classes. Thus the ascetic 'cultures' know the central distinction of complete versus incomplete, the religious 'cultures' that of sacred versus profane, the aristocratic 'cultures' that of noble versus common, the military 'cultures' that of brave versus cowardly, the political 'cultures' that of powerful versus powerless, the administrative 'cultures' that of superior versus subordinate, the athletic 'cultures' that of excellence versus mediocrity, the economic 'cultures' that of wealth versus lack, the cognitive 'cultures' that of knowledge versus ignorance, and the sapiental 'cultures' that of illumination versus blindness. What all these differentiations have in common is the espousal of the first value, which is considered the attractor in the respective field, while the second pole consistently functions as a factor of repulsion or object of avoidance. ~ Peter Sloterdijk,
1474:I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.

From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.

We do not know — neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I— what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know. ~ Socrates,
1475:I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.

From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be - what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing - I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.

We do not know - neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I- what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know. ~ Socrates,
1476:Never, not in the brightest days of the Renaissance, has learning appeared in such a radiant light as it did to the gay young men of imperial Athens. Listen to one of them talking to Socrates, just waked up in the early dawn by a persistent hammering at his door: “What’s here?” he cries out, still half asleep. “O Socrates,” and the voice is that of a lad he knows well, “Good news, good news!” “It ought to be at this unearthly hour. Well, out with it.” The young fellow is in the house now. “O Socrates, Protagoras has come. I heard it yesterday evening. And I was going to you at once but it was so late—” “What’s it all about—Protagoras? Has he stolen something of yours?” The boy bursts out laughing. “Yes, yes, that’s just it. He’s robbing me of wisdom. He has it—wisdom, and he can give it to me. Oh, come and go with me to him. Start now.” That eager, delightful boy in love with learning can be duplicated in nearly every dialogue of Plato. Socrates has but to enter a gymnasium; exercise, games, are forgotten. A crowd of ardent young men surround him. Tell us this. Teach us that, they clamor. What is Friendship? What is Justice? We will not let you off, Socrates. The truth—we want the truth. “What delight,” they say to each other, “to hear wise men talk!” “Egypt and Phœnicia love money,” Plato remarks in a discussion on how nations differ. “The special characteristic of our part of the world is the love of knowledge. ~ Edith Hamilton,
1477:Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself. There had been philosophers before him, of course: strong men like Thales and Heraclitus, subtle men like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, seers like Pythagoras and Empedocles; but for the most part they had been physical philosophers; they had sought for the physis or nature of external things, the laws and constituents of the material and measurable world. That is very good, said Socrates; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become? So he went about prying into the human soul, uncovering assumptions and questioning certainties. If men discoursed too readily of justice, he asked them, quietly, tò tí?—what is it? What do you mean by these abstract words with which you so easily settle the problems of life and death? What do you mean by honor, virtue, morality, patriotism? What do you mean by yourself? It was with such moral and psychological questions that Socrates loved to deal. Some ~ Will Durant,
1478:I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier.
Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war. ~ Larry Kramer,
1479:Cotton-Wool
Shun the brush and shun the pen,
Shun the ways of clever men,
When they prove that black is white,
Whey they swear that wrong is right,
When they roast the singing stars
Like chestnuts, in between the bars,
_Children, let a wandering fool
Stuff your ears with cotton-wool._
When you see a clever man
Run as quickly as you can.
You must never, never, never
Think that Socrates was clever.
The cleverest thing I ever knew
Now cracks walnuts at the Zoo.
_Children, let a wandering fool
Stuff your ears with cotton-wool._
Homer could not scintillate.
Milton, too, was merely great.
That's a very different matter
From talking like a frantic hatter.
Keats and Shelley had no tricks.
Wordsworth never climbed up sticks.
_Children, let a wandering fool
Stuff your ears with cotton-wool._
Lincoln would create a gloom
In many a London drawing-room;
He'd be silent at their wit,
He would never laugh at it.
When they kissed Salome's toes,
I think he'd snort and blow his nose.
_Children, let a wandering fool
Stuff your ears with cotton-wool._
They'd curse him for a silly clown,
They'd drum him out of London town.
Professor Flunkey, the historian,
28
Would say he was a dull Victorian.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John,
Bless the bed I rest upon.
_Children, let a wandering fool
Stuff your ears with cotton-wool._
Amen.
~ Alfred Noyes,
1480:Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. And as to technology, we have made immense strides in controlling the physical and biological worlds, but our practices in government, education, and much of economics, though adapted to very different conditions, have not greatly improved. We can scarcely explain this by saying that the Greeks knew all there was to know about human behavior. Certainly they knew more than they knew about the physical world, but it was still not much. Moreover, their way of thinking about human behavior must have had some fatal flaw. Whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere. If they are with us today, it is not because they possessed some kind of eternal verity, but because they did not contain the seeds of anything better. ~ B F Skinner,
1481:Why should Milton, Shakespeare, and Lord Bacon, and Sir Philip Sidney die? Perhaps yet they shall not wholly die. I am not contented to visit the house in Bread-Street where Milton was born, or that in Bunhill-Row where he died, I want to repair to the place where he now dwells. Some spirit shall escape from his ashes, and whisper to me things unfelt before. I am not satisfied to converse only with the generation of men that now happens to subsist; I wish to live in intercourse with the Illustrious Dead of All Ages. I demand the friendship of Zoroaster. Orpheus, and Linus, and Musaeus shall be welcome to me. I have a craving and an earnest heart, that can never be contented with anything in this sort, while something more remains to be obtained. And I feel that thus much at least the human race owes to its benefactors, that they should never be passed by without an affectionate remembrance. I would say, with Ezekiel, the Hebrew, in his Vision, ‘Let these dry bones live!’ Not let them live merely in cold generalities and idle homilies of morality; but let them live, as my friends, my philosophers, my instructors, and my guides! I would say with the moralist of old, ‘Let me act, as I would wish to have acted, if Socrates or Cato were the spectators of what I did!’ And I am not satisfied only to call them up by a strong effort of the imagination, but I would have them, and men like them, ‘around my path, and around my bed,’ and not allow myself to hold a more frequent intercourse with the living, than with the good departed. ~ William Godwin,
1482:Beranger's
Still serve me in my age, I pray,
As in my youth, O faithful one;
For years I've brushed thee every dayCould Socrates have better done?
What though the fates would wreak on thee
The fulness of their evil art?
Use thou philosophy, like meAnd we, old friend, shall never part!
I think-I
often
think of itThe day we twain first faced the crowd;
My roistering friends impeached your fit,
But you and I were very proud!
Those jovial friends no more make free
With us (no longer new and smart),
But rather welcome you and me
As loving friends that should not part.
The patch? Oh, yes-one happy night'Lisette,' says I, 'it's time to go'She clutched this sleeve to stay my flight,
Shrieking: 'What! leave so early? No!'
To mend the ghastly rent she'd made,
Three days she toiled, dear patient heart!
And I-right willingly I staidLisette decreed we should not part!
No incense ever yet profaned
This honest, shiny warp of thine,
Nor hath a courtier's eye disdained
Thy faded hue and quaint design;
Let servile flattery be the price
Of ribbons in the royal martA roadside posie shall suffice
For us two friends that must not part!
Fear not the recklessness of yore
72
Shall re-occur to vex thee now;
Alas, I am a youth no moreI'm old and sere, and so art thou!
So bide with me unto the last
And with thy warmth caress this heart
That pleads, by memories of the Past,
That two such friends should never part!
~ Eugene Field,
1483:For Molly, Concerning God
Is God the one who eats the meat
off the bones of dead people?
-Molly Miranda Jong-Fast, age 3 1/2
God is the one,
Molly,
whether we call him
Him,
or Her,
treeform or spewing
volcano,
Vesuvius or vulva,
penis-rock,
or reindeer-on-cave-wall,
God is the one
who eats
our meat,
Molly,
& we yield
our meat
up willingly.
Meat is our
element,
meat is our
lesson.
When our bodies fill
with each other,
when our blood swells
in our organs
aching for another,
body of meat,
heart of meat,
soul of meat,
we are only doing
what God wants
us to—
meat joining meat
78
to become insubstantial air,
meat fusing
with meat
to make
a small wonder
like you.
The wonder of you
is that you push
our questions
along into
the future—
so that I know
again
the wonder of meat
through you,
the wonder of meat
turning to philosophy,
the wonder of meat
transubstantiated
into poetry,
the wonder of
sky-blue meat
in your roundest eyes,
the wonder of
dawn-colored meat
in your cheeks & palms,
the wonder of meat
becoming
air.
You
are my theorem,
my proof,
my meaty metaphysics,
my little questioner,
my small Socrates
of the nursery-schoolyard.
To think that
such wonder
can come from meat!
79
Well then,
if God is hungry—
let Him eat,
let Her eat.
~ Erica Jong,
1484:Ballade Adresse A Geoffrey Chaucer
O Socratès plains de philosophie,
Seneque en meurs, Auglius en pratique,
Ovides grans en ta poëtrie,
Briés en parler, saiges en rethorique . . .
Grant translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier.
O Socrates, filled with philosophy,
Seneca in morals, Aulus Gellius in practice,
Great Ovid of your poetry,
Brief in speech, wise in rhetoric,
Most high eagle, who by your science
Enlumined the realm of Æneas.
The Isle of giants, of Brut, who has
Sown the flowers and planted the rose bower
For those ignorant of French,
Great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.
You are the god of earthly love in Albion,
And of the Rose - in the Angelic land,
Which, from the Saxoness Angelica, has flourished
Into Angle-land, from her whose name is applied
As the last in this etymology You have translated in good English;
And a garden for which you ask for plants
From those who compose in order to be authorities,
You have long since created,
Great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.
From you therefore, from the fountain of Helicon,
I have asked to have an authentic drink,
From the stream that is entirely in your power,
In order to quench my fevered thirst,
I who shall be shall be paralyzed in Gaul
Until you send to give me drink.
I am Eustaces; you shall have some of my plants;
Take in good grace these works of a schoolboy
Which you will recieve from me by Clifford,
Great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.
L'envoy
~ Eustache Deschamps,
1485:How Fortunate The Man With None
From the play 'Mother Courage'
You saw sagacious Solomon
You know what came of him,
To him complexities seemed plain.
He cursed the hour that gave birth to him
And saw that everything was vain.
How great and wise was Solomon.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's wisdom that had brought him to this state.
How fortunate the man with none.
You saw courageous Caesar next
You know what he became.
They deified him in his life
Then had him murdered just the same.
And as they raised the fatal knife
How loud he cried: you too my son!
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's courage that had brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.
You heard of honest Socrates
The man who never lied:
They weren't so grateful as you'd think
Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried
And handed him the poisoned drink.
How honest was the people's noble son.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's honesty that brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.
Here you can see respectable folk
Keeping to God's own laws.
So far he hasn't taken heed.
You who sit safe and warm indoors
26
Help to relieve our bitter need.
How virtuously we had begun.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's fear of god that brought us to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.
~ Bertolt Brecht,
1486:The far-reaching effect exercised by music upon the culture of the Greeks is thus summed up by Emil Nauman: "Plato depreciated the notion that music was intended solely to create cheerful and agreeable emotions, maintaining rather that it should inculcate a love of all that is noble, and hatred of all that is mean, and that nothing could more strongly influence man's innermost feelings than melody and rhythm. Firmly convinced of this, he agreed with Damon of Athens, the musical instructor of Socrates, that the introduction of a new and presumably enervating scale would endanger the future of a whole nation, and that it was not possible to alter a key without shaking the very foundations of the State. Plato affirmed that music which ennobled the mind was of a far higher kind than that which merely appealed to the senses, and he strongly insisted that it was the paramount duty of the Legislature to suppress all music of an effeminate and lascivious character, and to encourage only s that which was pure and dignified; that bold and stirring melodies were for men, gentle and soothing ones for women. From this it is evident that music played a considerable part in the education of the Greek youth. The greatest care was also to be taken in the selection of instrumental music, because the absence of words rendered its signification doubtful, and it was difficult to foresee whether it would exercise upon the people a benign or baneful influence. Popular taste, being always tickled by sensuous and meretricious effects, was to be treated with deserved contempt. (See The History of Music.) ~ Manly P Hall, The Secret Teachings of all Ages,
1487:Faust In Old Age
"Poet and veteran of childhood, look!
See in me the obscene, for you have love,
For you have hatred, you, you must be judge,
Deliver judgement, ~ Delmore Schwartz



.
Well-known wishes have been to war,
The vicious mouth has chewed the vine.
The patient crab beneath the shirt
Has charmed such interests as Indies meant.
For I have walked within and seen each sea,
The fish that flies, the broken burning bird,
Born again, beginning again, my breast!
Purple with persons like a tragic play.
For I have flown the cloud and fallen down,
Plucked Venus, sneering at her moan.
I took the train that takes away remorse;
I cast down every king like Socrates.
I knocked each nut to find the meat;
A worm was there and not a mint.
Metaphysicians could have told me this,
But each learns for himself, as in the kiss.
Polonius I poked, not him
To whom aspires spire and hymn,
Who succors children and the very poor;
I pierced the pompous Premier, not Jesus Christ,
I picked Polonius and Moby Dick,
the ego bloomed into an octopus.
29
Now come I to the exhausted West at last;
I know my vanity, my nothingness,
now I float will-less in despair's dead sea,
Every man my enemy.
Spontaneous, I have too much to say,
And what I say will no one not old see:
If we could love one another, it would be well.
But as it is, I am sorry for the whole world, myself
apart. My heart is full of memory and desire, and in
its last nervousness, there is pity for those I have
touched, but only hatred and contempt for myself."
~ Delmore Schwartz,
1488:Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, 'Try all things, hold fast by that which is good'; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic position, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.

The results of the working out of the agnostic principle will vary according to individual knowledge and capacity, and according to the general condition of science. That which is unproved today may be proved, by the help of new discoveries, tomorrow. The only negative fixed points will be those negations which flow from the demonstrable limitation of our faculties. And the only obligation accepted is to have the mind always open to conviction.

That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley,
1489:The Cloud Chorus
SOCRATES SPEAKS
Hither, come hither, ye Clouds renowned, and unveil yourselves
here;
Come, though ye dwell on the sacred crests of Olympian snow,
Or whether ye dance with the Nereid Choir in the gardens clear,
Or whether your golden urns are dipped in Nile's overflow,
Or whether you dwell by Maeotis mere
Or the snows of Mimas, arise! appear!
And hearken to us, and accept our gifts ere ye rise and go.
THE CLOUDS SING
Immortal Clouds from the echoing shore
Of the father of streams from the sounding sea,
Dewy and fleet, let us rise and soar;
Dewy and gleaming and fleet are we!
Let us look on the tree-clad mountain-crest,
On the sacred earth where the fruits rejoice,
On the waters that murmur east and west,
On the tumbling sea with his moaning voice.
For unwearied glitters the Eye of the Air,
And the bright rays gleam;
Then cast we our shadows of mist, and fare
In our deathless shapes to glance everywhere
From the height of the heaven, on the land and air,
And the Ocean Stream.
Let us on, ye Maidens that bring the Rain,
Let us gaze on Pallas's citadel,
In the country of Cecrops fair and dear,
The mystic land of the holy cell,
Where the Rites unspoken securely dwell,
And the gifts of the gods that know not stain,
And a people of mortals that know not fear.
For the temples tall and the statues fair,
And the feasts of the gods are holiest there;
The feasts of Immortals, the chaplets of flowers,
And the Bromian mirth at the coming of spring,
23
And the musical voices that fill the hours,
And the dancing feet of the maids that sing!
~ Aristophanes,
1490:If thou findest in human life anything better than justice, truth, temperance, fortitude, and, in a word, anything better than thy own mind's self-satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to right reason, and in the condition that is assigned to thee without thy own choice; if, I say, thou seest anything better than this, turn to it with all thy soul, and enjoy that which thou hast found to be the best. But if nothing appears to be better than the deity which is planted in thee, which has subjected to itself all thy appetites, and carefully examines all the impressions, and, as Socrates said, has detached itself from the persuasions of sense, and has submitted itself to the gods, and cares for mankind; if thou findest everything else smaller and of less value than this, give place to nothing else, for if thou dost once diverge and incline to it, thou wilt no longer without distraction be able to give the preference to that good thing which is thy proper possession and thy own; for it is not right that anything of any other kind, such as praise from the many, or power, or enjoyment of pleasure, should come into competition with that which is rationally and politically or practically good. All these things, even though they may seem to adapt themselves to the better things in a small degree, obtain the superiority all at once, and carry us away. But do thou, I say, simply and freely choose the better, and hold to it.- But that which is useful is the better.- Well then, if it is useful to thee as a rational being, keep to it; but if it is only useful to thee as an animal, say so, and maintain thy judgement without arrogance: only take care that thou makest the inquiry by a sure method. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
1491:Suppose someone says, “Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world’s favorite pastime, is starting to decline.” You suspect he is wrong. How do you question the claim? Don’t even think of taking a personal shot like “You’re silly.” That only adds heat, not light. “I don’t think so” only expresses disagreement without delving into why you disagree. “What do you mean?” lowers the emotional temperature with a question but it’s much too vague. Zero in. You might say, “What do you mean by ‘pastime’?” or “What evidence is there that soccer’s popularity is declining? Over what time frame?” The answers to these precise questions won’t settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested. Since Socrates, good teachers have practiced precision questioning, but still it’s often not used when it’s needed most. Imagine how events might have gone if the Kennedy team had engaged in precision questioning when planning the Bay of Pigs invasion: “So what happens if they’re attacked and the plan falls apart?” “They retreat into the Escambray Mountains, where they can meet up with other anti-Castro forces and plan guerrilla operations.” “How far is it from the proposed landing site in the Bay of Pigs to the Escambray Mountains?” “Eighty miles.” “And what’s the terrain?” “Mostly swamp and jungle.” “So the guerrillas have been attacked. The plan has fallen apart. They don’t have helicopters or tanks. But they have to cross eighty miles of swamp and jungle before they can begin to look for shelter in the mountains? Is that correct?” I suspect that this conversation would not have concluded “sounds good!” Questioning like that didn’t happen, so Kennedy’s first major decision as president was a fiasco. The lesson was learned, resulting in the robust but respectful debates of the Cuban missile crisis—which exemplified the spirit we encouraged among our forecasters. ~ Philip E Tetlock,
1492:He was probably never married. Some suppose that he was a widower. Jewish and rabbinical custom, the completeness of his moral character, his ideal conception of marriage as reflecting the mystical union of Christ with his church, his exhortations to conjugal, parental, and filial duties, seem to point to experimental knowledge of domestic life. But as a Christian missionary moving from place to place, and exposed to all sorts of hardship and persecution, he felt it his duty to abide alone.357 He sacrificed the blessings of home and family to the advancement of the kingdom of Christ.358 His "bodily presence was weak, and his speech contemptible" (of no value), in the superficial judgment of the Corinthians, who missed the rhetorical ornaments, yet could not help admitting that his "letters were weighty and strong."359  Some of the greatest men have been small in size, and some of the purest souls forbidding in body. Socrates was the homeliest, and yet the wisest of Greeks. Neander, a converted Jew, like Paul, was short, feeble, and strikingly odd in his whole appearance, but a rare humility, benignity, and heavenly aspiration beamed from his face beneath his dark and bushy eyebrows. So we may well imagine that the expression of Paul’s countenance was highly intellectual and spiritual, and that he looked "sometimes like a man and sometimes like an angel."360 He was afflicted with a mysterious, painful, recurrent, and repulsive physical infirmity, which he calls a "thorn in the flesh, " and which acted as a check upon spiritual pride and self-exultation over his abundance of revelations.361  He bore the heavenly treasure in an earthly vessel and his strength was made perfect in weakness.362  But all the more must we admire the moral heroism which turned weakness itself into an element of strength, and despite pain and trouble and persecution carried the gospel salvation triumphantly from Damascus to Rome. ~ Philip Schaff,
1493:Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
1494:There are certain men who are sacrosanct in history; you touch on the truth of them at your peril. These are such men as Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, Martel and Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and William of Falaise, St. Louis and Richard and Tancred, Erasmus and Bacon, Galileo and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Harvey and Darwin, Nelson and Wellington. In America, Penn and Franklin, Jefferson and Jackson and Lee. There are men better than these who are not sacrosanct, who may be challenged freely. But these men may not be. Albert Pike has been elevated to this sacrosanct company, though of course to a minor rank. To challenge his rank is to be overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse, and we challenge him completely.

Looks are important to these elevated. Albert Pike looked like Michelangelo's Moses in contrived frontier costume. Who could distrust that big man with the great beard and flowing hair and godly glance?
If you dislike the man and the type, then he was pompous, empty, provincial and temporal, dishonest, and murderous. But if you like the man and the type, then he was impressive, untrammeled, a man of the right place and moment, flexible or sophisticated, and firm.
These are the two sides of the same handful of coins.
He stole (diverted) Indian funds and used them to bribe doubtful Indian leaders. He ordered massacres of women and children (exemplary punitive operations). He lied like a trooper (he was a trooper). He effected assassinations (removal of semi-military obstructions). He forged names to treaties (astute frontier politics). He was part of a weird plot by men of both the North and South to extinguish the Indians whoever should win the war (devotion to the ideal of national growth ) . He personally arranged twelve separate civil wars among the Indians (the removal of the unfit) . After all, those were war years; and he did look like Moses, and perhaps he sounded like him. ~ R A Lafferty,
1495:A Jaynesian understanding of consciousness and its implications for rhetoric also helps explain the deep distrust of rhetoric that emerges at the same time rhetoric itself does. From the first writings overtly discussing persuasion as a civic art, we also see attacks on rhetoric as a practice that disregards the truth, can make what is bad seem good, and has an uncanny power to enrapture an audience. One of the best examples of this sort of skepticism is in Plato's dialog The Menexenus, in which Socrates describes the effects of hearing a speech praising the virtues of Athens. Although he knows that much of what the speaker says is exaggeration and distortion, Socrates says he felt himself transported to another realm — an "out of body" experience that affects his very perception of the world around him. The usual understanding of this sort of allegation about rhetoric's spellbinding power over an audience is that it is simply a poetic description of the sensation that we all experience today: the ability of powerful words to move us in unexpected ways, ways that often go beyond the logical or didactic. But I suggest that if Jaynes is right about the time frame for the development of consciousness, such descriptions by rhetoric's critics may be less poetic than usually thought, and much closer to the actual experience of early audiences of the relatively new art of rhetoric. If full consciousness in Greece emerged only after the Homeric era, would we not expect that for several generations after its advent, the power of language would indeed seem mysterious, almost mystical? Wouldn’t there continue to be a collective social memory of language as something that came from the gods? I suggest that the early apprehension about rhetoric’s near magical powers are not simply metaphorical amplifications, but descriptions of how audiences, only lately emerging from a bicameral world, would have experienced hearing an orator with the ability to artfully use language to move them. ~ Marcel Kuijsten,
1496:...he asked, "Where are you today, right now?"
Eagerly, I started talking about myself. However, I noticed that I was still being sidetracked from getting answers to my questions. Still, I told him about my distant and recent past and about my inexplicable depressions. He listened patiently and intently, as if he had all the time in the world, until I finished several hours later.
"Very well," he said. "But you still have not answered my question about where you are."
"Yes I did, remember? I told you how I got to where I am today: by hard work."
"Where are you?"
"What do you mean, where am I?"
"Where Are you?" he repeated softly.
"I'm here."
"Where is here?"
"In this office, in this gas station!" I was getting impatient with this game.
"Where is this gas station?"
"In Berkeley?"
"Where is Berkeley?"
"In California?"
"Where is California?"
"In the United States?"
"On a landmass, one of the continents in the Western Hemisphere. Socrates, I..."
"Where are the continents?
I sighed. "On the earth. Are we done yet?"
"Where is the earth?"
"In the solar system, third planet from the sun. The sun is a small star in the Milky Way galaxy, all right?"
"Where is the Milky Way?"
"Oh, brother, " I sighed impatiently, rolling my eyes. "In the universe." I sat back and crossed my arms with finality.
"And where," Socrates smiled, "is the universe?"
"The universe is well, there are theories about how it's shaped..."
"That's not what I asked. Where is it?"
"I don't know - how can I answer that?"
"That is the point. You cannot answer it, and you never will. There is no knowing about it. You are ignorant of where the universe is, and thus, where you are. In fact, you have no knowledge of where anything is or of What anything is or how is came to be. Life is a mystery.
"My ignorance is based on this understanding. Your understanding is based on ignorance. This is why I am a humorous fool, and you are a serious jackass. ~ Dan Millman,
1497:Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise even although I am not wise when they want to reproach you. If you had waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive, and not far from death. I am speaking now only to those of you who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to say to them: You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words - I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words - certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me, and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken them. And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of death, and they, too, go their ways condemned by the truth to suffer the penalty of villainy and wrong; and I must abide by my award - let them abide by theirs. I suppose that these things may be regarded as fated, - and I think that they are well. ~ Plato,
1498:Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Lao-tsze, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza’s? Was his brain equal to Kepler’s or Newton’s? Was he grander in death – a sublimer martyr than Bruno? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race? ~ Robert G Ingersoll,
1499:Suppose... that you acquit me... Suppose that, in view of this, you said to me 'Socrates, on this occasion we shall disregard Anytus and acquit you, but only on one condition, that you give up spending your time on this quest and stop philosophizing. If we catch you going on in the same way, you shall be put to death.' Well, supposing, as I said, that you should offer to acquit me on these terms, I should reply 'Gentlemen, I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you; and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet. I shall go on saying, in my usual way, "My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?" And if any of you disputes this and professes to care about these things, I shall not at once let him go or leave him; no, I shall question him and examine him and test him; and if it appears that in spite of his profession he has made no real progress towards goodness, I shall reprove him for neglecting what is of supreme importance, and giving his attention to trivialities. I shall do this to everyone that I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow-citizen; but especially to you my fellow-citizens, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kinship. This, I do assure you, is what my God commands; and it is my belief that no greater good has ever befallen you in this city than my service to my God; for I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and chief concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls, proclaiming as I go 'Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the State.' ...And so, gentlemen, I would say, 'You can please yourselves whether you listen to Anytus or not, and whether you acquit me or not; you know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths. ~ Socrates,
1500:I pity those reviewers above, and people like them, who ridicule authors like R.A. Boulay and other proponents of similar Ancient Astronaut theories, simply for putting forth so many interesting questions (because that's really what he often throughout openly admits is all he does does) in light of fascinating and thought-provoking references which are all from copious sources.
Some people will perhaps only read the cover and introduction and dismiss it as soon as any little bit of information flies in the face of their beliefs or normalcy biases. Some of those people, I'm sure, are some of the ones who reviewed this book so negatively without any constructive criticism or plausible rebuttal. It's sad to see how programmed and indoctrinated the vast majority of humanity has become to the ills of dogma, indoctrination, unverified status quos and basic ignorance; not to mention the laziness and conformity that results in such acquiescence and lack of critical thinking or lack of information gathering to confirm or debunk something. Too many people just take what's spoon fed to them all their lives and settle for it unquestioningly. For those people I like to offer a great Einstein quote and one of my personal favorites and that is:
"Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance"
I found this book to be a very interesting gathering of information and collection of obscure and/or remote antiquated information, i.e. biblical, sacred, mythological and otherwise, that we were not exactly taught to us in bible school, or any other public school for that matter. And I am of the school of thought that has been so for intended purposes.
The author clearly cites all his fascinating sources and cross-references them rather plausibly. He organizes the information in a sequential manner that piques ones interest even as he jumps from one set of information to the next. The information, although eclectic as it spans from different cultures and time periods, interestingly ties together in several respects and it is this synchronicity that makes the information all the more remarkable.
For those of you who continue to seek truth and enlightenment because you understand that an open mind makes for and lifelong pursuit of such things I leave you with these Socrates quotes:
"True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. ~ Socrates,

IN CHAPTERS [104/104]



   28 Integral Yoga
   27 Philosophy
   19 Christianity
   7 Poetry
   7 Occultism
   5 Psychology
   4 Fiction
   2 Science
   1 Yoga
   1 Integral Theory
   1 Education
   1 Baha i Faith


   19 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   12 Sri Aurobindo
   12 Plotinus
   12 Plato
   6 Carl Jung
   4 Saint Augustine of Hippo
   4 Percy Bysshe Shelley
   3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   3 Aldous Huxley
   3 A B Purani
   2 Friedrich Nietzsche
   2 Aleister Crowley


   6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   4 The Secret Doctrine
   4 Shelley - Poems
   4 City of God
   3 The Problems of Philosophy
   3 The Perennial Philosophy
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
   3 Mysterium Coniunctionis
   3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
   2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   2 Symposium
   2 Magick Without Tears
   2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07


01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulsesit is these of which the poets sang in their infinite variations. But the mind proper, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Metaphysicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern intellectual or rather rational intelligence is something other, something more than that. Even the metaphysics that was commandeered here had more or less a decorative value, it could not be taken into the pith and substance of poetic truth and beauty. It was a decoration, but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this connection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual experience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his au thentic followers the movement came to the forefront of human consciousness and attained the proportions of a major member of man's psychological constitution. We may remember here that Socrates, who started a similar movement of rationalisation in his own way in Europe, was almost a contemporary of the Buddha.
   Poetry as an expression of thought-power, poetry weighted with intelligence and rationalised knowledge that seems to me to be the end and drive, the secret sense of all the mystery of modern technique. The combination is risky, but not impossible. In the spiritual domain the Gita achieved this miracle to a considerable degree. Still, the power of intelligence and reason shown by Vyasa is of a special order: it is a sublimated function of the faculty, something aloof and other-worldly"introvert", a modern mind would term it that is to say, something a priori, standing in its own au thenticity and self-sufficiency. A modern intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more matter-of-fact and sense-based: the mental light should not be confined in its ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought down and placed at the service of our perception and appreciation and explanation of things human and terrestrial; made immanent in the mundane and the ephemeral, as they are commonly called. This is not an impossibility. Sri Aurobindo seems to have done the thing. In him we find the three terms of human consciousness arriving at an absolute fusion and his poetry is a wonderful example of that fusion. The three terms are the spiritual, the intellectual or philosophical and the physical or sensational. The intellectual, or more generally, the mental, is the intermediary, the Paraclete, as he himself will call it later on in a poem9 magnificently exemplifying the point we are trying to make out the agent who negotiates, bridges and harmonises the two other firmaments usually supposed to be antagonistic and incompatible.

01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mentalwhich is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activitiesserves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contri buting factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the present-day demand.
   The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and other where. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.

01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds.
   However, we are concerned more with the immediate past, the mentality that laid its supreme stress upon the human rationality. What that epoch did not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were draison. The human attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his humanity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated into other more powerful faculties.

01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Socrates is said to have brought down Philosophy from Heaven to live among men upon earth. A similar exploit can be ascribed to Tagore. The Spirit, the bare transcendental Reality contemplated by the orthodox Vedantins, has been brought nearer to our planet, close to human consciousness in Tagore's vision, being clothed in earth and flesh and blood, made vivid with the colours and contours of the physical existence. The Spirit, yes and by all means, but not necessarily asceticism and monasticism. So Tagore boldly declared in those famous lines of his:
   Mine is not the deliverance achieved through mere renunciation. Mine rather the freedom that tastes itself in a thousand associations.1

03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him.2 It is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this however an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps Socrates whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely, the genesis should be ascribed rather to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.
   Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance. It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature as it was positive and affirmative. For its fundamental character that which gave it its very namewas a protest against, a turning away from whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.

03.04 - The Other Aspect of European Culture, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Even the still more ancient Grco-Latin Europe which was not, to a general and apparent view, quite spiritual or other-worldly, was yet not so exclusively materialistic and profane as modern Europe. Classical culture was rationalistic, without doubt; but that rationalism was the function of a sublimated intelligence and a refined sensibility and served as a vehicle for a Higher Perceptiona ratiocinative and ultra-logical mind, like that of Socrates, could yet be so passive and upgazing as to receive and obey the commandments of a Dmon; whereas the rationalism, which is in vogue today and to which orthodox Scientism has affixed its royal sign manual, is the product of mere brain-power, vigorous but crude, of an intellect shut up in its self-complacent cunningness, obfuscated by its infinite but shallow inquisitiveness.
   And the secret soul of this Classical culture was not inherited by those who professed to be its champions and adorers the torch-bearers of the New Enlightenment; no, its direct descendants were to be found among the builders of the Christian civilization. Plato and Pythagoras and Heraclitus and the initiates to the Orphic and the Eleusinian mysteries continued to live in and through Plotinus and Anselm and Paracelsus and the long line of Christian savants and sages. The Middle Age had its own spiritual discoveries and achievements founded on the Cult of the Christ; to these it added what it could draw and assimilate from the mystic and spiritual traditions of the Grco-Latin world. The esoteric discipline of the Jewish Kabala also was not without influence in shaping the more secret undercurrents of Europe's creative and formative genius. The composite culture which they grew and developed had undisputed empire over Europe for some ten or twelve centuries; and it was nothing, if not at heart a spiritual and religious and other-worldly culture.

03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him. It is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this, however, an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps the father of European culture itself, Socrates, whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely the genesis should be ascribed to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.
   Humanism proper was bornor rebornwith the Renaissance.It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature, on one side, as it was positive and affirmative on the other. For its fundamental character that which gave it its Very namewas a protest against a turning away from, whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.

03.10 - The Mission of Buddhism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Yes, it was the age, almost a golden age, when man lived with his sense married to the Dawn, spontaneous in his reflexes, prime-sautier, intuitive and imaginative, full of a natural, unspoilt, unsophisticated happiness and hopefulness. But the Age of Reason had to come, and man's maturer nature, perhaps some "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought". Such an age of Reason and Ratiocination and pure brain power was ushered in by Buddha in India, and almost contemporaneously by Socrates in Greece and Confucius in China. The rational, that is to say, the scientific or analytical attitude to things appeared in the human consciousness for the first time in its fullness and almost exclusive sway. Neither the Vedas nor the Upanishads knew of logic as an instrumenta necessary instrument for knowledge and expression. The old-world method was, as I said, intuitive, experiential, empirical, dogmatic. Also the atmosphere of that world, the stress of the consciousness was theocratic; what the new world brought in was what is called humanistic.
   We say then that it was a necessity: it was a necessity that the rational, logical, ratiocinative, analytic mentality should be brought out and given its play and place. It is perhaps an inferior power of the mind or consciousness, but it is a strong power and has its use and utility. It is the power that gives the form and pattern for the display of consciousness and intelligence in outward expression and external living; it is a firm weapon that gives control over these inferior ranges of consciousness. The leap from the sense-consciousness or the elements of consciousness, from a mental growth just adequate and not too specialised, straight into the supra-sensuous and the transcendent had been an inevitable necessity, so that the human consciousness might get the first taste of its supreme status and value: a similar necessity brought to the fore this element of the mind, the mind's own powerof judgement and willso that there might be a greater and wider integration of human nature and also that the higher realities may be captured in our normal consciousness. Even for the withdrawal of the mind from the outer objects to the inner sources, the mind itself can be used with much effect. And Buddha showed it magnificently. And of course, Shankara too who followed in his footsteps.

03.16 - The Tragic Spirit in Nature, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   A Jeanne d'Arc, another glorious creature, Deliverer of France, the sweetest thing that ever put on a human body, was burnt as a witch. Socrates had to drink the hemlock for having brought down heavenly knowledge upon earth. The Christ, God's own son and beloved, perished on the Cross. Krishna, the Avatara, was killed by a chance arrow; and Arjuna, the peerless hero of Kurukshetra, Krishna's favourite, had to see days when he could not even lift his own bow with which he once played havoc. And in our own days, a Ramakrishna, who could cure souls could not cure his own cancer. This is the tears of thingsspoken of by a great poet the tragedy that is lodged in the hearts of things.
   There runs a pessimistic vein in Nature's movement. Due to the original Inconscience out of which she is built and also because of a habit formed through millenniums it is not possible for her to expect or envisage anything else than decay, death and frustration in the end or on the whole. To every rise there must be a fall, a crest must end in a trough. Nature has not the courage nor the faculty to look for any kind of perfection upon earth. Not that within her realm one cannot or should not try for the good; the noble, even the perfect, but one must be ready to pay the price. Good there is and may be, but it is suffered only on payment of its Danegeld to Evil. That is the law of sacrifice that seems to be fundamental to Nature's governance.

04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The appearance of the Greeks on the stage of human civilisation is a mystery to historians. They are so different from all that preceded them. There does not seem to exist any logical link between them and the races from whom they are supposed to have descended or whose successors they were. The Minoan or Cretan civilisation is said to be cradle of the Greek, but where is the parallel or proportion between the two, judging from whatever relics have been left over from the older, the more ancient one. Indeed that is the term which best describes the situation. Whatever has gone before the Hellenic culture is ancient; they belong to the Old Regime. Egypt is old, Phoenicia is old, the Hebrews are old, all the other races of the old world are old, not merely chronologically, but psychologically. But Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato are still the presiding gods ruling over the human spirit that was born on Olympus and Ida.
   Human evolution took a decisive turn with the advent of the Hellenic culture and civilisation. All crises in evolution are a sudden revelation, an unexpected outburst, a saltum, a leap into the unknown. Now, what the Greeks brought in was the Mind, the luminous Reason, the logical faculty that is married to the senses, no doubt, but still suffused with an inner glow of consciousness. It is the faculty mediating between a more direct and immediate perception of things, Intuition and Instinct, on the one hand, and on the other, the perception given by the senses and a power of control over material things. Take Egypt or Israel or Chaldea, what one finds prominent there is the instinctive-intuitive man, spontaneousprime-sautierimaginative, mythopoeic, clairvoyant, clairaudient (although not very clear, in the modern and Greek sense), bringing into this world things of the other world and pushing this world as much as possible into the other, maintaining a kind of direct connection and communion between the two. The Greeks are of another mould. They are a rational people; they do not move and act simply or mainly by instinctive reactions, but even these are filtered in them through a light of the Mind of Intelligence, a logical pattern, a rational disposition of things; through Mind they seek to know Matter and to control it. It is the modern methodology, that of observation and experiment, in other words, the scientific procedure. The Greeks have had their gods, their mythology; but these are modelled somewhat differently: the gods are made more human, too human, as has often been observed. Zeus and Juno (Hera) are infinitely more human than Isis and Osiris or Moloch and Baal or even the Jewish Jehovah. These vital gods have a sombre air about them, solemn and serious, grim and powerful, but they have not the sunshine, the radiance and smile of Apollo (Apollo Belvedere) or Hermes. The Greeks might have, they must have taken up their gods from a more ancient Pantheon, but they have, after the manner of their sculptor Phidias, remoulded them, shaped and polished them, made them more luminous and nearer and closer to earth and men. 1 Was it not said of Socrates that he brought down the gods from heaven upon earth?
   The intermediary faculty the Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities. There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure, establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic Dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Grco-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues the tradition.
  --
   In India we meet a characteristic movement. As I said the Vedas represented the Mythic Age, the age when knowledge was gained or life moulded and developed through Vision and Revelation (Sruti, direct Hearing). The Upanishadic Age followed next. Here we may say the descending light touched the higher reaches of the Mind, the mind of pure, fundamental, typical ideas. The consciousness divested itself of much of the mythic and parabolic apparel and, although supremely immediate and intuitive, yet was bathed with the light of the day, the clear sunshine of the normal wakeful state. The first burgeoning of the Rational Mind proper, the stress of intellect and intellectuality started towards the end of the Upanishadic Age with the Mahabharata, for example and the Brahmanas. It flowered in full vigour, however, in the earlier philosophical schools, the Sankhyas perhaps, and in the great Buddhist illuminationBuddha being, we note with interest, almost a contemporary of Socrates and also of the Chinese philosopher or moralist Confuciusa triumvirate almost of mighty mental intelligence ruling over the whole globe and moulding for an entire cycle human culture and destiny. The very name Buddha is significant. It means, no doubt, the Awakened, but awakened in and through the intelligence, the mental Reason, buddhi. The Buddhist tradition is that the Buddhist cycle, the cycle over which Buddha reigns is for two thousand and five hundred years since his withdrawal which takes us, it seems, to about 1956 A.D.
   The Veda speaks of Indra who became later on the king of the gods. And Zeus too occupies the same place in Greek Pantheon. Indra is, as has been pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, the Divine Mind, the leader of thought-gods (Maruts), the creator of perfect forms, in which to clo the our truth-realisations in life. The later traditional Indra in India and the Greek Zeus seem to be formulations on a lower level of the original archetypal Indra, where the consciousness was more mentalised, intellectualised, made more rational, sense-bound, external, pragmatic. The legend of Athena being born straight out of the head of Zeus is a pointer as to the nature and character of the gods. The Roman name for Athena, Minerva, is significantly derived by scholars from Latin mens, which means, as we all know, mind.

04.03 - The Eternal East and West, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The East does not consider the individual in his social behaviour in terms of freedom and liberty but of service and obligation, not in terms of rights but of duties. The Indian term for right and duty is the sameadhikar. The word originally and usually meant duty, one's sphere of work or service, capacity: the meaning of "right" was secondary and only latterly, probably as a result of the impact from the West, has gained predominance. The West measures human progress by the amount of rights gained for the individual or for the group. It does not seem to have any other standard: submission, obedience, any diminution of the sense of separate individuality meant slavery and loss of human value and dignity. It was the Greek perhaps, with Socrates as the great pioneer, who first declared the supremacy of the individual reason (although he himself obeyed in all things his guardian angel, the Daemon). In India, generally in the East, the value of the individual is estimated in another way. So long as he is in the society, the individual is bound by its demands: he has to serve it according to his best capacity. That is the dharma the Law that one has to observe conscientiously. But if he chooses, he can break the bonds forthwith, come out, come out of the society altogether and be free absolutely that is the only meaning of freedom. In the West the individual is taught to remain in the world and with the society, maintain his individuality and independence and gradually enlarge them in and through the natural fetters and bondages that a collective life and efficient organisation demands and inevitably imposes. The East, on the contrary, asks the individual never to protest and assert his individuality, which is in their view only another name for Ignorant egoism, but to know his position in the social scheme and fulfil the duties and obligations of that position. But the individual has the freedom not to enter into the social frame at all. If he chooses freedom as his ideal, it is the supreme freedom that he must choose, out of the chain of a terrestrial life. He can become the spiritual "outlaw", the sanysi, the word means one who has abandoned everything totally and absolutely.
   The contrast points to a synthesis parallel to or an extension of the one we spoke of earlier. The first thing to note is that the individual is the source of all progress; the individual has the right, as it is also his duty to maintain himself and fulfil himself, grow to his largest and highest dimensions! Secondly, the individual has to take cognisance of the others, the whole humanity, in fact, even for the sake of his own progress. The individual is not an isolated entity, a freak product in Nature, but is integrated into it, a part and parcel of its texture and composition. Indeed the individual has a double role to perform, first to increase himself and secondly to increase others. Using the terms which the Sartrian view of existence has put into vogue, we can say, the individual en soi (in himself) is the individual in commonalty with others, living and moving in and through every other person; and then there is the individual pour soi (for himself), that is to say, existing for himself, apart and away from others, in his own inner absolute autonomy. The individual is individualised, i.e. raises and lifts himself and then becomes the spearhead breaking through the level where Nature stands fixed, leading others to follow and raise themselves. The individual is the power of organised self-consciousness; the growth of the individual means the growth of this power of organised consciousness. And growth means ascension or evolution from level to level. The individual starts from the organic cell, that is the lower end, it progresses through various gradations of the vital and mental worlds till he reaches the culmination of its growth in the Spirit as tman. But this vertical growth must be reflected in a horizontal growth too. There is a solidarity among the individuals forming the collective humanity so that the progress of one means the progress of others in the same direction, at least a chance and possibility opened for an advance. On the other hand, it may be noted that unless the collectivity rises to a certain level the individual too cannot go very far from it. A higher lift in the individual presupposes a corresponding or some minimum lift in others. There cannot or should not be too great a rift between the individual and the collective.

05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Man possesses characters that mark him as an entity sui generis and give him the value that is his. First, toil and suffering and more failures than success have given him the quality of endurance and patience, of humility and quietness. That is the quality of earth-natureearth is always spoken of by the poets and seers as all-bearing and all-forgiving. She never protests under any load put upon her, never rises in revolt, never in a hurry or in worry, she goes on with her appointed labour silently, steadily, calmly, unflinchingly. Human consciousness can take infinite pains, go through the infinite details of execution, through countless repetitions and mazes: patience and perseverance are the very badge and blazon of the tribe. Ribhus, the artisans of immortalitychildren of Mahasaraswatiwere originally men, men who have laboured into godhood. Human nature knows to wait, wait infinitely, as it has all the eternity before it and can afford and is prepared to continue and persist life after life. I do not say that all men can do it and are of this nature; but there is this essential capacity in human nature. The gods, who are usually described as the very embodiment of calmness and firmness, of a serene and concentrated will to achieve, nevertheless suffer ill any delay or hindrance to their work. Man has not perhaps the even tenor, the steadiness of their movement, even though intense and fast flowing; but what man possesses is persistence through ups and downshis path is rugged with rise and fall, as the poet says. The steadiness or the staying power of the gods contains something of the nature of indifference, something hard in its grain, not unlike a crystal or a diamond. But human patience, when it has formed and taken shape, possesses a mellowness, an understanding, a sweet reasonableness and a resilience all its own. And because of its intimacy with the tears of things, because of its long travail and calvary, human consciousness is suffused with a quality that is peculiarly human and humane that of sympathy, compassion, comprehension, the psychic feeling of closeness and oneness. The gods are, after all, egoistic; unless in their supreme supramental status where they are one and identical with the Divine himself; on the lower levels, in their own domains, they are separate, more or less immiscible entities, as it were; greater stress is laid here upon their individual functioning and fulfilment than upon their solidarity. Even if they have not the egoism of the Asuras that sets itself in revolt and antagonism to the Divine, still they have to the fullest extent the sense of a separate mission that each has to fulfil, which none else can fulfil and so each is bound rigidly to its own orbit of activity. There is no mixture in their workingsna me thate, as the Vedas say; the conflict of the later gods, the apple of discord that drove each to establish his hegemony over the rest, as narrated in the mythologies and popular legends, carry the difference to a degree natural to the human level and human modes and reactions. The egoism of the gods may have the gait of aristocracy about it, it has the aloofness and indifference and calm nonchalance that go often with nobility: it has a family likeness to the egoism of an ascetic, of a saintit is sttwic; still it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve than the violent and ebullient rjasicpride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism is thwarted at every stepfrom outside, by, the force of circumstances, the force of counter-egoisms, and from inside, for there is there the thin little voice that always cuts across egoism's play and takes away from it something of its elemental blind momentum. The gods know not of this division in their nature, this schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and Amitabha, the soul of pity and compassion are peculiarly human phenomena. They are not merely human weaknesses and failings that are to be brushed aside with a godlike disdain; but they contain and yield a deeper sap of life and out of them a richer fulfilment is being elaborated.
   Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of light and shademore shade perhaps than lightof knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life accurately and beautifully and perfectly.

10.07 - The World is One, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Coming next to Mind, the unity here too, is quite marked, clearly discernible. There is only one Mind that rules the myriad mentalities of this world. Thoughts and ideas are not in reality personal creations, they are various formulations of the one universal Mind; they enter into and possess individual minds as receptacles, and no doubt in the process undergo particular modifications in their general character. It is a very common experience to see the same or very similar ideas and thoughts expressed by individuals (or groups) living far from each other, having practically no mutual contact. We have known of "independent discoveries" of the same truth or fact and innumerable instances of this kind has history provided for us. It is not a freak of nature that we find Socrates and Buddha and Confucius as contemporaries. Contemporaries also were India's Akbar, England's Elizabeth and Italy's Leo X. Also the year 1905 has been known as Annus Mirabilis, a year of seminal importance the sowing of the seed of a new earth-lifesignificant for the whole human race, for the East and for the West, particularly for India, for Japan, for Russia and even for England. And today's world has indeed become a world of compact unity in human achievement and also alas, in human distress!
   Now if one goes to the very source, the very root of the matter, the cardinal fact of unity is that of the supreme Consciousness, the original oneness of the one Divine Existence. It is the Ultimate One, inviolate, inviolableekam sat. That unity is transferred or translated or imaged on all the levels and strands of creation. That is the basic reality that holds together all tiered multiplicities. True, there has been side by side a movement of aberration, denial, disjunction in the multiple formulations and translations of the One. A reunion remains to be achieved conveying and embodying the basic unity.

1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  ascetic schools referring back to Socrates, and Neoplaton-
  ism. Gnosticism also enriched itself with Hermetism, and

1.02 - THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  object:1.02 - THE PROBLEM OF Socrates
  class:chapter
  --
  THE PROBLEM OF Socrates
  In all ages the wisest have always agreed in their V judgment of
  --
  weariness of life, full of hostility to life. Even Socrates' dying
  words were:--"To live--means to be ill a long while: I owe a cock to
  the god sculapius." Even Socrates had had enough of it. What does that
  prove? What does it point to? Formerly people would have said (--oh,
  --
  wise? Let me however return to the problem of Socrates.
  To judge from his origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest of the low:
   Socrates was mob. You know, and you can still see it for yourself,
  --
  almost a refutation among the Greeks. Was Socrates really a Greek?
  Ugliness is not infrequently the expression of thwarted development,
  --
  Was Socrates a typical criminal?--At all events this would not clash
  with that famous physiognomist's judgment which was so repugnant to
  --
  who was no fool at judging by looks, told Socrates to his face that
  he was a monster, that his body harboured all the worst vices and
  passions. And Socrates replied simply: "You know me, sir!"--
  Not only are the acknowledged wildness and anarchy of Socrates'
  instincts indicative of decadence, but also that preponderance of the
  --
  which were religiously interpreted as "the demon of Socrates."
  Everything in him is exaggerated, _buffo,_ caricature, his nature is
  --
  With Socrates Greek taste veers round in favour of dialectics: what
  actually occurs? In the first place a noble taste is vanquished:
  with dialectics the mob comes to the top. Before Socrates' time,
  dialectical manners were avoided in good society: they were regarded
  --
  People laugh at him, they do not take him seriously. Socrates was a
  clown who succeeded in making men take him seriously: what then was the
  --
  the Fox was a dialectician: what?--and was Socrates one as well?
  Is the Socratic irony an expression of revolt, of mob resentment?
  Does Socrates, as a creature suffering under oppression, enjoy his
  innate ferocity in the knife-thrusts of the syllogism? Does he wreak
  --
  it be that dialectics was only a form of revenge in Socrates?
  I have given you to understand in what way Socrates was able to repel:
  now it is all the more necessary to explain how he fascinated.--One
  --
  variation into the contests between men and youths. Socrates was also a
  great erotic.
  But Socrates divined still more. He saw right through his noble
  Athenians; he perceived that his case, his peculiar case, was no
  --
  preparing itself everywhere: ancient Athens was dying out. And Socrates
  understood that the whole world needed him,--his means, his remedy, his
  --
  they." On the occasion when that physiognomist had unmasked Socrates,
  and had told him what he was, a crater full of evil desires, the great
  --
  did Socrates succeed in mastering himself? His case was at bottom only
  the extreme and most apparent example of a state of distress which
  --
  When a man finds it necessary, as Socrates did, to create a tyrant out
  of reason, there is no small danger that something else wishes to play
  the tyrant. Reason was then discovered as a saviour; neither Socrates
  nor his "patients" were at liberty to be rational or not, as they
  --
  I have now explained how Socrates fascinated: he seemed to be a
  doctor, a Saviour. Is it necessary to expose the errors which lay in
  --
  they do not abolish it Socrates was a misunderstanding. _The whole
  of the morality of amelioration--that of Christianity as well--was
  --
  wisdom of his courage before death. Socrates wished to die. Not Athens,
  but his own hand gave him the draught of hemlock; he drove Athens to
  --
  "death alone can be a doctor here.... Socrates himself has only been ill
  a long while."

1.02 - The Vision of the Past, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  its environment or in itself. Socrates could have been born
  in the place of Descartes, and vice versa. Temporally (no

10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The liberation of the mind, at least the higher mind, as an instrument of expression for the human consciousness was achieved to a remarkable degree in the Upanishads generally, particularly in some, although the beginnings of it might be traced even in some of the earliest of the Vedic Riks. A serious and persistent attempt for this liberation was made later, in the age or rather ages of the Gita, the Mahabharata, the Darshanas. It was the rational spirit that impelled and inspired the Buddhist consciousness and in Europe it had its heyday in the age of Socrates and Plato. Those were intellectual ages and the intellect was trying to find and explore its own domain in its full and free power and sovereignty. And the human language too, as a necessary corollary was remoulded, remodelled, rationalised: it shook itself away as far as possible from the prejudices and prepossessions of the sense-bound mind. That is the inner story of the growth of language from the synthetic inflexional cohesive stage to its modern analytic discursive character.
   Still, however, it is not easy to completely ignore or efface the influence of a concrete truth, a fact which is at the basis of human birth the truth and fact of the body, of the external material objects. For example, how to express That which does not belong to this world, has not the measures of this body? The Upanishad has perforce to speak negatively of the Supreme positive Reality. It has to say, "It is not this, it is not this, it is quite other than all this, it has no parallel here below although it is the source and origin of all this." We have found some positive words indeedsat-cit-nanda; but the other key-word is a negative in structureamtam, not death. Immortality means not mortality, and ananta too is a negative expression. We remember the famous lines: Na tatra srya bhti etc.,1 it is a supreme revelation, it is supremely evocative but it is built up of negatives. The Vedic rishis followed a different line, as I said; they did not evade or reject the materials of a physical life, they boldly grasped them and used them as signs, symbols, embodiments of other truths and realities. They accepted the sun, the moon, the stars, man and woman, even the normal activities of life but they gave these quite a different connotation. They filled them with a new depth and density, a higher specific gravity.

1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
  89. The theme of divine madness has a long history. Its 10c1. .\s Classicus was Socrates's discussion of it in the Phaedrus: madness, provided it comes as a gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings (Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, tr. W Hamilton
  [London: Penguin, 1986], p. 46, line 244). Socrates distinguished four types of divine madness: (I) inspired divination, such as by the prophetess at Delphi; (2) instances in which individuals, when ancient sins have given rise to troubles, have prophesied and incited to prayer and worship; (3) possession by the Muses, since the technically skilled untouched by the madness of the Muses will never be a good poet; and (4) the lover. In the Renaissance, the theme of divine madness was talcen up by the Neoplatonists such as Ecino and by humanists such as Erasmus. Erasmus's discussion is particularly important, as it fuses the classical Platonic conception with Christianity.
  For Erasmus, Christianity was the highest type of inspired madness. Like Plato, Erasmus

1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
  Another complicated illness I was confronted with during this period was that of a sadhak. A typical Englishman, stiff but polite, a cultured, sensitive poet; the poor man had never enjoyed good health since his childhood and in later years was also mentally shaken. I had been treating him for chronic liver trouble, indigestion, etc., for some years before he had this illness. Either because of this, or by nature, he was none too optimistic. Besides, he had suffered from rheumatism and infantile paralysis too. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo knew his temperament very well and instructed me to look after him with a large consideration as they themselves had always done. He was turned into a fine poet by Sri Aurobindo's Force. I wonder how with such a poor health he managed to do Yoga. That, however, is none of my business. Failing to diagnose his illness, I called in other doctors, and as is often the case, opinions differed. Neither were there proper facilities for making specific tests in the hospital. He began to suffer from fever, jaundice, abscesses, joint pains, and a host of diverse complaints which made him extremely irritable. He pestered me like Socrates with all sorts of questions, the why and the how of his ailments, their remedy, and the last question, when would he be all right? I reported faithfully all this to the Mother and to Sri Aurobindo who would often side with him, appreciating his inquisitiveness and his refusal to gulp down docilely all that was given to him. When I told Sri Aurobindo that he would not allow his old dusty heaps of the journal, Manchester Guardian to be removed, Sri Aurobindo approved of his feelings. One day the Mother said, "Once when you were fanning Sri Aurobindo, I had a vision of the patient crying to you, 'Why don't you cure me?' "On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo had told me that the patient was disgusted with his ailing body and would like to leave it. We are made of many conflicting parts! My inner comment was: the Mother's occult sight could read all our movements. Only if she could always prescribe remedies! To that question Sri Aurobindo gave, in our correspondence, a rather evasive answer. He said, "Why do you want us to do your work?" Of course, I understood what he meant. There is a humorous episode connected with this patient's ailment, which will be interesting to note here. The Mother had advised me in my medical practice to develop the power of intuition. One of the methods I followed was to go into meditation and see, hear or feel something relating to a particular case. Now, in the present quandary, I tried the method; after a couple of failures, what I saw in the meditation was a brinjal! When I blurted it out to Sri Aurobindo and to my colleagues, they all roared with laughter. Thenceforth they would taunt me with "Nirod's brinjal intuition"!
  To end the sad story: the case was not showing any improvement; one after another complications began to develop. Above all, his outer consciousness failed to respond actively to the Force. The Mother saw that the only way that could save the patient was to send him to Bangalore where he could be treated by an efficient German doctor well-known to us, Sri Aurobindo asked me to prepare a clear and complete history of the patient's malady, let the Mother hear it and then send it to the doctor. When it was ready, I read it out to both of them. Sri Aurobindo commented, "Excellent!" I felt gratified. On receiving the report the doctor came down to take the patient. He concurred with our view that it must be a case of septicaemia. When the patient was being sent off, the Mother came and stood on her terrace waiting a long time for him. At last the car came before her and she and the patient looked at each other for quite a while. He had a premonition that he would not come back.

1.04 - The First Circle, Limbo Virtuous Pagans and the Unbaptized. The Four Poets, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. The Noble Castle of Philosophy., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
  There I beheld both Socrates and Plato,
  Who nearer him before the others stand;

1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  when she said: "Eros, dear Socrates, is a mighty daemon." The
  Greek words daimon and daimonion express a determining

1.05 - THE NEW SPIRIT, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  in itself. Socrates could have been born in the place of Descartes,
  and vice versa. Temporally (no less than spatially) human beings

1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  There can be no complete communism except in the goods of the spirit and, to some extent also, of the mind, and only when such goods are possessed by men and women in a state of non-attachment and self-denial. Some degree of mortification, it should be noted, is an indispensable prerequisite for the creation and enjoyment even of merely intellectual and aesthetic goods. Those who choose the profession of artist, philosopher, or man of science, choose, in many cases, a life of poverty and unrewarded hard work. But these are by no means the only mortifications they have to undertake. When he looks at the world, the artist must deny his ordinary human tendency to think of things in utilitarian, self-regarding terms. Similarly, the critical philosopher must mortify his commonsense, while the research worker must steadfastly resist the temptations to over-simplify and think conventionally, and must make himself docile to the leadings of mysterious Fact. And what is true of the creators of aesthetic and intellectual goods is also true of the enjoyers of such goods, when created. That these mortifications are by no means trifling has been shown again and again in the course of history. One thinks, for example, of the intellectually mortified Socrates and the hemlock with which his unmortified compatriots rewarded him. One thinks of the heroic efforts that had to be made by Galileo and his contemporaries to break with the Aristotelian convention of thought, and the no less heroic efforts that have to be made today by any scientist who believes that there is more in the universe than can be discovered by employing the time-hallowed recipes of Descartes. Such mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artistand the philosopher and the man of science are also artistsknows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession.
  The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking, feeling and fancying.

1.06 - Psychic Education, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  "The veiled psychic is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature... It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic... It is the individual soul, caitya purusa, supporting mind, life and body, standing behind the mental, the vital, the subtle-physical being in us and watching and profiting by their development and experience... It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature... If the secret psychic person can come forward into the front... the whole nature can be turned towards the real aim of life, the supreme victory, the ascent into spiritual existence."2
  ~ The Mother On Education

1.07 - On Our Knowledge of General Principles, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
  But the newness of the knowledge is much less certain if we take the stock instance of deduction that is always given in books on logic, namely, 'All men are mortal; Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.' In this case, what we really know beyond reasonable doubt is that certain men, A, B, C, were mortal, since, in fact, they have died.
  If Socrates is one of these men, it is foolish to go the roundabout way through 'all men are mortal' to arrive at the conclusion that _probably_
   Socrates is mortal. If Socrates is not one of the men on whom our induction is based, we shall still do better to argue straight from our
  A, B, C, to Socrates, than to go round by the general proposition, 'all men are mortal'. For the probability that Socrates is mortal is greater, on our data, than the probability that all men are mortal. (This is obvious, because if all men are mortal, so is Socrates; but if Socrates is mortal, it does not follow that all men are mortal.) Hence we shall reach the conclusion that Socrates is mortal with a greater approach to certainty if we make our argument purely inductive than if we go by way of 'all men are mortal' and then use deduction.
  This illustrates the difference between general propositions known _a priori_ such as 'two and two are four', and empirical generalizations such as 'all men are mortal'. In regard to the former, deduction is the right mode of argument, whereas in regard to the latter, induction is always theoretically preferable, and warrants a greater confidence in the truth of our conclusion, because all empirical generalizations are more uncertain than the instances of them.

1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But why, it might be asked, should each subjective order or stratum of consciousness necessarily involve the co-existence of a corresponding order of beings & objective world-stratum? For the modern mind, speculative & introspective like the Vedic, is yet speculative within the limits of sensational experience and therefore unable to believe in, even if it can conceive of existence, least of all of an objective existence under conditions different from those [with] which we are familiar and of which our senses assure us. We may therefore admit the profundity & subtlety of the subjective distinction, but we shall be apt to regard the belief in objective worlds & beings unseen by our senses as either an early poetic fancy or a crude superstition of savages. But the Vedic mentality, although perfectly rational, stood at the opposite pole of ideas from the modern and its subjective consciousness admitted a class of experiences which we reject and cut short the moment they begin to present themselves by condemning them as hallucinations. The idea of modern men that the ancients evolved their gods by a process of poetic imagination, is an error due to inability to understand an alien mentality & unwillingness to investigate from within those survivals of it which still subsist though with difficulty under modern conditions. Encouraging this order of phenomena, fostering & developing carefully the states of mind in which they were possible and the movements of mind & sense by which they were effected, the Vedic Rishis saw and communed with the gods and threw themselves into the worlds of which they had the conception. They believed in them for the same reason that Joan of Arc believed in her saints & her voices, Socrates in his daemon or Swedenborg in his spirits, because they had constant experience of them and of the validity both of the experiences and of the instruments of mind & sense by which they were maintained in operation. They would have answered a modern objector that they had as good a proof of them as the scientist has of the worlds & the different orders of life revealed to his optical nerve by microscope & telescope. Some of them might even question whether these scientific discoveries were not optical illusions due to the excitation of the nerve by the instruments utilised! We may, similarly, get rid of the Vedic experiences, disbelieve and discount them, saying that they missed one essential instrument of truth, the sceptical distrust of their instruments,but we cannot argue from them in the minds that received them a childish irrationality or a savage superstition. They trusted, like us, their experience, believed their mind & senses and argued logically from their premisses.
  It is true that apart from these experiences the existence of various worlds & different orders of beings was a logical necessity of the Vedic conception of existence. Existence being a life, a soul expressing itself in forms, every distinct order of consciousness, every stratum or sea of conscious-being (samudra, sindhu, apah as the Vedic thinkers preferred to call them) demanded its own order of objective experiences (lokas, worlds), tended inevitably to throw itself into forms of individualised being (vishah, ganah, prajah). Moreover, in a world so conceived, nothing could happen in this world without relation to some force or being in the worlds behind; nor could there be any material, vital or mental movement except as the expression of a life & a soul behind it. Everything here must be supported from the worlds of mind or it could not maintain its existence. From this idea to the peopling of the world with innumerable mental & vital existences,existences essentially vital like the Naiads, Dryads, Nereids, Genii, Lares & Penates of the Greeks and Romans, the wood-gods, river-gods, house-gods, tree-deities, snake-deities of the Indians, or mental like the intermediate gods of our old Pantheon, would be a natural and inevitable step. This Animism is a remarkably universal feature in the religious culture of the ancient world. I cannot accept the modern view that its survival in a crude form among the savages, those waifs & strays of human progress, is a proof of their low & savage originany more than the peculiarly crude ideas of Christianity that exist in uneducated negro minds [and] would survive in a still more degraded form if they were long isolated from civilised life, would be a proof to future research that Christianity originated from a cannibal tribe on the African continent. The idea is essentially a civilised conception proceeding from keen susceptibility & only possible after a meditative dwelling upon Naturenot different indeed in rank & order from Wordsworths experience of Nature which no one, I suppose, would consider an atavistic recrudescence of old savage mentality, and impossible to the animal man. The dog & crow who reason from their senses, do not stand in awe of inanimate objects, or of dawn & rain & shine or expect from them favours.

1.09 - SELF-KNOWLEDGE, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  The importance, the indispensable necessity, of self-knowledge has been stressed by the saints and doctors of every one of the great religious traditions. To us in the West, the most familiar voice is that of Socrates. More systematically than Socrates the Indian exponents of the Perennial Philosophy harped on the same theme. There is, for example, the Buddha, whose discourse on The Setting-Up of Mindfulness expounds (with that positively inexorable exhaustiveness characteristic of the Pali scriptures) the whole art of self-knowledge in all its branchesknowledge of ones body, ones senses, ones feelings, ones thoughts. This art of self-knowledge is practised with two aims in view. The proximate aim is that a brother, as to the body, continues so to look upon the body, that he remains ardent, self-possessed and mindful, having overcome both the hankering and dejection common in the world. And in the same way as to feelings, thoughts and ideas, he so looks upon each that he remains ardent, self-possessed and mindful, without hankering or dejection. Beyond and through this desirable psychological condition lies the final end of man, knowledge of that which underlies the individualized self. In their own vocabulary, Christian writers express the same ideas.
  A man has many skins in himself, covering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many things; he does not know himself. Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, just like an oxs or a bears, so thick and hard, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

1.1.05 - The Siddhis, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Siddhis, but recognised them as a part, though not the most important part of Yogic accomplishment, and used them with an abundant and unhesitating vigour. They are recognised in our sacred books, formally included in Yoga by so devotional a Purana as the Bhagawat, noted and some of their processes carefully tabled by Patanjali. Even in the midnight of the Kali great Siddhas and saints have used them more sparingly, but with power and effectiveness. It would be difficult for many of them to do otherwise than use the siddhis since by the very fact of their spiritual elevation, these powers have become not exceptional movements, but the ordinary processes of their thought and action. It is by the use of the siddhis that the Siddhas sitting on the mountains help the world out of the heart of their solitude and silence. Jesus Christ made the use of the siddhis a prominent feature of his pure, noble and spiritual life, nor did he hesitate to communicate them to his disciples - the laying of hands, the healing of the sick, the ashirvada, the abhishap, the speaking with many tongues were all given to them. The day of Pentecost is still kept holy by the Christian Church. Joan of Arc used her siddhis to liberate France. Socrates had his siddhis, some of them of a very material nature. Men of great genius are usually born with some of them and use them unconsciously. Even in natures far below the power and clarity of genius we see their occasional or irregular operation. The West, always avid of knowledge, is struggling, sadly hampered by misuse and imposture, to develop them and gropes roughly for the truth about them in the phenomena of hypnotism, clairvoyance, telepathy, vouched for by men and women of great intellectuality and sincerity. Returning
  Eastwards, where only their right practice has been understood, the lives of our saints northern and southern are full of the record of Siddhis. Sri Ramakrishna, whose authority is quoted against

1.11 - On Intuitive Knowledge, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
  But let us imagine some insistent Socrates, who, whatever reason we give him, continues to demand a reason for the reason. We must sooner or later, and probably before very long, be driven to a point where we cannot find any further reason, and where it becomes almost certain that no further reason is even theoretically discoverable. Starting with the common beliefs of daily life, we can be driven back from point to point, until we come to some general principle, or some instance of a general principle, which seems luminously evident, and is not itself capable of being deduced from anything more evident. In most questions of daily life, such as whether our food is likely to be nourishing and not poisonous, we shall be driven back to the inductive principle, which we discussed in Chapter VI. But beyond that, there seems to be no further regress. The principle itself is constantly used in our reasoning, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously; but there is no reasoning which, starting from some simpler self-evident principle, leads us to the principle of induction as its conclusion. And the same holds for other logical principles. Their truth is evident to us, and we employ them in constructing demonstrations; but they themselves, or at least some of them, are incapable of demonstration.
  Self-evidence, however, is not confined to those among general principles which are incapable of proof. When a certain number of logical principles have been admitted, the rest can be deduced from them; but the propositions deduced are often just as self-evident as those that were assumed without proof. All arithmetic, moreover, can be deduced from the general principles of logic, yet the simple propositions of arithmetic, such as 'two and two are four', are just as self-evident as the principles of logic.

1.12 - THE FESTIVAL AT PNIHTI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  M: "There once lived a man in Greece, Socrates by name. A voice from heaven said that he was wise among men. Socrates was amazed at this revelation. He meditated on it a long time in solitude and then realized its significance. He said to his friends, 'I alone of all people have understood that I do not know anything.' But every man believes he is wise. In reality all are ignorant."
  MASTER: "Now and then I think, 'What is it I know that makes so many people come to me?' Vaishnavcharan was a great pundit. He used to say to me: 'I can find in the scriptures all the things you talk about. But do you know why I come to you? I come to hear them from your mouth.' "

1.13 - Knowledge, Error, and Probably Opinion, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
   Socrates was a man, and I infer that Socrates was a Greek, I cannot be said to _know_ that Socrates was a Greek, because, although my premisses and my conclusion are true, the conclusion does not follow from the premisses.
  But are we to say that nothing is knowledge except what is validly deduced from true premisses? Obviously we cannot say this. Such a definition is at once too wide and too narrow. In the first place, it is too wide, because it is not enough that our premisses should be _true_, they must also be _known_. The man who believes that Mr. Balfour was the late Prime Minister may proceed to draw valid deductions from the true premiss that the late Prime Minister's name began with a B, but he cannot be said to _know_ the conclusions reached by these deductions.

1.13 - Under the Auspices of the Gods, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  what remained of pure communism? What remains even of Christ beneath the mass of dogmas and prohibitions? Socrates was poisoned,
  and Rimbaud fled to the Abyssinian desert; we know the fate of the Fourierists, of nonviolence; the Cathars wound up at the stake. History keeps turning like a Moloch. We may now appear to be a "triumph"

1.17 - Religion as the Law of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  We need not follow the rationalistic or atheistic mind through all its aggressive indictment of religion. We need not for instance lay a too excessive stress on the superstitions, aberrations, violences, crimes even, which Churches and cults and creeds have favoured, admitted, sanctioned, supported or exploited for their own benefit, the mere hostile enumeration of which might lead one to echo the cry of the atheistic Roman poet, To such a mass of ills could religion persuade mankind. As well might one cite the crimes and errors which have been committed in the name of liberty or of order as a sufficient condemnation of the ideal of liberty or the ideal of social order. But we have to note the fact that such a thing was possible and to find its explanation. We cannot ignore for instance the bloodstained and fiery track which formal external Christianity has left furrowed across the mediaeval history of Europe almost from the days of Constantine, its first hour of secular triumph, down to very recent times, or the sanguinary comment which such an institution as the Inquisition affords on the claim of religion to be the directing light and regulating power in ethics and society, or religious wars and wide-spread State persecutions on its claim to guide the political life of mankind. But we must observe the root of this evil, which is not in true religion itself, but in its infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration, but in our ignorant human confusion of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or Church. So strong is the human tendency to this error that even the old tolerant Paganism slew Socrates in the name of religion and morality, feebly persecuted non-national faiths like the cult of Isis or the cult of Mithra and more vigorously what it conceived to be the subversive and anti-social religion of the early Christians; and even in still more fundamentally tolerant Hinduism with all its spiritual broadness and enlightenment it led at one time to the milder mutual hatred and occasional though brief-lived persecution of Buddhist, Jain, Shaiva, Vaishnava.
  The whole root of the historic insufficiency of religion as a guide and control of human society lies there. Churches and creeds have, for example, stood violently in the way of philosophy and science, burned a Giordano Bruno, imprisoned a Galileo, and so generally misconducted themselves in this matter that philosophy and science had in self-defence to turn upon Religion and rend her to pieces in order to get a free field for their legitimate development; and this because men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religion was bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions about God and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny had to be put down by fire and sword; scientific and philosophical truth had to be denied in order that religious error might survive. We see too that a narrow religious spirit often oppresses and impoverishes the joy and beauty of life, either from an intolerant asceticism or, as the Puritans attempted it, because they could not see that religious austerity is not the whole of religion, though it may be an important side of it, is not the sole ethico-religious approach to God, since love, charity, gentleness, tolerance, kindliness are also and even more divine, and they forgot or never knew that God is love and beauty as well as purity. In politics religion has often thrown itself on the side of power and resisted the coming of larger political ideals, because it was itself, in the form of a Church, supported by power and because it confused religion with the Church, or because it stood for a false theocracy, forgetting that true theocracy is the kingdom of God in man and not the kingdom of a Pope, a priesthood or a sacerdotal class. So too it has often supported a rigid and outworn social system, because it thought its own life bound up with social forms with which it happened to have been associated during a long portion of its own history and erroneously concluded that even a necessary change there would be a violation of religion and a danger to its existence. As if so mighty and inward a power as the religious spirit in man could be destroyed by anything so small as the change of a social form or so outward as a social readjustment! This error in its many shapes has been the great weakness of religion as practised in the past and the opportunity and justification for the revolt of the intelligence, the aesthetic sense, the social and political idealism, even the ethical spirit of the human being against what should have been its own highest tendency and law.

1.201 - Socrates, #Symposium, #Plato, #Philosophy
  object:1.201 - Socrates
  author class:Plato
  --
  He is a great spirit,151 Socrates. All spirits are intermediate between god and mortal.
  What is the function of a spirit? I asked.
  --
  This, then, is the nature of that particular spirit, my dear Socrates.
  But there was nothing surprising in the view you held yourself about the nature of Love. Judging from what you say, I think you believed that Love was that which is loved, not that which loves. This is the reason, I suppose, why Love appeared to you to be supremely beautiful.
  --
  That is the next thing I will try to teach you, Socrates, she said. I have just described Loves nature and parentage. Also, he is love of beautiful things, according to you. But what if someone asked us, What does it mean, Socrates and Diotima, to say that Love is love of beautiful things? Or to put it more clearly: what does the lover167 of beautiful things actually desire?168
  To possess them, I replied.
  --
  Well, she said, suppose one changed the question and asked about the good instead of the beautiful: Come now, Socrates, what does the lover of good things actually desire?
  To possess the good things, I replied.
  --
  Why is it, then, Socrates, that if in fact all people always love the
  205b same things we do not describe all people as being in love, instead of saying that some are and that others are not?
  --
  Then I shall speak more clearly, she replied. All human beings are pregnant,176 Socrates, in body and in soul, and when we reach maturity it is natural that we desire to give birth. It is not possible to give birth in what is ugly,177 only in the beautiful. I say that because the intercourse of a man and a woman178 is a kind of giving birth. It is something divine, this process of pregnancy and procreation. It is an aspect of immortality in the otherwise mortal creature, and it cannot
  206d take place in what is discordant. Now, the ugly is not in accord with anything divine, whereas the beautiful accords well. So at this birth
  --
  206e there is much excitement at the presence of the beautiful because its possessor will deliver the pregnant one from great pain. For the object of love, Socrates, she said, is not, as you think, simply the beautiful.
  What, then?
  --
   by implanting a fresh memory in place of the one that is departing, preserves our knowledge so that it seems to be the same. In this way everything mortal is preserved, not by remaining entirely the same for ever, which is the mark of the divine, but by leaving behind another new thing of the same kind in the place of what is growing old and passing away. By this means, Socrates, she said, what is mortal-body and every creature else-partakes of immortality; but what is immortal does so differently. So do not be surprised that everything naturally values its own offspring. This universal zeal and love is for the sake of immortality.
  I was surprised to hear this speech. Well now, Diotima, I said. I know you are very wise, but is this really how things are? Like the perfect sophist183 she replied: Believe me, Socrates. You have only to look at humankinds love of honour and you will be surprised at your absurdity regarding the matters I have just mentioned, unless you think about it and reflect how strongly people are affected by the desire to become famous and to lay up immortal glory for all time.184 For the sake of this they are prepared to run risks even more than for their children spend their money, endure any kind of suffering, even die in the cause. Do you suppose, she went on, that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles would have sacrificed his life to avenge Patroclus, or your Athenian king Codrus would have perished before his time for the sake of his sons succession, if they had not thought that the memory of their virtue,185 which indeed we still have of them, would be immortal? Far from it, she said. I think that it is for the sake of immortal fame186 and this kind of glorious reputation187 that everyone strives to the utmost, and the better they are the more they strive: for they desire what is immortal.
  Those whose pregnancy is of the body, she went on, are drawn more towards women, and they express their love through the procreation of children, ensuring for themselves, they think, for all time to come, immortality and remembrance and happiness in this way. But
  --
  210a Socrates, might be initiated into. But for the final initiation and revelation, to which all this has been merely preliminary for someone on the right track, I am not sure if you have the capability. However I will do my utmost to explain to you, and you must try to follow if you can.
  A person who would set out on this path in the right way must begin in youth by directing his attention to beautiful bodies, and first of all, if his guide is leading him aright, he should fall in love with the body of one individual only, and there procreate beautiful discourse.
  --
   erotica. Diotima is speaking as if Socrates was now reaching the final stages of initiation into a religious mystery-cult. See Mysteries in Glossary of names. eidos. See glossary. 197 psuche.
  48
  --
  211d last he may know what the beautiful itself really is. That is the life, my dear Socrates, said the visitor from Mantinea, which most of all a human being should live, in the contemplation of beauty itself.
  If ever you see that beauty, it will not seem to you to be comparable with gold or dress or those beautiful boys and young men who now drive you and many others to distraction when you see them. If only you could see your beloveds and be with them all the time you would be prepared if only it were possible to go without food and drink, and do nothing but gaze at them and be with them. What, then, do we
  --
  With these words Socrates concluded his speech. Aristodemus said that everyone was praising it, and Aristophanes was trying to say something about the reference Socrates had made to his own speech, when
  Plato in Republic 533d calls this faculty the eye of the soul (psuche); it is elsewhere associated with nous, mind or intellect.
  --
  Agathon invited him to join them. So in he came, escorted by his companions. Because he was simultaneously untying the ribbons in order to crown Agathon with them and had them in front of his eyes, he did not notice Socrates, who, catching sight of him, had moved over.
  Alcibiades sat down beside Agathon, between him and Socrates, and as he did so he embraced Agathon and crowned him.
  Take off Alcibiades shoes, said Agathon to the servants, so that he can have the third place on the couch.
  Thank you, said Alcibiades, but who is this on my other side? As he spoke, he turned round and saw Socrates. At once he leaped up.
  Heracles! he exclaimed, What is this! You, Socrates? You were lying there to ambush me again, just as you used to do, making a sudden appearance in a place where I least expected you. Now what are you up to? And another thing, why are you on this particular couch? I notice you are not beside someone like Aristophanes who enjoys mockery too.
  No, you have schemed to take a place beside the best-looking man in the room.
  --
  Agathon, keep him off, please, cried Socrates. I must say my passion for him has become quite a burden. From the moment I fell in love with him I have not been allowed to look at or talk to a single goodlooking man, or if I do so this man here gets jealous and resentful and his behaviour is quite extraordinary he hurls insults at me and all but hits me. Take care he doesnt do something like this now. Do keep the peace between us, or if he tries to use force, protect me, because I am completely terrified by his mad obsession with being loved.
  No peace is possible, said Alcibiades, between the two of us, and I will take my revenge for these allegations later on. But as for now,
  Agathon, please give me back some of the ribbons to crown this mans head too, this wonderful head of his, so that he cannot blame me for crowning you and not him. When it is a contest of words he beats every one else, not just once, like you the day before yesterday, but every time. So saying he took some of the ribbons and crowned Socrates, and then took his place on the couch.
  When he had settled himself he spoke again. Well now, gentlemen, you seem to me to be quite sober. This must not be allowed; you have to drink. We have made an agreement. So for our master of ceremonies, until you have all drunk adequately, I elect myself. Agathon, get someone to bring a really big cup, if you have one. No, there is no need.
  Boy, bring me that wine-cooler there, he ordered, seeing that it held more than eight cotylae.202 Having had this filled Alcibiades first drained it himself, then told them to fill it again for Socrates, saying as they did so, In the case of Socrates, gentlemen, my trick is useless.
  However much you provide, he will drink it all and never be drunk.
  So the servant filled the wine-cooler again and Socrates was drinking from it when Eryximachus spoke. How are we arranging things, then,
  Alcibiades? he asked. Are we not going to have conversation or singing as the wine goes round? Are we simply going to drink like thirsty men?
  --
  All right, then, said Eryximachus. Listen and I will tell you. Before you arrived we had decided that each of us should make as fine a speech as possible in praise of Love, going from left to right in turn. Since all the rest of us have spoken while you, on the other hand, have drunk all your wine but not yet spoken, you are entitled to speak, and afterwards you can give Socrates any instruction you like. He can do the same to the man on his right, and so on.
  That is all very well, Eryximachus, said Alcibiades, but for a drunken man to be in competition with the speeches of the sober is scarcely fair. And another thing, my dear friend: do you really believe what Socrates said just now? Do you realise that the truth is entirely the opposite of what he was saying? He is the one who starts hitting me if I try to praise anyone else, god or man, in his presence.
  Watch what you say! said Socrates.
  By Poseidon! exclaimed Alcibiades, You cannot deny that! I would never praise anyone else in your presence.

12.03 - The Sorrows of God, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Son of Man the Avatarsuffers with and suffers for the suffering humanity. The Christ with his cross, Ramakrishna with his cancer, Socrates with the hemlock creeping up and benumbing his limbs and Mohammed being hunted from place to place are familiar and poignant pictures. "Verily, verily, the foxes have their holes, the birds their nests, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head."
   And this is bound to be so, for it is the inexorable law of nature: one who has identified himself with Nature, ignorant nature, of which the ignorant and suffering humanity is part and parcel, one whose body and soul are in unison and union with the body and soul of all beings and creatures, made of the same stuff and substance cannotand wants not to escape the general fate whatever it is. If misery be the badge of the human tribe, the Divine Man, the representative human being must wear that badge.

1.23 - The Double Soul in Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  10:The true soul secret in us - subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, - this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine. Not the unborn Self or Atman, for the Self even in presiding over the existence of the individual is aware always of its universality and transcendence, it is yet its deputy in the forms of Nature, the individual soul, caitya purus.a, supporting mind, life and body, standing behind the mental, the vital, the subtle-physical being in us and watching and profiting by their development and experience. These other person-powers in man, these beings of his being, are also veiled in their true entity, but they put forward temporary personalities which compose our outer individuality and whose combined superficial action and appearance of status we call ourselves: this inmost entity also, taking form in us as the psychic Person, puts forward a psychic personality which changes, grows, develops from life to life; for this is the traveller between birth and death and between death and birth, our nature parts are only its manifold and changing vesture. The psychic being can at first exercise only a concealed and partial and indirect action through the mind, the life and the body, since it is these parts of Nature that have to be developed as its instruments of self-expression, and it is long confined by their evolution. Missioned to lead man in the Ignorance towards the light of the Divine Consciousness, it takes the essence of all experience in the Ignorance to form a nucleus of soul-growth in the nature; the rest it turns into material for the future growth of the instruments which it has to use until they are ready to be a luminous instrumentation of the Divine. It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature. It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness. On the contrary, where the psychic personality is weak, crude or ill-developed, the finer parts and movements in us are lacking or poor in character and power, even though the mind may be forceful and brilliant, the heart of vital emotions hard and strong and masterful, the life-force dominant and successful, the bodily existence rich and fortunate and an apparent lord and victor. It is then the outer desire-soul, the pseudo-psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience.7 If the secret psychic Person can come forward into the front and, replacing the desire-soul, govern overtly and entirely and not only partially and from behind the veil this outer nature of mind, life and body, then these can be cast into soul images of what is true, right and beautiful and in the end the whole nature can be turned towards the real aim of life, the supreme victory, the ascent into spiritual existence.
  11:But it might seem then that by bringing this psychic entity, this true soul in us, into the front and giving it there the lead and rule we shall gain all the fulfilment of our natural being that we can seek for and open also the gates of the kingdom of the Spirit. And it might well be reasoned that there is no need for any intervention of a superior Truth-Consciousness or principle of Supermind to help us to attain to the divine status or the divine perfection. Yet, although the psychic transformation is one necessary condition of the total transformation of our existence, it is not all that is needed for the largest spiritual change. In the first place, since this is the individual soul in Nature, it can open to the hidden diviner ranges of our being and receive and reflect their light and power and experience, but another, a spiritual transformation from above is needed for us to possess our self in its universality and transcendence. By itself the psychic being at a certain stage might be content to create a formation of truth, good and beauty and make that its station; at a farther stage it might become passively subject to the worldself, a mirror of the universal existence, consciousness, power, delight, but not their full participant or possessor. Although more nearly and thrillingly united to the cosmic consciousness in knowledge, emotion and even appreciation through the senses, it might become purely recipient and passive, remote from mastery and action in the world; or, one with the static self behind the cosmos, but separate inwardly from the world-movement, losing its individuality in its Source, it might return to that Source and have neither the will nor the power any further for that which was its ultimate mission here, to lead the nature also towards its divine realisation. For the psychic being came into Nature from the Self, the Divine, and it can turn back from Nature to the silent Divine through the silence of the Self and a supreme spiritual immobility. Again, an eternal portion of the Divine,8 this part is by the law of the Infinite inseparable from its Divine Whole, this part is indeed itself that Whole, except in its frontal appearance, its frontal separative self-experience; it may awaken to that reality and plunge into it to the apparent extinction or at least the merging of the individual existence. A small nucleus here in the mass of our ignorant Nature, so that it is described in the Upanishad as no bigger than a man's thumb, it can by the spiritual influx enlarge itself and embrace the whole world with the heart and mind in an intimate communion or oneness. Or it may become aware of its eternal Companion and elect to live for ever in His presence, in an imperishable union and oneness as the eternal lover with the eternal Beloved, which of all spiritual experiences is the most intense in beauty and rapture. All these are great and splendid achievements of our spiritual self-finding, but they are not necessarily the last end and entire consummation; more is possible.

1.24 - RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  We have seen that, when they are promoted to be the central core of organized religious worship, ritualism and sacramentalism are by no means unmixed blessings. But that the whole of a mans workaday life should be transformed by him into a kind of continuous ritual, that every object in the world around him should be regarded as a symbol of the worlds eternal Ground, that all his actions should be performed sacramentallythis would seem to be wholly desirable. All the masters of the spiritual life, from the authors of the Upanishads to Socrates, from Buddha to St. Bernard are agreed that, without self-knowledge there cannot be adequate knowledge of God, that without a constant recollectedness there can be no complete deliverance. The man who has learnt to regard things as symbols, persons as temples of the Holy Spirit and actions as sacraments, is a man who has learned constantly to remind himself who he is, where he stands in relation to the universe and its Ground, how he should behave towards his fellows and what he must do to come to his final end.
  Because of this indwelling of the Logos, writes Mr. Kenneth Saunders in his valuable study of the Fourth Gospel, the Gita and the Lotus Sutra, all things have a reality. They are sacraments, not illusions like the phenomenal word of the Vedanta. That the Logos is in things, lives and conscious minds, and they in the Logos, was taught much more emphatically and explicitly by the Vedantists than by the author of the Fourth Gospel; and the same idea is, of course, basic in the theology of Taoism. But though all things in fact exist at the intersection between a divine manifestation and a ray of the unmanifest Godhead, it by no means follows that everyone always knows that this is so. On the contrary, the vast majority of human beings believe that their own selfness and the objects around them possess a reality in themselves, wholly independent of the Logos. This belief leads them to identify their being with their sensations, cravings and private notions and in its turn this self-identification with what they are not effectively walls them off from divine influence and the very possibility of deliverance. To most of us on most occasions things are not symbols and actions are not sacramental; and we have to teach ourselves, consciously and deliberately, to remember that they are.

1.42 - This Self Introversion, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  There is only one point of theory which matters to our practice. We may readily concur that the Augoeides, the "Genius" of Socrates, and the "Holy Guardian Angel" of Abramelin the Mage, are identical. But we cannot include this "Higher Self"; for the Angel is an actual Individual with his own Universe, exactly as man is; or, for the matter of that, a bluebottle. He is not a mere abstraction, a selection from, and exaltation of, one's own favorite qualities, as the "Higher Self" seems to be. The trouble is (I think) that the Hindu passion for analysis makes them philosophize any limited being out of existence.
  This matter is of importance, because it influences one's attitude to invocation. I can, for instance, work myself up to a "Divine Consciousness," in which I can understand, and act, as I cannot in my normal state. I become "inspired;" I feel, and I express, ideas of almost illimitable exaltation. But this is totally different from the "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel," which is the special aim of the Adeptus Minor. It is ruin to that Work if one deceives oneself by mistaking one's own "energized enthusiasm" for external communication. The parallel on the physical plane is the difference between Onanism and Sexual Intercourse.

1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
  be the witness of ignorance. That is what you are. Socrates said, I
  know that I do not know. Can it be ignorance? It is wisdom.

1.76 - The Gods - How and Why they Overlap, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  For, as I have explained in a previous letter, Gods are people: macrocosms, not mere collocations of the elements, planets and signs as are most of the angels, intelligences and spirits. It is interesting to note that Gabriel in particular seems to be more than one of these; he enjoys the divine privilege of being himself. Between you and me and the pylon, I suspect that Gabriel who gave the Q'uran to Mohammed was in reality a "Master" or messenger of some such person, more or less as Aiwass describes himself as "...the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat." (AL I, 7) His name implies some such function; for G.B.R. is Mercury between the Two Greater Lights, Sol and Luna. This seems to mean that he is something more than a lunar or terrestrial archangel; as he would appear to be from 777. (There now! That was my private fiend again the Demon of Digression. Back to our Gods!) 777 itself, to say nothing of The Golden Bough and the Good Lord knows how many other similar monuments of lexicography (for really they are little more), is our text-book. We are bound to note at once that the Gods sympathise, run into one another, coalesce much more closely than any other of the Orders of Being. There is not really much in common between a jackal and a beetle, or between a wolf and an owl, although they are grouped under Pisces or Aries respectively. But Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Melcarth, Mithras, Marsyas  a whole string of them comes tripping off the tongue. They all have histories; their birth, their life, their death, their subsequent career; all goes naturally with them exactly as if they were (say) a set of warriors, painters, anything superbly human. We feel instinctively that we know them, or at least know of them in the same sense that we know of our fellow men and women; and that is a sense which never so much as occurs to us when we discuss Archangels. The great exception is the Holy Guardian Angel; and this as I have shewn in another letter is for exactly the same reason; He is a Person, a macrocosmic Individual. (We do not know about his birth and so on; but that is because he is, so to speak, a private God; he only appears to the world at all through some reference to him by his client; for instance, the genius or Augoeides of Socrates).
  Let us see how this works in practice. Consider Zeus, Jupiter, Amon- Ra, Indra, etc., we can think of them as the same identical people known and described by Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Hindus; they differ as Mont Cervin differs from Monte Silvio and the Matterhorn.

1.ey - Socrates, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  object:1.ey - Socrates
  author class:Edward Young

1.jk - Epistle To John Hamilton Reynolds, #Keats - Poems, #John Keats, #Poetry
  Old Socrates a-tying his cravat,
  And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth's cat;

1.pbs - Epipsychidion - Passages Of The Poem, Or Connected Therewith, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
  And Socrates, the Jesus Christ of Greece,
  And Jesus Christ Himself, did never cease

1.pbs - Hellas - A Lyrical Drama, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
  Trampling in scorn, like Him and Socrates.
  The first is Anarchy; when Power and Pleasure,

1.pbs - Queen Mab - Part II., #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
   Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's slave,
   A coward and a fool, spreads death around

1.pbs - The Triumph Of Life, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
  of which Shelley is thinking are Socrates in Athens and Jesus in Jerusalem. But
  the corruption of the text here makes any interpretation doubtful.

1.whitman - The Base Of All Metaphysics, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
  Stated the lore of Platoand Socrates, greater than Plato,
  And greater than Socrates sought and statedChrist divine having
      studied long,
  --
  Yet underneath Socrates clearly seeand underneath Christ the divine
      I see,

2.01 - THE ADVENT OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  strictly unique (as with Socrates or Augustus in human history).
  In which of these two ' inexperi mental ' or rather ' praeter-

2.01 - THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE AND THE POINT, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  [37] Further paradoxes: I am the black of the white and the red of the white and the yellow of the red;9 or The principle of the art is the raven, who flies without wings in the blackness of night and in the brightness of day.10 The stone is cold and moist in its manifest part, and in its hidden part is hot and dry.11 In lead is the dead life,12 or Burn in water and wash in fire.13 The Allegoriae sapientum speak of two figures, one of which is white and lacking a shadow, the other red and lacking the redness.14 A quotation from Socrates runs: Seek the coldness of the moon and ye shall find the heat of the sun.15 The opus is said to be a running without running, moving without motion.16 Make mercury with mercury.17 The philosophical tree has its roots in the air18 (this is probably a reference to the tree of the Sefiroth). That paradox and ambivalence are the keynotes of the whole work is shown by The Chymical Wedding: over the main portal of the castle two words are written: Congratulor, Condoleo.19
  [38] The paradoxical qualities of Mercurius have already been discussed in a separate study.20 As Mercurius is the principal name for the arcane substance, he deserves mention here as the paradox par excellence. What is said of him is obviously true of the lapis, which is merely another synonym for the thousand-named arcane substance. As the Tractatus aureus de Lapide says: Our matter has as many names as there are things in the world.21 The arcane substance is also synonymous with the Monad and the Son of Man mentioned in Hippolytus:

2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  acted as some feeble check on the individual, but when the merciless questioning of Socrates and his followers crumbled them
  to pieces, nothing was left for society to live by. Reason, justice
  and enlightened virtue which Socrates and his successors offered
  as a substitute, could not take their place because the world was

2.04 - On Art, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Disciple: He also argues, rather queerly, that the poisoning of Socrates, the banishment of Themistocles and the killing of other great men were expressions of unrestrained passion. Greek life was far from settled at that time.
   Sri Aurobindo: What has that got to do with the arts?

2.08 - ALICE IN WONDERLAND, #God Exists, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  These questions arose before Socrates. How can you say that idea is prior to the universe?
  How could there be an idea unless the universe exists? How can you have a thought about a thing unless the thing exists? How can you say that things are subsequent and ideas are precedent?

2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: That is what should be; but it is not so always in life. A man's soul may be as noble as that of Socrates and he may be as ugly!
   Disciple: Children are all and always beautiful.

2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes. All men who have been great and strong believe in some higher force greater than themselves, moving them. Socrates used to call this force his Daemon. It is curious how sometimes even in small things one depends on the voice. Once Socrates was walking with a disciple. When they came to a place where they had to take a turn, the disciple said, "Let us take this route." Socrates said: "No, my Daemon asks me to take the other." The disciple did not agree and followed his own route. After he had gone a certain distance he was attacked by a herd of pigs and thrown down by them.
   There are some who do not follow an inner voice but an inner light. The Quakers believed in that.

30.02 - Greek Drama, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   That was the golden age of Greece and Athens, famed in history as the Age of Pericles. Pericles was the leading man in his city, the chief Archon of the state, and a man of great genius. It was largely thanks to his genius that the whole of Greece could attain its supreme point of greatness in all manner of achievement and creative ability. In every field there appeared in that age men of outstanding gifts. In the realm of tragic drama there were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; in comedy there was Aristophanes. Herodotus the father of History was there and the master sculptor Phidias. Above all, there was Socrates with his band of young disciples. All of them produced their wonderful work during this period of a little more than a hundred years. We may remember that precisely during this period, that is about five hundred years before Christ, Lord Buddha made his appearance in the East, in India. It was thus an Age of Transition, the beginning of a New Age in the history of mankind.
   A remarkable thing about these ancients is that almost all of them lived to a ripe old age. They had such an abundance of vital force that they retained their capacity to work undiminished till the last days of their life. Sophocles went on writing plays till his ninetieth year. He could count as many or more works to his credit than the number of years in his life; he had written more than a hundred of which only about half a dozen are still extant. About Euripides it is said that he had composed twenty three tetralogies, making a total of ninety two pieces, or about one for every year of his life; only some ten out of this number have survived. All of these men were poets and artists and men of high intellectual calibre, but most of them thought fit not to confine themselves within the inner sanctum of their chosen work; they were also great men of action, they devoted themselves to public work in the service of their state, they did a good deal of politics, even took part in wars as common soldiers or as commanders.

3.05 - SAL, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  TIMAEUS: He suddenly felt unwell, Socrates; he would not have failed to join our company if he could have helped it.513
  [279] The transition from three to four is a problem514 on which the ambiguous formulation of Maria does not shed very much light.515 We come across the dilemma of three and four in any number of guises, and in Maiers Symbola aureae mensae as well the step from three to four proves to be an important development presaged by the vision of paradise. The region of the Red Sea is proverbially hot, and Maier reached it at the end of July, in the intense heat of summer. He was, in fact, getting hot, uncommonly hot, as hot as hell, for he was approaching that region of the psyche which was not unjustly said to be inhabited by Pans, Satyrs, dog-headed baboons, and half-men. It is not difficult to see that this region is the animal soul in man. For just as a man has a body which is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower storeys in which the spectres from humanitys past epochs still dwell, then the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the psyche of the cold-blooded saurians, and, deepest down of all, the transcendental mystery and paradox of the sympathetic and parasympa thetic psychoid processes.

33.03 - Muraripukur - I, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Queene. One day I suddenly discovered that they had removed my Mazzini from the shelves of the library, and even the Life and Death of Socrates by Plato had disappeared. These books were no doubt supposed to turn the heads of our Indian students!
   About this time, I had been several times to my home town of Rungpore. There at the local Library, I discovered a fine book on the history of Secret Societies. The book gave the story of how subject nations aspiring for freedom began their work in secret. In it the story of Ireland and Russia had been given a good deal of space. The secret societies in Russia had a system which was rather distinctive. It should have been taken over by us, so I have heard Sri Aurobindo say. They would divide the underground workers into little groups of not more than five. No group could know the others, only those belonging to a particular group would know its own members. Each group had a leader, who alone would know his immediate superior placed in charge of only four or five of such little groups. Similarly, the leader of the higher group would have dealings with the one next higher in rank who would be in charge of the bigger groups, and so on, right to the topmost man. Such a system was necessary, for in case someone got caught, that could not implicate the entire organisation but only a handful of his acquaintances. One of the main instruments in the hands of the police or the government for detecting a conspiracy is the confession extracted from the persons caught, whether by torture, through temptations, from sheer bravado, or by whatever other means. Under that system, no one could know anybody except the few members of his own group with whom he came into immediate contact through his work, nor could he know anything about the general plan of work; he had to carry out only the part assigned to him.

3.6.01 - Heraclitus, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  To ignore the influence of the mystic thought and its methods of self-expression on the intellectual thinking of the Greeks from Pythagoras to Plato is to falsify the historical procession of the human mind. It was enveloped at first in the symbolic, intuitive, esoteric style and discipline of the Mystics,-Vedic and Vedantic seers, Orphic secret teachers, Egyptian priests. From that veil it emerged along the path of a metaphysical philosophy still related to the Mystics by the source of its fundamental ideas, its first aphoristic and cryptic style, its attempt to seize directly upon truth by intellectual vision rather than arrive at it by careful ratiocination, but nevertheless intellectual in its method and aim. This is the first period of the Darshanas in India, in Greece of the early intellectual thinkers. Afterwards came the full tide of philosophic rationalism, Buddha or the Buddhists and the logical philosophers in India, in Greece the Sophists and Socrates with all their splendid progeny; with them the intellectual method did not indeed begin, but came to its own and grew to its fullness. Heraclitus belongs to the transition, not to the noontide of the reason; he is even its most characteristic representative. Hence his cryptic style, hence his brief and burdened thought and the difficulty we feel when we try to clarify and entirely rationalise his significances. The ignoring of the Mystics, our pristine fathers, pūrve pitaraḥ, is the great defect of the modern account of our thought-evolution.
  Heraclitus - II
  --
  The ideas of Heraclitus on which I have so far laid stress, are general, philosophical, metaphysical; they glance at those first truths of existence, devānāṁ prathamā vratāni,1 for which philosophy first seeks because they are the key to all other truths. But what is their practical effect on human life and aspiration? For that is in the end the real value of philosophy for man, to give him light on the nature of his being, the principles of his psychology, his relations with the world and with God, the fixed lines or the great possibilities of his destiny. It is the weakness of most European philosophy-not the ancient-that it lives too much in the clouds and seeks after pure metaphysical truth too exclusively for its own sake; therefore it has been a little barren because much too indirect in its bearing on life. It is the great distinction of Nietzsche among later European thinkers to have brought back something of the old dynamism and practical force into philosophy, although in the stress of this tendency he may have neglected unduly the dialectical and metaphysical side of philosophical thinking. No doubt, in seeking Truth we must seek it for its own sake first and not start with any preconceived practical aim and prepossession which would distort our disinterested view of things; but when Truth has been found, its bearing on life becomes of capital importance and is the solid justification of the labour spent in our research. Indian philosophy has always understood its double function; it has sought the Truth not only as an intellectual pleasure or the natural dharma of the reason, but in order to know how man may live by the Truth or strive after it; hence its intimate influence on the religion, the social ideas, the daily life of the people, its immense dynamic power on the mind and actions of Indian humanity. The Greek thinkers, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, the Stoics and Epicureans, had also this practical aim and dynamic force, but it acted only on the cultured few. That was because Greek philosophy, losing its ancient affiliation to the Mystics, separated itself from the popular religion; but as ordinarily Philosophy alone can give light to Religion and save it from crudeness, ignorance and superstition, so Religion alone can give, except for a few, spiritual passion and effective power to Philosophy and save it from becoming unsubstantial, abstract and sterile. It is a misfortune for both when the divine sisters part company.
  But when we seek among Heraclitus' sayings for the human application of his great fundamental thoughts, we are disappointed. He gives us little direct guidance and on the whole leaves us to draw our own profit from the packed opulence of his first ideas. What may be called his aristocratic view of life, we might regard possibly as a moral result of his philosophical conception of Power as the nature of the original principle. He tells us that the many are bad, the few good and that one is to him equal to thousands, if he be the best. Power of knowledge, power of character,-character, he says, is man's divine force,-power and excellence generally are the things that prevail in human life and are supremely valuable, and these things in their high and pure degree are rare among men, they are the difficult attainment of the few. From that, true enough so far as it goes, we might deduce a social and political philosophy. But the democrat might well answer that if there is an eminent and concentrated virtue, knowledge and force in the one or the few, so too there is a diffused virtue, knowledge and force in the many which acting collectively may outweigh and exceed isolated or rare excellences. If the king, the sage, the best are Vishnu himself, as old Indian thought also affirmed, to a degree to which the ordinary man, prākṛto janaḥ, cannot pretend, so also are "the five", the group, the people. The Divine is samaṣṭi as well as vyaṣṭi, manifested in the collectivity as well as in the individual, and the justice on which Heraclitus insists demands that both should have their effect and their value; they depend indeed and draw on each other for the effectuation of their excellences.

36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
   Katha, 11.1.10. (Whatever is there in the inner world is to be found here as well). In ancient times, not only in India, but in all countries of the world, symbolism was in vogue. We cannot read through those symbols. That is why we consider them black magic or rustic customs of the uncivilised. We can partly appreciate the political and artistic genius of Egypt. So at times we consider it equal or superior to ours. But we are unable to grasp her spiritual genius. Hence we do not hesitate to relegate it to the level of barbarism. We have hardly any spiritual realisation. What we understand is at best morality. We highly admire the art and literature of Greece. But in respect of Greek spirituality our knowledge is confined to Socrates. In the earlier period of Greek civilisation there was a current of deep spiritual culture, and what they used to call the Mysteries were only mysteries of spiritual yogic discipline. We fail to understand that the water-worship of Thales and the fire-worship of Heraclitus were not merely different aspects of Nature-worship. We do not like to believe that these terms "water" and "fire" can ever be the symbols of spiritual truths. We study the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. But we do not delve into the spiritual culture or esoteric aspect of which their philosophies are but outer expressions. Behind the mythologies of China, Japan, old-world America and Australia there lies a science of spiritual discipline which may not be recognised by the scientists, but those practising spirituality will not find it difficult to discover it.
   ***

3.7.2.03 - Mind Nature and Law of Karma, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A third possible and less outwardly mechanical line of Karma is suggested by the dictum that like creates like and in accordance with that law good must create good and evil must create evil. In the terms of a moral return or rather repayment to moral energies this would mean that by putting forth love we get a return of love and by putting forth hatred a return of hatred, that if we are merciful or just to others, others also will be to us just or merciful and that generally good done by us to our fellow-men will return in a recompense of good done by them in kind and posted back to our address duly registered in the moral post office of the administrative government of the universe. Do unto others as you would be done by, because then they will indeed so do to you, seems to be the formula of this moral device. If this were true, human life might indeed settle down into a very symmetrical system of a harmoniously moral egoism and a mercantile traffic in goodness that might seem fair and beautiful enough to those who are afflicted with that kind of moral aesthesis. Happily for the upward progress of the human soul, the rule breaks down in practice, the world-spirit having greater ends before it and a greater law to realise. The rule is true to a certain extent in tendency and works sometimes well enough and the prudential intelligence of man takes some account of it in action but it is not true all the way and all the time. It is evident enough that hatred, violence, injustice are likely to create an answering hatred, violence and injustice and that I can only indulge these propensities with impunity if I am sufficiently powerful to defy resistance or so long as I am at once strong enough and prudent enough to provide against their natural reactions. It is true also that by doing good and kindness I create a certain goodwill in others and can rely under ordinary or favourable circumstances not so much on gratitude and return in kind as on their support and favour. But this good and this evil are both of them movements of the ego and on the mixed egoism of human nature there can be no safe or positive reliance. An egoistic selfish strength, if it knows what to do and where to stop, even a certain measure of violence and injustice, if it is strong and skilful, cunning, fraud, many kinds of evil, do actually pay in mans dealing with man hardly less than in the animals with the animal, and on the other hand the doer of good who counts on a return or reward finds himself as often as not disappointed of his bargained recompense. The weakness of human nature worships the power that tramples on it, does homage to successful strength, can return to every kind of strong or skilful imposition belief, acceptance, obedience: it can crouch and fawn and admire even amidst movements of hatred and terror; it has singular loyalties and unreasoning instincts. And its disloyalties too are as unreasoning or light and fickle: it takes just dealing and beneficence as its right and forgets or cares not to repay. And there is worse; for justice, mercy, beneficence, kindness are often enough rewarded by their opposites and ill will an answer to goodwill is a brutally common experience. If something in the world and in man returns good for good and evil for evil, it as often returns evil for good and, with or without a conscious moral intention, good for evil. And even an unegoistic virtue or a divine good and love entering the world awakens hostile reactions. Attila and Jenghiz on the throne to the end, Christ on the cross and Socrates drinking his portion of hemlock are no very clear evidence for any optimistic notion of a law of moral return in the world of human nature.
  There is little more sign of its sure existence in the world measures. Actually in the cosmic dispensation evil comes out of good and good out of evil and there seems to be no exact correspondence between the moral and the vital measures. All that we can say is that good done tends to increase the sum and total power of good in the world and the greater this grows the greater is likely to be the sum of human happiness and that evil done tends to increase the sum and total power of evil in the world and the greater this grows, the greater is likely to be the sum of human suffering and, eventually, man or nation doing evil has in some way to pay for it, but not often in any intelligibly graded or apportioned measure and not always in clearly translating terms of vital good fortune and ill fortune.

4.1.3 - Imperfections and Periods of Arrest, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The existence of imperfections, even many and serious imperfections, cannot be a permanent bar to progress in the Yoga. (I do not speak of a recovery of the former opening, for, according to my experience, what comes after a period of obstruction or struggle is usually a new and wider opening, some larger consciousness and an advance on what had been gained before and seems but only seemsto be lost for the moment.) The only bar that can be permanent but need not be, for this too can changeis insincerity, and this does not exist in you. If imperfections were a bar, then no man could succeed in Yoga; for all are imperfect, and I am not sure, from what I have seen, that it is not those who have the greatest power for Yoga who have too, very often, or have had the greatest imperfections. You know, I suppose, the comment of Socrates on his own character; that could be said by many great Yogins of their own initial human nature. Also, self-expression in some form of art does not preclude serious imperfections and, of itself, does not cure them. Here again my experience is that men of this kind have great qualities, but also great faults and defects as a weight in the other balance. In Yoga the one thing that counts in the end is sincerity and with it the patience to persist in the pathmany even without this patience go through, foragain I speak from personal experience,in spite of revolt, impatience, depression, despondency, fatigue, temporary loss of faith, a force greater than ones outer self, the force of the Spirit, the drive of the souls need, pushes them through the cloud and the mist to the goal before them. Imperfections can be stumbling blocks and give one a bad fall for the moment, but not a permanent bar. Obscurations due to some resistance in the nature can be more serious causes of delay, but they too do not last for ever.
  The length of your period of dullness is also no sufficient reason for losing belief in your capacity or your spiritual destiny. I can look back to periods not of two but of many months of blank suspension of all experience or progress. I believe that alternations of bright and dark periods are almost a universal experience of Yogins, and the exceptions are very rare. If one enquires into the reasons of this phenomenon,very unpleasant to our impatient human nature,it will be found, I think, that they are in the main two. The first is that the human consciousness either cannot bear a constant descent of the Light or Power or Ananda, or cannot at once receive and absorb it; it needs periods of assimilation, but this assimilation goes on behind the veil of the surface consciousness; the experience or the realisation that has descended retires behind that veil and leaves this outer or surface consciousness to lie fallow and become ready for a new descent. In the more developed stages of the Yoga these dark or dull periods become shorter, less trying as well as uplifted by the sense of the greater consciousness which, though not acting for immediate progress, yet remains and sustains the outer nature. The second cause is some resistance, something in the human nature that has not felt the former descents, is not ready, is perhaps unwilling to change,often it is some strong habitual formation of the mind or the vital or some temporary inertia of the physical consciousness and not exactly a part of the nature and this, whether showing or concealing itself, thrusts up the obstacle. If one can detect the cause in oneself, acknowledge it, see its workings and call down the Power for its removal, then the periods of obscurity can be greatly shortened and their acuity becomes less. But in any case the Divine Power is working always behind and one day, perhaps when one least expects it, the obstacle breaks, the clouds vanish and there is again the light and the sunshine. The best thing in these cases is, if one can manage it, not to fret, not to despond, but to insist quietly and keep oneself open, spread to the Light and waiting in faith for it to come: that, I have found, shortens these ordeals. Afterwards, when the obstacle disappears, one finds that a great progress has been made and that the consciousness is far more capable of receiving and retaining than before. There is a return for all the trials and ordeals of the spiritual life.

5.02 - THE STATUE, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  ) of Mercurius and hid in them a simulacrum of the god. In this way they worshipped not the unseemly herm but the image hidden inside.61 Plato is referring to these statues when he makes Alcibiades say that Socrates bears a strong resemblance to those figures of Silenus in statuaries shops, represented holding pipes or flutes; they are hollow inside, and when they are taken apart you see that they contain little figures [
  ] of gods.62

5.4.01 - Occult Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But they seem so to all who live in the outward vision only. "Coincidence the scientists do them call." But anyone with some intelligence and power of observation who lives more in an inward consciousness can see the play of invisible forces at every step which act on men and bring about events without their knowing about the instrumentation. The difference created by Yoga or by an inner consciousness - for there are people like Socrates who develop or have some inner awareness without Yoga - is that one becomes conscious of these invisible forces and can also consciously profit by them or use and direct them. That is all.
  I have not said [in the preceding letter] that everything is rigidly predetermined. Play of forces does not mean that. What I said was that behind visible events in the world there is always a mass of invisible forces at work unknown to the outward minds of men and by Yoga (by going inward and establishing a conscious connection with the cosmic Self and Force and forces) one can become conscious of these forces, intervene consciously in the play, to some extent at least determine things in the result of the play. All that has nothing to do with predetermination. On the

5 - The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  words, a conflict ensues. Here too we could ask with Socrates,
  "One, two, three but, my dear Timaeus, of those who yester-

6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  two, three . . . but where, my dear Socrates, is the fourth?")
  and right up to the Cabiri scene in Faust, the motif of four as

Apology, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
     Also known as The Death of Socrates
    
  --
  In what relation the Apology of Plato stands to the real defence of Socrates, there are no means of determining. It certainly agrees in tone and character with the description of Xenophon, who says in the Memorabilia that Socrates might have been acquitted if in any moderate degree he would have conciliated the favour of the dicasts; and who informs us in another passage, on the testimony of Hermogenes, the friend of Socrates, that he had no wish to live; and that the divine sign refused to allow him to prepare a defence, and also that Socrates himself declared this to be unnecessary, on the ground that all his life long he had been preparing against that hour. For the speech breathes throughout a spirit of defiance, ut non supplex aut reus sed magister aut dominus videretur esse judicum (Cic. de Orat. i. 54); and the loose and desultory style is an imitation of the accustomed manner in which Socrates spoke in the agora and among the tables of the money-changers. The allusion in the Crito (45 B) may, perhaps, be adduced as a further evidence of the literal accuracy of some parts (37 C, D). But in the main it must be regarded as the ideal of Socrates, according to Platos conception of him, appearing in the greatest and most public scene of his life, and in the height of his triumph, when he is weakest, and yet his mastery over mankind is greatest, and his habitual irony acquires a new meaning and a sort of tragic pathos in the face of death. The facts of his life are summed up, and the features of his character are brought out as if by accident in the course of the defence. The conversational manner, the seeming want of arrangement, the ironical simplicity, are found to result in a perfect work of art, which is the portrait of Socrates.
  Yet some of the topics may have been actually used by Socrates; and the recollection of his very words may have rung in the ears of his disciple. The Apology of Plato may be compared generally with those speeches of Thucydides in which he has embodied his conception of the lofty character and policy of the great Pericles, and which at the same time furnish a commentary on the situation of affairs from the point of view of the historian. So in the Apology there is an ideal rather than a literal truth; much is said which was not said, and is only Platos view of the situation. Plato was not, like Xenophon, a chronicler of facts; he does not appear in any of his writings to have aimed at literal accuracy. He is not therefore to be supplemented from the Memorabilia and Symposium of Xenophon, who belongs to an entirely different class of writers. The Apology of Plato is not the report of what Socrates said, but an elaborate composition, quite as much so in fact as one of the Dialogues. And we may perhaps even indulge in the fancy that the actual defence of Socrates was as much greater than the Platonic defence as the master was greater than the disciple. But in any case, some of the words used by him must have been remembered, and some of the facts recorded must have actually occurred. It is significant that Plato is said to have been present at the defence (Apol.), as he is also said to have been absent at the last scene in the Phdo. Is it fanciful to suppose that he meant to give the stamp of au thenticity to the one and not to the other?especially when we consider that these two passages are the only ones in which Plato makes mention of himself. The circumstance that Plato was to be one of his sureties for the payment of the fine which he proposed has the appearance of truth. More suspicious is the statement that Socrates received the first impulse to his favourite calling of cross-examining the world from the Oracle of Delphi; for he must already have been famous before Chaerephon went to consult the Oracle (Riddell), and the story is of a kind which is very likely to have been invented. On the whole we arrive at the conclusion that the Apology is true to the character of Socrates, but we cannot show that any single sentence in it was actually spoken by him. It breathes the spirit of Socrates, but has been cast anew in the mould of Plato.
  There is not much in the other Dialogues which can be compared with the Apology. The same recollection of his master may have been present to the mind of Plato when depicting the sufferings of the Just in the Republic. The Crito may also be regarded as a sort of appendage to the Apology, in which Socrates, who has defied the judges, is nevertheless represented as scrupulously obedient to the laws. The idealization of the sufferer is carried still further in the Georgias, in which the thesis is maintained, that to suffer is better than to do evil; and the art of rhetoric is described as only useful for the purpose of self-accusation. The parallelisms which occur in the so-called Apology of Xenophon are not worth noticing, because the writing in which they are contained is manifestly spurious. The statements of the Memorabilia respecting the trial and death of Socrates agree generally with Plato; but they have lost the flavour of Socratic irony in the narrative of Xenophon.
  The Apology or Platonic defence of Socrates is divided into three parts: 1st. The defence properly so called; 2nd. The shorter address in mitigation of the penalty; 3rd. The last words of prophetic rebuke and exhortation.
  The first part commences with an apology for his colloquial style; he is, as he has always been, the enemy of rhetoric, and knows of no rhetoric but truth; he will not falsify his character by making a speech. Then he proceeds to divide his accusers into two classes; first, there is the nameless accuserpublic opinion. All the world from their earliest years had heard that he was a corrupter of youth, and had seen him caricatured in the Clouds of Aristophanes. Secondly, there are the professed accusers, who are but the mouth-piece of the others. The accusations of both might be summed up in a formula. The first say, Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others. The second, Socrates is an evil-doer and corrupter of the youth, who does not receive the gods whom the state receives, but introduces other new divinities. These last words appear to have been the actual indictment (compare Xen. Mem.); and the previous formula, which is a summary of public opinion, assumes the same legal style.
  The answer begins by clearing up a confusion. In the representations of the Comic poets, and in the opinion of the multitude, he had been identified with the teachers of physical science and with the Sophists. But this was an error. For both of them he professes a respect in the open court, which contrasts with his manner of speaking about them in other places. (Compare for Anaxagoras, Phdo, Laws; for the Sophists, Meno, Republic, Tim., Theaet., Soph., etc.) But at the same time he shows that he is not one of them. Of natural philosophy he knows nothing; not that he despises such pursuits, but the fact is that he is ignorant of them, and never says a word about them. Nor is he paid for giving instructionthat is another mistaken notion:he has nothing to teach. But he commends Evenus for teaching virtue at such a moderate rate as five min. Something of the accustomed irony, which may perhaps be expected to sleep in the ear of the multitude, is lurking here.
  He then goes on to explain the reason why he is in such an evil name. That had arisen out of a peculiar mission which he had taken upon himself. The enthusiastic Chaerephon (probably in anticipation of the answer which he received) had gone to Delphi and asked the oracle if there was any man wiser than Socrates; and the answer was, that there was no man wiser. What could be the meaning of thisthat he who knew nothing, and knew that he knew nothing, should be declared by the oracle to be the wisest of men? Reflecting upon the answer, he determined to refute it by finding a wiser; and first he went to the politicians, and then to the poets, and then to the craftsmen, but always with the same resulthe found that they knew nothing, or hardly anything more than himself; and that the little advantage which in some cases they possessed was more than counter-balanced by their conceit of knowledge. He knew nothing, and knew that he knew nothing: they knew little or nothing, and imagined that they knew all things. Thus he had passed his life as a sort of missionary in detecting the pretended wisdom of mankind; and this occupation had quite absorbed him and taken him away both from public and private affairs. Young men of the richer sort had made a pastime of the same pursuit, which was not unamusing. And hence bitter enmities had arisen; the professors of knowledge had revenged themselves by calling him a villainous corrupter of youth, and by repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.
  The second accusation he meets by interrogating Meletus, who is present and can be interrogated. If he is the corrupter, who is the improver of the citizens? (Compare Meno.) All men everywhere. But how absurd, how contrary to analogy is this! How inconceivable too, that he should make the citizens worse when he has to live with them. This surely cannot be intentional; and if unintentional, he ought to have been instructed by Meletus, and not accused in the court.
  But there is another part of the indictment which says that he teaches men not to receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new gods. Is that the way in which he is supposed to corrupt the youth? Yes, it is. Has he only new gods, or none at all? None at all. What, not even the sun and moon? No; why, he says that the sun is a stone, and the moon earth. That, replies Socrates, is the old confusion about Anaxagoras; the Athenian people are not so ignorant as to attribute to the influence of Socrates notions which have found their way into the drama, and may be learned at the theatre. Socrates undertakes to show that Meletus (rather unjustifiably) has been compounding a riddle in this part of the indictment: There are no gods, but Socrates believes in the existence of the sons of gods, which is absurd.
  Leaving Meletus, who has had enough words spent upon him, he returns to the original accusation. The question may be asked, Why will he persist in following a profession which leads him to death? Why?because he must remain at his post where the god has placed him, as he remained at Potidaea, and Amphipolis, and Delium, where the generals placed him. Besides, he is not so overwise as to imagine that he knows whether death is a good or an evil; and he is certain that desertion of his duty is an evil. Anytus is quite right in saying that they should never have indicted him if they meant to let him go. For he will certainly obey God rather than man; and will continue to preach to all men of all ages the necessity of virtue and improvement; and if they refuse to listen to him he will still persevere and reprove them. This is his way of corrupting the youth, which he will not cease to follow in obedience to the god, even if a thousand deaths await him.
  --
  Few persons will be found to wish that Socrates should have defended himself otherwise,if, as we must add, his defence was that with which Plato has provided him. But leaving this question, which does not admit of a precise solution, we may go on to ask what was the impression which Plato in the Apology intended to give of the character and conduct of his master in the last great scene? Did he intend to represent him (1) as employing sophistries; (2) as designedly irritating the judges? Or are these sophistries to be regarded as belonging to the age in which he lived and to his personal character, and this apparent haughtiness as flowing from the natural elevation of his position?
  For example, when he says that it is absurd to suppose that one man is the corrupter and all the rest of the world the improvers of the youth; or, when he argues that he never could have corrupted the men with whom he had to live; or, when he proves his belief in the gods because he believes in the sons of gods, is he serious or jesting? It may be observed that these sophisms all occur in his cross-examination of Meletus, who is easily foiled and mastered in the hands of the great dialectician. Perhaps he regarded these answers as good enough for his accuser, of whom he makes very light. Also there is a touch of irony in them, which takes them out of the category of sophistry. (Compare Euthyph.)
  That the manner in which he defends himself about the lives of his disciples is not satisfactory, can hardly be denied. Fresh in the memory of the Athenians, and detestable as they deserved to be to the newly restored democracy, were the names of Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides. It is obviously not a sufficient answer that Socrates had never professed to teach them anything, and is therefore not justly chargeable with their crimes. Yet the defence, when taken out of this ironical form, is doubtless sound: that his teaching had nothing to do with their evil lives. Here, then, the sophistry is rather in form than in substance, though we might desire that to such a serious charge Socrates had given a more serious answer.
  Truly characteristic of Socrates is another point in his answer, which may also be regarded as sophistical. He says that if he has corrupted the youth, he must have corrupted them involuntarily. But if, as Socrates argues, all evil is involuntary, then all criminals ought to be admonished and not punished. In these words the Socratic doctrine of the involuntariness of evil is clearly intended to be conveyed. Here again, as in the former instance, the defence of Socrates is untrue practically, but may be true in some ideal or transcendental sense. The commonplace reply, that if he had been guilty of corrupting the youth their relations would surely have witnessed against him, with which he concludes this part of his defence, is more satisfactory.
  Again, when Socrates argues that he must believe in the gods because he believes in the sons of gods, we must remember that this is a refutation not of the original indictment, which is consistent enough Socrates does not receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new divinitiesbut of the interpretation put upon the words by Meletus, who has affirmed that he is a downright atheist. To this Socrates fairly answers, in accordance with the ideas of the time, that a downright atheist cannot believe in the sons of gods or in divine things. The notion that demons or lesser divinities are the sons of gods is not to be regarded as ironical or sceptical. He is arguing ad hominem according to the notions of mythology current in his age. Yet he abstains from saying that he believed in the gods whom the State approved. He does not defend himself, as Xenophon has defended him, by appealing to his practice of religion. Probably he neither wholly believed, nor disbelieved, in the existence of the popular gods; he had no means of knowing about them. According to Plato (compare Phdo; Symp.), as well as Xenophon (Memor.), he was punctual in the performance of the least religious duties; and he must have believed in his own oracular sign, of which he seemed to have an internal witness. But the existence of Apollo or Zeus, or the other gods whom the State approves, would have appeared to him both uncertain and unimportant in comparison of the duty of self-examination, and of those principles of truth and right which he deemed to be the foundation of religion. (Compare Phaedr.; Euthyph.; Republic.)
  The second question, whether Plato meant to represent Socrates as braving or irritating his judges, must also be answered in the negative. His irony, his superiority, his audacity, regarding not the person of man, necessarily flow out of the loftiness of his situation. He is not acting a part upon a great occasion, but he is what he has been all his life long, a king of men. He would rather not appear insolent, if he could avoid it (ouch os authadizomenos touto lego). Neither is he desirous of hastening his own end, for life and death are simply indifferent to him. But such a defence as would be acceptable to his judges and might procure an acquittal, it is not in his nature to make. He will not say or do anything that might pervert the course of justice; he cannot have his tongue bound even in the throat of death. With his accusers he will only fence and play, as he had fenced with other improvers of youth, answering the Sophist according to his sophistry all his life long. He is serious when he is speaking of his own mission, which seems to distinguish him from all other reformers of mankind, and originates in an accident. The dedication of himself to the improvement of his fellow-citizens is not so remarkable as the ironical spirit in which he goes about doing good only in vindication of the credit of the oracle, and in the vain hope of finding a wiser man than himself. Yet this singular and almost accidental character of his mission agrees with the divine sign which, according to our notions, is equally accidental and irrational, and is nevertheless accepted by him as the guiding principle of his life. Socrates is nowhere represented to us as a freethinker or sceptic. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he speculates on the possibility of seeing and knowing the heroes of the Trojan war in another world. On the other hand, his hope of immortality is uncertain;he also conceives of death as a long sleep (in this respect differing from the Phdo), and at last falls back on resignation to the divine will, and the certainty that no evil can happen to the good man either in life or death. His absolute truthfulness seems to hinder him from asserting positively more than this; and he makes no attempt to veil his ignorance in mythology and figures of speech. The gentleness of the first part of the speech contrasts with the aggravated, almost threatening, tone of the conclusion. He characteristically remarks that he will not speak as a rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a regular defence such as Lysias or one of the orators might have composed for him, or, according to some accounts, did compose for him. But he first procures himself a hearing by conciliatory words. He does not attack the Sophists; for they were open to the same charges as himself; they were equally ridiculed by the Comic poets, and almost equally hateful to Anytus and Meletus. Yet incidentally the antagonism between Socrates and the Sophists is allowed to appear. He is poor and they are rich; his profession that he teaches nothing is opposed to their readiness to teach all things; his talking in the marketplace to their private instructions; his tarry-at-home life to their wandering from city to city. The tone which he assumes towards them is one of real friendliness, but also of concealed irony. Towards Anaxagoras, who had disappointed him in his hopes of learning about mind and nature, he shows a less kindly feeling, which is also the feeling of Plato in other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had been dead thirty years, and was beyond the reach of persecution.
  It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers who would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more violent terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference can be drawn from this circumstance as to the probability of the words attri buted to him having been actually uttered. They express the aspiration of the first martyr of philosophy, that he would leave behind him many followers, accompanied by the not unnatural feeling that they would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in their words when emancipated from his control.
  The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of certainty to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar words may have been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the possibility, that like so much else, e.g. the wisdom of Critias, the poem of Solon, the virtues of Charmides, they may have been due only to the imagination of Plato. The arguments of those who maintain that the Apology was composed during the process, resting on no evidence, do not require a serious refutation. Nor are the reasonings of Schleiermacher, who argues that the Platonic defence is an exact or nearly exact reproduction of the words of Socrates, partly because Plato would not have been guilty of the impiety of altering them, and also because many points of the defence might have been improved and streng thened, at all more conclusive. (See English Translation.) What effect the death of Socrates produced on the mind of Plato, we cannot certainly determine; nor can we say how he would or must have written under the circumstances. We observe that the enmity of Aristophanes to Socrates does not prevent Plato from introducing them together in the Symposium engaged in friendly intercourse. Nor is there any trace in the Dialogues of an attempt to make Anytus or Meletus personally odious in the eyes of the Athenian public.
  APOLOGY
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  And first, I have to reply to the older charges and to my first accusers, and then I will go on to the later ones. For of old I have had many accusers, who have accused me falsely to you during many years; and I am more afraid of them than of Anytus and his associates, who are dangerous, too, in their own way. But far more dangerous are the others, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. The disseminators of this tale are the accusers whom I dread; for their hearers are apt to fancy that such enquirers do not believe in the existence of the gods. And they are many, and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they were made by them in the days when you were more impressible than you are nowin childhood, or it may have been in youthand the cause when heard went by default, for there was none to answer. And hardest of all, I do not know and cannot tell the names of my accusers; unless in the chance case of a Comic poet. All who from envy and malice have persuaded yousome of them having first convinced themselvesall this class of men are most difficult to deal with; for I cannot have them up here, and cross-examine them, and therefore I must simply fight with shadows in my own defence, and argue when there is no one who answers. I will ask you then to assume with me, as I was saying, that my opponents are of two kinds; one recent, the other ancient: and I hope that you will see the propriety of my answering the latter first, for these accusations you heard long before the others, and much oftener.
  Well, then, I must make my defence, and endeavour to clear away in a short time, a slander which has lasted a long time. May I succeed, if to succeed be for my good and yours, or likely to avail me in my cause! The task is not an easy one; I quite understand the nature of it. And so leaving the event with God, in obedience to the law I will now make my defence.
  I will begin at the beginning, and ask what is the accusation which has given rise to the slander of me, and in fact has encouraged Meletus to proof this charge against me. Well, what do the slanderers say? They shall be my prosecutors, and I will sum up their words in an affidavit: Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others. Such is the nature of the accusation: it is just what you have yourselves seen in the comedy of Aristophanes (Aristoph., Clouds.), who has introduced a man whom he calls Socrates, going about and saying that he walks in air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning matters of which I do not pretend to know either much or littlenot that I mean to speak disparagingly of any one who is a student of natural philosophy. I should be very sorry if Meletus could bring so grave a charge against me. But the simple truth is, O Athenians, that I have nothing to do with physical speculations. Very many of those here present are witnesses to the truth of this, and to them I appeal. Speak then, you who have heard me, and tell your neighbours whether any of you have ever known me hold forth in few words or in many upon such matters...You hear their answer. And from what they say of this part of the charge you will be able to judge of the truth of the rest.
  As little foundation is there for the report that I am a teacher, and take money; this accusation has no more truth in it than the other. Although, if a man were really able to instruct mankind, to receive money for giving instruction would, in my opinion, be an honour to him. There is Gorgias of Leontium, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis, who go the round of the cities, and are able to persuade the young men to leave their own citizens by whom they might be taught for nothing, and come to them whom they not only pay, but are thankful if they may be allowed to pay them. There is at this time a Parian philosopher residing in Athens, of whom I have heard; and I came to hear of him in this way:I came across a man who has spent a world of money on the Sophists, Callias, the son of Hipponicus, and knowing that he had sons, I asked him: Callias, I said, if your two sons were foals or calves, there would be no difficulty in finding some one to put over them; we should hire a trainer of horses, or a farmer probably, who would improve and perfect them in their own proper virtue and excellence; but as they are human beings, whom are you thinking of placing over them? Is there any one who understands human and political virtue? You must have thought about the matter, for you have sons; is there any one? There is, he said. Who is he? said I; and of what country? and what does he charge? Evenus the Parian, he replied; he is the man, and his charge is five min. Happy is Evenus, I said to myself, if he really has this wisdom, and teaches at such a moderate charge. Had I the same, I should have been very proud and conceited; but the truth is that I have no knowledge of the kind.
  I dare say, Athenians, that some one among you will reply, Yes, Socrates, but what is the origin of these accusations which are brought against you; there must have been something strange which you have been doing? All these rumours and this talk about you would never have arisen if you had been like other men: tell us, then, what is the cause of them, for we should be sorry to judge hastily of you. Now I regard this as a fair challenge, and I will endeavour to explain to you the reason why I am called wise and have such an evil fame. Please to attend then. And although some of you may think that I am joking, I declare that I will tell you the entire truth. Men of Athens, this reputation of mine has come of a certain sort of wisdom which I possess. If you ask me what kind of wisdom, I reply, wisdom such as may perhaps be attained by man, for to that extent I am inclined to believe that I am wise; whereas the persons of whom I was speaking have a superhuman wisdom which I may fail to describe, because I have it not myself; and he who says that I have, speaks falsely, and is taking away my character. And here, O men of Athens, I must beg you not to interrupt me, even if I seem to say something extravagant. For the word which I will speak is not mine. I will refer you to a witness who is worthy of credit; that witness shall be the God of Delphihe will tell you about my wisdom, if I have any, and of what sort it is. You must have known Chaerephon; he was early a friend of mine, and also a friend of yours, for he shared in the recent exile of the people, and returned with you. Well, Chaerephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all his doings, and he went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whetheras I was saying, I must beg you not to interrupthe asked the oracle to tell him whether anyone was wiser than I was, and the Pythian prophetess answered, that there was no man wiser. Chaerephon is dead himself; but his brother, who is in court, will confirm the truth of what I am saying.
  Why do I mention this? Because I am going to explain to you why I have such an evil name. When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the god mean? and what is the interpretation of his riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom, small or great. What then can he mean when he says that I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god, and cannot lie; that would be against his nature. After long consideration, I thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him, Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest. Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed himhis name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examinationand the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same. Whereupon I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.
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  This inquisition has led to my having many enemies of the worst and most dangerous kind, and has given occasion also to many calumnies. And I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go about the world, obedient to the god, and search and make enquiry into the wisdom of any one, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and my occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god.
  There is another thing:young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing; and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!and then if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practise or teach? they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detectedwhich is the truth; and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are drawn up in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate calumnies. And this is the reason why my three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me; Meletus, who has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on behalf of the craftsmen and politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians: and as I said at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of such a mass of calumny all in a moment. And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing. And yet, I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?Hence has arisen the prejudice against me; and this is the reason of it, as you will find out either in this or in any future enquiry.
  I have said enough in my defence against the first class of my accusers; I turn to the second class. They are headed by Meletus, that good man and true lover of his country, as he calls himself. Against these, too, I must try to make a defence:Let their affidavit be read: it contains something of this kind: It says that Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new divinities of his own. Such is the charge; and now let us examine the particular counts. He says that I am a doer of evil, and corrupt the youth; but I say, O men of Athens, that Meletus is a doer of evil, in that he pretends to be in earnest when he is only in jest, and is so eager to bring men to trial from a pretended zeal and interest about matters in which he really never had the smallest interest. And the truth of this I will endeavour to prove to you.
  Come hither, Meletus, and let me ask a question of you. You think a great deal about the improvement of youth?
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  The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.
  What, do you mean to say, Meletus, that they are able to instruct and improve youth?
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  Friend Meletus, you think that you are accusing Anaxagoras: and you have but a bad opinion of the judges, if you fancy them illiterate to such a degree as not to know that these doctrines are found in the books of Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, which are full of them. And so, forsooth, the youth are said to be taught them by Socrates, when there are not unfrequently exhibitions of them at the theatre (Probably in allusion to Aristophanes who caricatured, and to Euripides who borrowed the notions of Anaxagoras, as well as to other dramatic poets.) (price of admission one drachma at the most); and they might pay their money, and laugh at Socrates if he pretends to father these extraordinary views. And so, Meletus, you really think that I do not believe in any god?
  I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all.
  Nobody will believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure that you do not believe yourself. I cannot help thinking, men of Athens, that Meletus is reckless and impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a spirit of mere wantonness and youthful bravado. Has he not compounded a riddle, thinking to try me? He said to himself:I shall see whether the wise Socrates will discover my facetious contradiction, or whether I shall be able to deceive him and the rest of them. For he certainly does appear to me to contradict himself in the indictment as much as if he said that Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, and yet of believing in thembut this is not like a person who is in earnest.
  I should like you, O men of Athens, to join me in examining what I conceive to be his inconsistency; and do you, Meletus, answer. And I must remind the audience of my request that they would not make a disturbance if I speak in my accustomed manner:
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  Some one will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrongacting the part of a good man or of a bad. Whereas, upon your view, the heroes who fell at Troy were not good for much, and the son of Thetis above all, who altogether despised danger in comparison with disgrace; and when he was so eager to slay Hector, his goddess mother said to him, that if he avenged his companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would die himselfFate, she said, in these or the like words, waits for you next after Hector; he, receiving this warning, utterly despised danger and death, and instead of fearing them, feared rather to live in dishonour, and not to avenge his friend. Let me die forthwith, he replies, and be avenged of my enemy, rather than abide here by the beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden of the earth. Had Achilles any thought of death and danger? For wherever a mans place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything but of disgrace. And this, O men of Athens, is a true saying.
  Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was ordered by the generals whom you chose to comm and me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man, facing deathif now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfil the philosophers mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death, or any other fear; that would indeed be strange, and I might justly be arraigned in court for denying the existence of the gods, if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death, fancying that I was wise when I was not wise. For the fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretence of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows what he does not know? And in this respect only I believe myself to differ from men in general, and may perhaps claim to be wiser than they are:that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know: but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonourable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil. And therefore if you let me go now, and are not convinced by Anytus, who said that since I had been prosecuted I must be put to death; (or if not that I ought never to have been prosecuted at all); and that if I escape now, your sons will all be utterly ruined by listening to my wordsif you say to me, Socrates, this time we will not mind Anytus, and you shall be let off, but upon one condition, that you are not to enquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing so again you shall die;if this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply: Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet and saying to him after my manner: You, my friend,a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens,are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? And if the person with whom I am arguing, says: Yes, but I do care; then I do not leave him or let him go at once; but I proceed to interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue in him, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less. And I shall repeat the same words to every one whom I meet, young and old, citizen and alien, but especially to the citizens, inasmuch as they are my brethren. For know that this is the comm and of God; and I believe that no greater good has ever happened in the state than my service to the God. For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person. But if any one says that this is not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth. Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids or not as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not; but whichever you do, understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.
  Men of Athens, do not interrupt, but hear me; there was an understanding between us that you should hear me to the end: I have something more to say, at which you may be inclined to cry out; but I believe that to hear me will be good for you, and therefore I beg that you will not cry out. I would have you know, that if you kill such an one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Nothing will injure me, not Meletus nor yet Anytusthey cannot, for a bad man is not permitted to injure a better than himself. I do not deny that Anytus may, perhaps, kill him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and he may imagine, and others may imagine, that he is inflicting a great injury upon him: but there I do not agree. For the evil of doing as he is doingthe evil of unjustly taking away the life of anotheris greater far.
  --
  Well, Athenians, this and the like of this is all the defence which I have to offer. Yet a word more. Perhaps there may be some one who is offended at me, when he calls to mind how he himself on a similar, or even a less serious occasion, prayed and entreated the judges with many tears, and how he produced his children in court, which was a moving spectacle, together with a host of relations and friends; whereas I, who am probably in danger of my life, will do none of these things. The contrast may occur to his mind, and he may be set against me, and vote in anger because he is displeased at me on this account. Now if there be such a person among you,mind, I do not say that there is,to him I may fairly reply: My friend, I am a man, and like other men, a creature of flesh and blood, and not of wood or stone, as Homer says; and I have a family, yes, and sons, O Athenians, three in number, one almost a man, and two others who are still young; and yet I will not bring any of them hither in order to petition you for an acquittal. And why not? Not from any self-assertion or want of respect for you. Whether I am or am not afraid of death is another question, of which I will not now speak. But, having regard to public opinion, I feel that such conduct would be discreditable to myself, and to you, and to the whole state. One who has reached my years, and who has a name for wisdom, ought not to demean himself. Whether this opinion of me be deserved or not, at any rate the world has decided that Socrates is in some way superior to other men. And if those among you who are said to be superior in wisdom and courage, and any other virtue, demean themselves in this way, how shameful is their conduct! I have seen men of reputation, when they have been condemned, behaving in the strangest manner: they seemed to fancy that they were going to suffer something dreadful if they died, and that they could be immortal if you only allowed them to live; and I think that such are a dishonour to the state, and that any stranger coming in would have said of them that the most eminent men of Athens, to whom the Athenians themselves give honour and command, are no better than women. And I say that these things ought not to be done by those of us who have a reputation; and if they are done, you ought not to permit them; you ought rather to show that you are far more disposed to condemn the man who gets up a doleful scene and makes the city ridiculous, than him who holds his peace.
  But, setting aside the question of public opinion, there seems to be something wrong in asking a favour of a judge, and thus procuring an acquittal, instead of informing and convincing him. For his duty is, not to make a present of justice, but to give judgment; and he has sworn that he will judge according to the laws, and not according to his own good pleasure; and we ought not to encourage you, nor should you allow yourselves to be encouraged, in this habit of perjurythere can be no piety in that. Do not then require me to do what I consider dishonourable and impious and wrong, especially now, when I am being tried for impiety on the indictment of Meletus. For if, O men of Athens, by force of persuasion and entreaty I could overpower your oaths, then I should be teaching you to believe that there are no gods, and in defending should simply convict myself of the charge of not believing in them. But that is not sofar otherwise. For I do believe that there are gods, and in a sense higher than that in which any of my accusers believe in them. And to you and to God I commit my cause, to be determined by you as is best for you and me.
  --
  Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you are still less likely to believe me. Yet I say what is true, although a thing of which it is hard for me to persuade you. Also, I have never been accustomed to think that I deserve to suffer any harm. Had I money I might have estimated the offence at what I was able to pay, and not have been much the worse. But I have none, and therefore I must ask you to proportion the fine to my means. Well, perhaps I could afford a mina, and therefore I propose that penalty: Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty min, and they will be the sureties. Let thirty min be the penalty; for which sum they will be ample security to you.
  Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise, even although I am not wise, when they want to reproach you. If you had waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive, and not far from death. I am speaking now not to all of you, but only to those who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to say to them: you think that I was convicted because I had no words of the sort which would have procured my acquittalI mean, if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone or unsaid. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of wordscertainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to do, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I maintain, are unworthy of me. I thought at the time that I ought not to do anything common or mean when in danger: nor do I now repent of the style of my defence; I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man to use every way of escaping death. Often in battle there can be no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me, and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken them. And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of death,they too go their ways condemned by the truth to suffer the penalty of villainy and wrong; and I must abide by my awardlet them abide by theirs. I suppose that these things may be regarded as fated,and I think that they are well.
  And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with prophetic power. And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my departure punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you. Me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives. But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more inconsiderate with you, and you will be more offended at them. If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who have condemned me.

BOOK II. -- PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS., #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  initiated -- which must have been the case, as otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a daimon to
  reveal to him the secret and sacred allegorical drama of initiation. At all events, it is not the "father of

BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  word "demon," however, as in the case of Socrates, and in the spirit of the meaning given to it by the
  whole of antiquity, standing for the guardian Spirit, an "Angel," not a devil of Satanic descent, as
  --
  Kapilas, Platos, and Socrates, is compared with that of the Newtons, Kants, and the modern Huxleys
  and Haeckels. On comparing the results obtained by Dr. J. Barnard Davis, the Craniologist, worked

BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  with mutilating history most unscrupulously. And Socrates, a historian of the fifth century, and
  Syncellus, vice-patriarch of Constantinople (eighth century), both denounce him as the most daring
  --
  is inscrutable -- hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably
  refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging

BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  testimony of History, which shows even the Atheists of old -- such as Epicurus and Democritus -believing in gods, was false; and that philosophers like Socrates and Plato, asserting their existence,
  were mistaken enthusiasts and fools. If we hold our opinions merely on historical grounds, on the

BOOK VIII. - Some account of the Socratic and Platonic philosophy, and a refutation of the doctrine of Apuleius that the demons should be worshipped as mediators between gods and men, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  As far as concerns the literature of the Greeks, whose language holds a more illustrious place than any of the languages of the other nations, history mentions two schools of philosophers, the one called the Italic school, originating in that part of Italy which was formerly called Magna Grcia;[Pg 307] the other called the Ionic school, having its origin in those regions which are still called by the name of Greece. The Italic school had for its founder Pythagoras of Samos, to whom also the term "philosophy" is said to owe its origin. For whereas formerly those who seemed to excel others by the laudable manner in which they regulated their lives were called sages, Pythagoras, on being asked what he professed, replied that he was a philosopher, that is, a student or lover of wisdom; for it seemed to him to be the height of arrogance to profess oneself a sage.[292] The founder of the Ionic school, again, was Thales of Miletus, one of those seven who were styled the "seven sages," of whom six were distinguished by the kind of life they lived, and by certain maxims which they gave forth for the proper conduct of life. Thales was distinguished as an investigator into the nature of things; and, in order that he might have successors in his school, he committed his dissertations to writing. That, however, which especially rendered him eminent was his ability, by means of astronomical calculations, even to predict eclipses of the sun and moon. He thought, however, that water was the first principle of things, and that of it all the elements of the world, the world itself, and all things which are generated in it, ultimately consist. Over all this work, however, which, when we consider the world, appears so admirable, he set nothing of the nature of divine mind. To him succeeded Anaximander, his pupil, who held a different opinion concerning the nature of things; for he did not hold that all things spring from one principle, as Thales did, who held that principle to be water, but thought that each thing springs from its own proper principle. These principles of things he believed to be infinite in number, and thought that they generated innumerable worlds, and all the things which arise in them. He thought, also, that these worlds are subject to a perpetual process of alternate dissolution and regeneration, each one continuing for a longer or shorter period of time, according to the nature of the case; nor did he, any more than Thales, attribute anything to a divine mind in the production of all this activity of things. Anaximander left as his successor his[Pg 308] disciple Anaximenes, who attri buted all the causes of things to an infinite air. He neither denied nor ignored the existence of gods, but, so far from believing that the air was made by them, he held, on the contrary, that they sprang from the air. Anaxagoras, however, who was his pupil, perceived that a divine mind was the productive cause of all things which we see, and said that all the various kinds of things, according to their several modes and species, were produced out of an infinite matter consisting of homogeneous particles, but by the efficiency of a divine mind. Diogenes, also, another pupil of Anaximenes, said that a certain air was the original substance of things out of which all things were produced, but that it was possessed of a divine reason, without which nothing could be produced from it. Anaxagoras was succeeded by his disciple Archelaus, who also thought that all things consisted of homogeneous particles, of which each particular thing was made, but that those particles were pervaded by a divine mind, which perpetually energized all the eternal bodies, namely, those particles, so that they are alternately united and separated. Socrates, the master of Plato, is said to have been the disciple of Archelaus; and on Plato's account it is that I have given this brief historical sketch of the whole history of these schools.
  3. Of the Socratic philosophy.
   Socrates is said to have been the first who directed the entire effort of philosophy to the correction and regulation of manners, all who went before him having expended their greatest efforts in the investigation of physical, that is, natural phenomena. However, it seems to me that it cannot be certainly discovered whether Socrates did this because he was wearied of obscure and uncertain things, and so wished to direct his mind to the discovery of something manifest and certain, which was necessary in order to the obtaining of a blessed life,that one great object toward which the labour, vigilance, and industry of all philosophers seem to have been directed,or whether (as some yet more favourable to him suppose) he did it because he was unwilling that minds defiled with earthly desires should essay to raise themselves upward to divine things. For he saw that the causes of[Pg 309] things were sought for by them,which causes he believed to be ultimately reducible to nothing else than the will of the one true and supreme God,and on this account he thought they could only be comprehended by a purified mind; and therefore that all diligence ought to be given to the purification of the life by good morals, in order that the mind, delivered from the depressing weight of lusts, might raise itself upward by its native vigour to eternal things, and might, with purified understanding, contemplate that nature which is incorporeal and unchangeable light, where live the causes of all created natures. It is evident, however, that he hunted out and pursued, with a wonderful pleasantness of style and argument, and with a most pointed and insinuating urbanity, the foolishness of ignorant men, who thought that they knew this or that,sometimes confessing his own ignorance, and sometimes dissimulating his knowledge, even in those very moral questions to which he seems to have directed the whole force of his mind. And hence there arose hostility against him, which ended in his being calumniously impeached, and condemned to death. Afterwards, however, that very city of the Athenians, which had publicly condemned him, did publicly bewail him,the popular indignation having turned with such vehemence on his accusers, that one of them perished by the violence of the multitude, whilst the other only escaped a like punishment by voluntary and perpetual exile.
  Illustrious, therefore, both in his life and in his death, Socrates left very many disciples of his philosophy, who vied with one another in desire for proficiency in handling those moral questions which concern the chief good (summum bonum), the possession of which can make a man blessed; and because, in the disputations of Socrates, where he raises all manner of questions, makes assertions, and then demolishes them, it did not evidently appear what he held to be the chief good, every one took from these disputations what pleased him best, and every one placed the final good[293] in whatever it appeared to himself to consist. Now, that which is called the final good is that at which,[Pg 310] when one has arrived, he is blessed. But so diverse were the opinions held by those followers of Socrates concerning this final good, that (a thing scarcely to be credited with respect to the followers of one master) some placed the chief good in pleasure, as Aristippus, others in virtue, as Antis thenes. Indeed, it were tedious to recount the various opinions of various disciples.
  4. Concerning Plato, the chief among the disciples of Socrates, and his threefold division of philosophy.
  But, among the disciples of Socrates, Plato was the one who shone with a glory which far excelled that of the others, and who not unjustly eclipsed them all. By birth an Athenian of honourable parentage, he far surpassed his fellow-disciples in natural endowments, of which he was possessed in a wonderful degree. Yet, deeming himself and the Socratic discipline far from sufficient for bringing philosophy to perfection, he travelled as extensively as he was able, going to every place famed for the cultivation of any science of which he could make himself master. Thus he learned from the Egyptians whatever they held and taught as important; and from Egypt, passing into those parts of Italy which were filled with the fame of the Pythagoreans, he mastered, with the greatest facility, and under the most eminent teachers, all the Italic philosophy which was then in vogue. And, as he had a peculiar love for his master Socrates, he made him the speaker in all his dialogues, putting into his mouth whatever he had learned, either from others, or from the efforts of his own powerful intellect, tempering even his moral disputations with the grace and politeness of the Socratic style. And, as the study of wisdom consists in action and contemplation, so that one part of it may be called active, and the other contemplative,the active part having reference to the conduct of life, that is, to the regulation of morals, and the contemplative part to the investigation into the causes of nature and into pure truth, Socrates is said to have excelled in the active part of that study, while Pythagoras gave more attention to its contemplative part, on which he brought to bear all the force of his great intellect. To Plato is given the praise of having perfected philosophy by combining both parts into one. He[Pg 311] then divides it into three parts,the first moral, which is chiefly occupied with action; the second natural, of which the object is contemplation; and the third rational, which discriminates between the true and the false. And though this last is necessary both to action and contemplation, it is contemplation, nevertheless, which lays peculiar claim to the office of investigating the nature of truth. Thus this tripartite division is not contrary to that which made the study of wisdom to consist in action and contemplation. Now, as to what Plato thought with respect to each of these parts,that is, what he believed to be the end of all actions, the cause of all natures, and the light of all intelligences,it would be a question too long to discuss, and about which we ought not to make any rash affirmation. For, as Plato liked and constantly affected the well-known method of his master Socrates, namely, that of dissimulating his knowledge or his opinions, it is not easy to discover clearly what he himself thought on various matters, any more than it is to discover what were the real opinions of Socrates. We must, nevertheless, insert into our work certain of those opinions which he expresses in his writings, whether he himself uttered them, or narrates them as expressed by others, and seems himself to approve of,opinions sometimes favourable to the true religion, which our faith takes up and defends, and sometimes contrary to it, as, for example, in the questions concerning the existence of one God or of many, as it relates to the truly blessed life which is to be after death. For those who are praised as having most closely followed Plato, who is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the Gentiles, and who are said to have manifested the greatest acuteness in understanding him, do perhaps entertain such an idea of God as to admit that in Him are to be found the cause of existence, the ultimate reason for the understanding, and the end in reference to which the whole life is to be regulated. Of which three things, the first is understood to pertain to the natural, the second to the rational, and the third to the moral part of philosophy. For if man has been so created as to attain, through that which is most excellent in him, to that which excels all things,that is, to the one true and absolutely good[Pg 312] God, without whom no nature exists, no doctrine instructs, no exercise profits,let Him be sought in whom all things are secure to us, let Him be discovered in whom all truth becomes certain to us, let Him be loved in whom all becomes right to us.
    5. That it is especially with the Platonists that we must carry on our disputations on matters of theology, their opinions being preferable to those of all other philosophers.
  --
  Of these things many have written: among others Apuleius, the Platonist of Madaura, who composed a whole work on the subject, entitled, Concerning the God of Socrates. He there discusses and explains of what kind that deity was who attended on Socrates, a sort of familiar, by whom it is said he was admonished to desist from any action which would not turn out to his advantage. He asserts most distinctly, and proves at great length, that it was not a god but a demon; and he discusses with great diligence the opinion of Plato concerning the lofty estate of the gods, the lowly estate of men, and the middle estate of demons. These things being so, how did Plato dare to take away, if not from the gods, whom he removed from all human contagion, certainly from the demons, all the pleasures of the theatre, by expelling the poets from the state? Evidently in this way he wished to admonish the human soul, although still confined in these moribund members, to despise the shameful commands of the demons,[Pg 327] and to detest their impurity, and to choose rather the splendour of virtue. But if Plato showed himself virtuous in answering and prohibiting these things, then certainly it was shameful of the demons to comm and them. Therefore either Apuleius is wrong, and Socrates' familiar did not belong to this class of deities, or Plato held contradictory opinions, now honouring the demons, now removing from the well-regulated state the things in which they delighted, or Socrates is not to be congratulated on the friendship of the demon, of which Apuleius was so ashamed that he entitled his book On the God of Socrates, whilst according to the tenor of his discussion, wherein he so diligently and at such length distinguishes gods from demons, he ought not to have entitled it, Concerning the God, but Concerning the Demon of Socrates. But he preferred to put this into the discussion itself rather than into the title of his book. For, through the sound doctrine which has illuminated human society, all, or almost all men have such a horror at the name of demons, that every one who, before reading the dissertation of Apuleius, which sets forth the dignity of demons, should have read the title of the book, On the Demon of Socrates, would certainly have thought that the author was not a sane man. But what did even Apuleius find to praise in the demons, except subtlety and strength of body and a higher place of habitation? For when he spoke generally concerning their manners, he said nothing that was good, but very much that was bad. Finally, no one, when he has read that book, wonders that they desired to have even the obscenity of the stage among divine things, or that, wishing to be thought gods, they should be delighted with the crimes of the gods, or that all those sacred solemnities, whose obscenity occasions laughter, and whose shameful cruelty causes horror, should be in agreement with their passions.
  15. That the demons are not better than men because of their aerial bodies, or on account of their superior place of abode.
  --
  But, nevertheless, we do not build temples, and ordain priests, rites, and sacrifices for these same martyrs; for they are not our gods, but their God is our God. Certainly we honour their reliquaries, as the memorials of holy men of God who strove for the truth even to the death of their bodies, that the true religion might be made known, and false and fictitious religions exposed. For if there were some before them who thought that these religions were really false and fictitious, they were afraid to give expression to their convictions. But who ever heard a priest of the faithful, standing at an altar built for the honour and worship of God over the holy body of some martyr, say in the prayers, I offer to thee a sacrifice, O Peter, or O Paul, or O Cyprian? for it is to God that sacrifices are offered at their tombs,the God who made them both men and martyrs, and associated them with holy angels in celestial honour; and the reason why we pay such honours to their memory is, that by so doing we may both give thanks to the true God for their victories, and, by recalling them afresh to remembrance, may stir ourselves up to imitate them by seeking to obtain like crowns and palms, calling to our help that same God on whom they called. Therefore, whatever honours the religious may pay in the places of the martyrs, they are but honours rendered to their memory,[327] not sacred rites or sacrifices offered to dead men as to gods. And even such as bring thither food,which, indeed, is not done by the better Christians, and in most places of[Pg 351] the world is not done at all,do so in order that it may be sanctified to them through the merits of the martyrs, in the name of the Lord of the martyrs, first presenting the food and offering prayer, and thereafter taking it away to be eaten, or to be in part bestowed upon the needy.[328] But he who knows the one sacrifice of Christians, which is the sacrifice offered in those places, also knows that these are not sacrifices offered to the martyrs. It is, then, neither with divine honours nor with human crimes, by which they worship their gods, that we honour our martyrs; neither do we offer sacrifices to them, or convert the crimes of the gods into their sacred rites. For let those who will and can read the letter of Alexander to his mother Olympias, in which he tells the things which were revealed to him by the priest Leon, and let those who have read it recall to memory what it contains, that they may see what great abominations have been handed down to memory, not by poets, but by the mystic writings of the Egyptians, concerning the goddess Isis, the wife of Osiris, and the parents of both, all of whom, according to these writings, were royal personages. Isis, when sacrificing to her parents, is said to have discovered a crop of barley, of which she brought some ears to the king her husband, and his councillor Mercurius, and hence they identify her with Ceres. Those who read the letter may there see what was the character of those people to whom when dead sacred rites were instituted as to gods, and what those deeds of theirs were which furnished the occasion for these rites. Let them not once dare to compare in any respect those people, though they hold them to be gods, to our holy martyrs, though we do not hold them to be gods. For we do not ordain priests and offer sacrifices to our martyrs, as they do to their dead men, for that would be incongruous, undue, and unlawful, such being due only to God; and thus we do not delight them with their own crimes, or with such shameful plays as those in which the crimes of the gods are celebrated, which are either real crimes committed by them at a time when they were men, or else, if they never were men, fictitious crimes invented for the pleasure of noxious demons. The god of Socrates, if he had a[Pg 352] god, cannot have belonged to this class of demons. But perhaps they who wished to excel in this art of making gods, imposed a god of this sort on a man who was a stranger to, and innocent of any connection with that art. What need we say more? No one who is even moderately wise imagines that demons are to be worshipped on account of the blessed life which is to be after death. But perhaps they will say that all the gods are good, but that of the demons some are bad and some good, and that it is the good who are to be worshipped, in order that through them we may attain to the eternally blessed life. To the examination of this opinion we will devote the following book.
  [Pg 353]

BOOK XIII. - That death is penal, and had its origin in Adam's sin, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  [524] With this may be compared the argument of Socrates in the Gorgias, in which it is shown that to escape punishment is worse than to suffer it, and that the greatest of evils is to do wrong and not be chastised.
  [525] Eccles. x. 13.

BOOK XIV. - Of the punishment and results of mans first sin, and of the propagation of man without lust, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  The same author had also used the expression, "the evil contentments of the mind."[47] So that good and bad men alike will, are cautious, and contented; or, to say the same thing in other words, good and bad men alike desire, fear, rejoice, but the former in a good, the latter in a bad fashion, according as the will is right or wrong. Sorrow itself, too,[Pg 15] which the Stoics would not allow to be represented in the mind of the wise man, is used in a good sense, and especially in our writings. For the apostle praises the Corinthians because they had a godly sorrow. But possibly some one may say that the apostle congratulated them because they were penitently sorry, and that such sorrow can exist only in those who have sinned. For these are his words: "For I perceive that the same epistle hath made you sorry, though it were but for a season. Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance; for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For, behold, this selfsame thing that ye sorrowed after a godly sort, what carefulness it wrought in you!"[48] Consequently the Stoics may defend themselves by replying,[49] that sorrow is indeed useful for repentance of sin, but that this can have no place in the mind of the wise man, inasmuch as no sin attaches to him of which he could sorrowfully repent, nor any other evil the endurance or experience of which could make him sorrowful. For they say that Alcibiades (if my memory does not deceive me), who believed himself happy, shed tears when Socrates argued with him, and demonstrated that he was miserable because he was foolish. In his case, therefore, folly was the cause of this useful and desirable sorrow, wherewith a man mourns that he is what he ought not to be. But the Stoics maintain not that the fool, but that the wise man, cannot be sorrowful.
  9. Of the perturbations of the soul which appear as right affections in the life of the righteous.

BOOK XVIII. - A parallel history of the earthly and heavenly cities from the time of Abraham to the end of the world, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  In the time of our prophets, then, whose writings had already come to the knowledge of almost all nations, the philosophers of the nations had not yet arisen,at least, not those who were called by that name, which originated with Pythagoras the Samian, who was becoming famous at the time when the Jewish captivity ended. Much more, then, are the other philosophers found to be later than the prophets. For even Socrates the Athenian, the master of all who were then most famous, holding the pre-eminence in that department that is called the moral or active, is found after Esdras in the chronicles. Plato also was born not much later, who far outwent the other disciples of Socrates. If, besides these, we take their predecessors, who had not yet been styled philosophers, to wit, the seven sages, and then the physicists, who succeeded Thales, and imitated his studious search into the nature of things, namely, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Anaxagoras, and some others, before Pythagoras first professed himself a philosopher, even these did not precede the whole of our prophets in antiquity of time, since Thales, whom the others succeeded, is said to have flourished in the reign of Romulus, when the stream of prophecy burst forth from the fountains of Israel in those writings which spread over the whole world. So that only those theological poets, Orpheus, Linus, and Musus, and, it may be, some others[Pg 264] among the Greeks, are found earlier in date than the Hebrew prophets whose writings we hold as authoritative. But not even these preceded in time our true divine, Moses, who au thentically preached the one true God, and whose writings are first in the authoritative canon; and therefore the Greeks, in whose tongue the literature of this age chiefly appears, have no ground for boasting of their wisdom, in which our religion, wherein is true wisdom, is not evidently more ancient at least, if not superior. Yet it must be confessed that before Moses there had already been, not indeed among the Greeks, but among barbarous nations, as in Egypt, some doctrine which might be called their wisdom, else it would not have been written in the holy books that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,[573] as he was, when, being born there, and adopted and nursed by Pharaoh's daughter, he was also liberally educated. Yet not even the wisdom of the Egyptians could be antecedent in time to the wisdom of our prophets, because even Abraham was a prophet. And what wisdom could there be in Egypt before Isis had given them letters, whom they thought fit to worship as a goddess after her death? Now Isis is declared to have been the daughter of Inachus, who first began to reign in Argos when the grandsons of Abraham are known to have been already born.
    38. That the ecclesiastical canon has not admitted certain writings on account of their too great antiquity, lest through them false things should be inserted instead of true.

Cratylus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, HERMOGENES, CRATYLUS
  .......................................................................
  Hermogenes. Suppose that we make Socrates a party to the argument?
  Cratylus. If you please.
  Her. I should explain to you, Socrates, that our friend Cratylus has
  been arguing about names; he says that they are natural and not
  --
  intelligible. Tell me, Socrates, what this oracle means; or rather
  tell me, if you will be so good, what is your own view of the truth or
  --
  Her. Yes, Socrates, I can conceive no correctness of names other
  than this; you give one name, and I another; and in different cities
  --
  Her. There have been times, Socrates, when I have been driven in
  my perplexity to take refuge with Protagoras; not that I agree with
  --
  Her. I think, Socrates, that you have said the truth.
  Soc. Does what I am saying apply only to the things themselves, or
  --
  Her. I should say, he who is to use them, Socrates.
  Soc. And who uses the work of the lyremaker? Will not he be the
  --
  Her. I cannot answer you, Socrates; but I find a difficulty in
  changing my opinion all in a moment, and I think that I should be more
  --
  Her. Certainly, Socrates.
  Soc. Again, Hermogenes, there is Orestes (the man of the
  --
  Her. That is very likely, Socrates.
  Soc. And his father's name is also according to nature.
  --
  Her. You seem to me, Socrates, to be quite like a prophet newly
  inspired, and to be uttering oracles.
  --
  Her. I think so, Socrates.
  Soc. Ought we not to begin with the consideration of the Gods, and
  --
  Her. I think, Socrates, that we have said enough of this class of
  words. But have we any more explanations of the names of the Gods,
  --
  Her. I think, Socrates, that you are quite right, and I would like
  to do as you say.
  --
  Her. Why, Socrates?
  Soc. My good friend, I have discovered a hive of wisdom.
  --
  Her. I think that there is something in what you say, Socrates;
  but I do not understand the meaning of the name Tethys.
  --
  Her. The idea is ingenious, Socrates.
  Soc. To be sure. But what comes next?- of Zeus we have spoken.
  --
  Her. Desire, Socrates, is stronger far.
  Soc. And do you not think that many a one would escape from Hades,
  --
  Her. Still there remains Athene, whom you, Socrates, as an Athenian,
  will surely not forget; there are also Hephaestus and Ares.
  --
  Her. From these sort of Gods, by all means, Socrates. But why should
  we not discuss another kind of Gods- the sun, moon, stars, earth,
  --
  Her. A real dithyrambic sort of name that, Socrates. But what do you
  say of the month and the stars?
  --
  Her. Indeed, Socrates, you make surprising progress.
  Soc. I am run away with.
  --
  Her. How is that, Socrates?
  Soc. Perhaps you did not observe that in the names which have been
  --
  Her. I think, Socrates, that you are not improvising now; you must
  have heard this from some one else.
  --
  Her. That is quite true, Socrates.
  Soc. And yet, if you are permitted to put in and pull out any
  --
  Her. You bring out curious results, Socrates, in the use of names;
  and when I hear the word boulapteroun I cannot help imagining that you
  --
  Her. Yes, Socrates; that is quite plain.
  Soc. Not if you restore the ancient form, which is more likely to be
  --
  (desire), and the like, Socrates?
  Soc. I do not think, Hermogenes, that there is any great
  --
  Her. You are quickening your pace now, Socrates.
  Soc. Why yes, the end I now dedicate to God, not, however, until I
  --
  Her. There would be no choice, Socrates.
  Soc. We should imitate the nature of the thing; the elevation of our
  --
  Her. In my opinion, no. But I wish that you would tell me, Socrates,
  what sort of an imitation is a name?
  --
  Her. I imagine, Socrates, that he must be the namer, or
  name-giver, of whom we are in search.
  --
  Her. That, Socrates, I can quite believe.
  Soc. Well, but do you suppose that you will be able to analyse
  --
  Her. Certainly, Socrates.
  Soc. My first notions of original names are truly wild and
  --
  Her. But, Socrates, as I was telling you before, Cratylus
  mystifies me; he says that there is a fitness of names, but he never
  --
  presence of Socrates, do you agree in what Socrates has been saying
  about names, or have you something better of your own? and if you
  --
   Socrates, or Socrates and I will learn of you.
  Crat. Well, but surely, Hermogenes, you do not suppose that you
  --
  take a little trouble and oblige Socrates, and me too, who certainly
  have a claim upon you.
  --
  Crat. You are right, Socrates, in saying that I have made a study of
  these matters, and I might possibly convert you into a disciple. But I
  --
  And you, Socrates, appear to me to be an oracle, and to give answers
  much to my whether you are inspired by Euthyphro, or whether some Muse
  --
  Crat. Yes, Socrates, what you say, as I am disposed to think, is
  quite true.
  --
  Crat. Why, Socrates, how can a man say that which is not?- say
  something and yet say nothing? For is not falsehood saying the thing
  --
  Crat. In my opinion, Socrates, the speaker would only be talking
  nonsense.
  --
  Crat. That may be true, Socrates, in the case of pictures; they
  may be wrongly assigned; but not in the case of names- they must be
  --
  Crat. I would fain agree with you, Socrates; and therefore I say,
  Granted.
  --
  Crat. Very true, Socrates; but the case of language, you see, is
  different; for when by the help of grammar we assign the letters a
  --
  Crat. I quite acknowledge, Socrates, what you say to be very
  reasonable.
  --
  Crat. There would be no use, Socrates, in my quarrelling with you,
  since I cannot be satisfied that a name which is incorrectly given
  --
  Crat. Representation by likeness, Socrates, is infinitely better
  than representation by any chance sign.
  --
  Crat. Why, perhaps the letter l is wrongly inserted, Socrates, and
  should be altered into r, as you were saying to Hermogenes and in my
  --
  Crat. The use of names, Socrates, as I should imagine, is to inform:
  the simple truth is, that he who knows names knows also the things
  --
  Crat. But, Socrates, am I not right in thinking that he must
  surely have known; or else, as I was saying, his names would not be
  --
  Crat. Yes, Socrates, but observe; the greater number express motion.
  Soc. What of that, Cratylus? Are we to count them like votes? and is
  --
  Crat. They must have known, Socrates.
  Soc. Why, yes, friend Cratylus, they could hardly have been
  --
  Crat. I think that there is a good deal in what you say, Socrates.
  Soc. But if things are only to be known through names, how can we
  --
  Crat. I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be,
  that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that
  --
  Crat. No; not in that way, Socrates.
  Soc. But if this is a battle of names, some of them asserting that
  --
  Crat. Clearly, Socrates.
  Soc. There is another point. I should not like us to be imposed upon
  --
  Crat. Certainly, Socrates, I think so.
  Soc. Then let us seek the true beauty: not asking whether a face
  --
  Crat. I will do as you say, though I can assure you, Socrates,
  that I have been considering the matter already, and the result of a
  --
  Crat. Very good, Socrates; I hope, however, that you will continue
  to think about these things yourself.

ENNEAD 02.05 - Of the Aristotelian Distinction Between Actuality and Potentiality., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  In non-permanent things, what exists potentially is evidently something quite different (from what is said to exist actually). But when the potential grammarian becomes an actual grammarian, why should not the potential and actual coincide? The potential wise Socrates is the same as the actual Socrates. Is the ignorant man, who was potentially learned, the same as the learned? No: only accident makes of the ignorant man a learned one; for it was not his ignorance that made him potentially wise; with him, ignorance was only an accident; but his soul, being by herself disposed (to be actually learned), still remains potentially learned, in so far as she was actually so,344 and still keeps what is called potential existence; thus the actual grammarian does not cease being a potential grammarian.18 Nothing hinders these two different things (of being a potential and actual grammarian) from coinciding; in the first case, the man is no more than a potential grammarian; in the latter, the man is still a potential grammarian, but this potentiality has acquired its form (that is, has become actual19).
  DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GENERAL AND PARTICULAR ACTUALITY.

ENNEAD 03.02 - Of Providence., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  In this world, indeed, just as in the theatre, it is not the soul, the interior man, but his shadow, the exterior man, who gives himself up to lamentations and groans, who on this earth moves about so much, and who makes of it the scene of an immense drama with numberless different acts (?) Such is the characteristic of the actions of a man who considers exclusively the things placed at his feet, and outside of him, and who does not know that his tears and serious occupations are any more than games.68 The really earnest man occupies himself seriously only with really serious affairs, while the frivolous man applies himself to frivolous things. Indeed, frivolous things become serious for him who does not know really serious occupations, and who himself is frivolous. If, indeed, one cannot help being mixed up in this child's play, it is just as well to know that he has fallen into child's play where one's real personality is not in question. If Socrates were to mingle in these games, it would only be his exterior man who would do so. Let us add that tears and groans do not prove that the evils we are complaining of are very real evils; for often children weep and lament over imaginary grievances.
  DOES THIS POINT OF VIEW DESTROY SIN AND JUSTICE?

ENNEAD 04.03 - Psychological Questions., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  5. How could the universal Soul simultaneously be the soul of yourself and of other persons? Might she be the soul of one person by her lower strata, and that of somebody else by her higher strata? To teach such a doctrine would be equivalent to asserting that the soul of Socrates would be alive while being in a certain body, while she would be annihilated (by losing herself within the universal Soul) at the very moment when (as a result of separation of the body) she had come into what was best (in the intelligible world). No, none of the true beings perishes. Not even the intelligences lose themselves up there (in the divine Intelligence), because they are not divided as are bodies, and each subsists in her own characteristics, to their differences joining that identity which constitutes "being." Being located below the individual intelligences to which they are attached, individual souls are the "reasons" (born) of the intelligences, or more developed intelligences; from being but slightly manifold, they become very much so, while remaining in communion with the slightly manifold beings. As however they tend to introduce separation in these less divisible beings (that is, intelligences), and as nevertheless they cannot attain the last limits of division, they simultaneously preserve both their identity and difference. Each one remains single, and all together form a unity.
  SOULS DEVELOP MANIFOLDNESS JUST AS INTELLIGENCE DOES.

ENNEAD 04.04 - Questions About the Soul., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  2. Granted. But does the soul remember herself? Probably not. He who contemplates the intelligible444 world does not remember who he is; that, for instance, he is Socrates, that he is a soul or an intelligence. How indeed would he remember it? Entirely devoted to the contemplation of the intelligible world, he does not by thought reflect back upon himself; he possesses himself, but he applies himself to the intelligible, and becomes the intelligible, in respect to which he plays the part of matter. He assumes the form of the object he is contemplating, and he then is himself only potentially. Actually, he is himself only when he thinks the intelligible. When he is himself only, he is empty of all things, because he does not think the intelligible; but if by nature he is such that he is all things, in thinking himself, he thinks all things. In this state, seeing himself actually by the glance he throws on himself, he embraces all things in this intuition; on the other hand, by the glance he throws on all things, he embraces himself in the intuition of all things.
  IN THE INTELLIGIBLE SELF-DIRECTION OF THOUGHT IS NOT CHANGEABLENESS.

ENNEAD 05.01 - The Three Principal Hypostases, or Forms of Existence., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  4. The dignity of Intelligence may be appreciated in still another way. After having admired the magnitude and beauty of the sense-world, the eternal regularity of its movement, the visible or hidden divinities, the animals and plants it contains, we may (taking our direction from all this), rise to this world's archetype, a more real World. There we may contemplate all the intelligible entities which are as eternal as the intelligible world, and which there subsist within perfect knowledge and life. There preside pure intelligence and ineffable wisdom; there is located the real Saturnian realm,226 which is nothing else than pure intelligence. This indeed embraces every immortal essence, every intelligence, every divinity, every soul;179 everything there is eternal and immutable. Since its condition is blissful, why should Intelligence change? Since it contains everything, why should it aspire to anything? Since it is sovereignly perfect, what need of development would it have? Its perfection is so much completer, since it contains nothing but perfect things, and since it thinks them; it thinks them, not because it seeks to know them, but because it possesses them.227 Its felicity is not in any way contingent on anything else; itself is true eternity, of which time furnishes a moving image of the sphere of the soul. Indeed, the soul's action is successive, and divided by the different objects that attract its attention. Now it thinks Socrates, and then it thinks a horse; never does it grasp but one part of reality, while intelligence always embraces all things simultaneously. Intelligence, therefore, possesses all things immovable in identity. It is; it never has anything but the present;228 it has no future, for it already is all it could ever later become; it has no past, for no intelligible entity ever passes away; all of them subsist in an eternal present, all remain identical, satisfied with their present condition. Each one is both intelligence and existence; all together, they are universal Intelligence, universal Existence.
  ABOVE INTELLIGENCE AND EXISTENCE IS THEIR SIMULTANEOUS PRINCIPLE.

ENNEAD 05.03 - The Self-Consciousnesses, and What is Above Them., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  3. Now let us suppose that the senses have perceived a man, and have furnished an appropriate image thereof to discursive reason. What will the latter say? It may say nothing, limiting itself to taking notice of him. However, it may also ask itself who this man is;1093 and, having already met him, with the aid of memory, decide that he is Socrates. If then discursive reason develop the image of Socrates, then it divides what imagination has furnished. If discursive reason add that Socrates is good, it still deals with things known by the senses; but that which it asserts thereof, namely, his goodness, it has drawn from itself, because within itself it possesses the rule of goodness. But how does it, within itself, possess goodness? Because it conforms to the Good, and receives the notion of it from the Intelligence that enlightens itself; for (discursive reason), this part of the soul, is pure, and receives impressions from Intelligence.101
  WHY DISCURSIVE REASON SHOULD BELONG TO THE SOUL RATHER THAN TO INTELLIGENCE.

ENNEAD 05.07 - Do Ideas of Individuals Exist?, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  1. Do ideas of individuals (as well as of classes of individuals), exist? This means that if I, in company with some other man, were to trace ourselves back to the intelligible world, we would there find separate individual principles corresponding to each of us. (This might imply either of two theories.) Either, if the individual named Socrates be eternal, and if the soul of Socrates be Socrates himself, then the soul of each individual is contained in the intelligible world. Or if, on the contrary, the individual named Socrates be not eternal, if the same soul can belong successively to several individuals, such as Socrates or Pythagoras, then (as Alcinoous, e. g., and other Platonists insist), each individual does not have his idea in the intelligible world.
  THE FIRST (NON-PLATONIC) HYPOTHESIS ALONE RIGHT.
  --
  But, if produced things may be more numerous than their specimens, what would be the necessity for the "reasons" and specimens of all individuals begotten during some one period? It would seem that the (idea of) the "man himself" to explain the existence of all men, and that the souls of a finite number of them could successively animate men of an infinite number. (To this contention we demur: for) it is impossible for different things to have an identical ("seminal) reason." The (idea of) the man himself would not, as model, suffice (to account) for men who differ from each other not only by matter, but also by specific differences. They cannot be compared to the images of Socrates which reproduce their model. Only the difference of the ("seminal) reasons" could give rise to individual differences. (As Plato said),334 the entire period contains all the ("seminal) reasons." When it recommences, the same things rearise through the same "reasons." We need not fear that, as a consequence, there would be an infinite (number or variety) of them in the intelligible world; for the multitude (of the seminal reasons) constitutes an indivisible principle from which each issues forth whenever active.
  SEX ALONE WOULD NOT ACCOUNT FOR THIS DIVERSITY.

ENNEAD 05.09 - Of Intelligence, Ideas and Essence., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  12. If the intelligible world contains the idea of Man, it must also contain that of the reasonable man, and of the artist; and consequently the idea of the arts that are begotten by Intelligence. We must therefore insist that the intelligible world contains the ideas of the universals, the idea of Man as such, and not, for instance, that of Socrates. Still we shall have to decide whether the intelligible world does not also contain the idea of the individual man, that is, of the man considered with the things that differ in each individual; for one may have a Roman nose and the other a pug nose. These differences are indeed implied within the idea of man, just as there are differences within the idea of animal. But the differences between a Roman or a snub nose are derived from matter. Likewise, amidst the varieties of colors, some are contained within the seminal reason, while others are derived from matter and space.
  116

ENNEAD 06.01 - Of the Ten Aristotelian and Four Stoic Categories., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  If to-morrow, to-day, and yesterday, as well as other similar divisions of time, be parts of time, why should they not be classed in the same classification as time itself, along with the ideas "it has been," "it is," and "it will be?" As they are kinds of time, it seems proper that they should be classified along with time itself. Now time is part of quantity. What then is the use of another category? If the Aristotelians say that not only "it has been" and "it will be" are time-concepts, but "yesterday" and "formerly," which are varieties of "there has been" are also time-concepts (for these terms are subordinated to "there has been"), that it is not only "now" that is time, but that "when" is such also, they will be forced to answer as follows: First, if "when" be time, time exists; then, as "yesterday" is past time, it will be something composite, if the past be something else than time; we will have to erect two categories, not merely a simple category. For instance, they say both that "when" is in time, without being time, and say that "when" is that which is in time. An example of this would be to say that Socrates existed "formerly," whereby Socrates would really be outside of (present) time. Therefore they are no longer expressing something single. But what is meant by Socrates "being in time," and that some fact "is in time?" Does it mean that they are "part of time?" If, in saying "a part of time," and "so far as it is a part of time," the Aristotelians believe that they are not speaking of time absolutely, but only of a past part of time, they are really expressing several things. For this "part," so far as it is a part, is by them referred to something; and for them the past will be some thing added (to Time), or it will become identified with "there has been," which is a kind of862 time. But if they say that there is a difference, because "there has been" is indeterminate, while "formerly" and "yesterday" are determinate, we shall be deciding something about "there has been;" then "yesterday" will be the determination of "there has been," so that "yesterday" will be determined time. Now, that is a quantity of time; so that if time be a quantity, each one of these two things will be a determined quantity. But, if, when they say "yesterday" they mean thereby that such an event has happened in a determined past time, they are still expressing several things. Therefore, if some new category is to be introduced whenever one thing acts in another, as here happened of what occurred in time, we might have to introduce many additional categories, for in a different thing the action is different. This will, besides, become clearer in what is to follow on the category of place.
  5. WHERE, OR, PLACE.

ENNEAD 06.02 - The Categories of Plotinos., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  As we are going to treat of essence or essences, we must before everything else clear up the significance of essence, which we are now considering, and distinguish it from what other people mean by that word, which we would more likely call that which becomes, what is never genuine essence. And besides, it must be clearly understood that in making this distinction, we do not intend to divide a genus in species of the same nature; as Plato tried to do.299 For it would be ridiculous to subsume under the same genus both essence and non-essence, or Socrates, and the image of Socrates. The kind of divisions here attempted will therefore only consist in separating things essentially different, as, for instance, explaining that apparent essence is not the same as the veritable Essence, by demonstrating that the latter's nature is entirely different. To clarify this its nature, it will be necessary to add to the idea of essence that of eternity, and thus to demonstrate that the nature of being could never be deceptive. It is of this kind of essence (that is, of the intelligible Essence), that we are going to treat, admitting that it is not single. Later300 we shall speak of generation, of what becomes, and of the sense-world.
  HIERARCHICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE UNIVERSE.

ENNEAD 06.03 - Plotinos Own Sense-Categories., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  It would seem that (physical) "being" is that which is not predicated of anything else;355 for whiteness and blackness may, for instance, be predicated of some white or black subject. Likewise with the idea of "doubleness";I mean here not the doubleness which is the opposite of one half, but the doubleness predicated of some subject, as when one says "this wood is double." So also paternity, and science, are attri butes of another subject, of which that is said. So space is that which limits, and time that which measures something else. But fire, or wood considered as such, are not attri butes. Neither are Socrates, nor composite940 being (composed of matter and form), nor form which is in the "being," because it is not a modification of any other subject. Indeed, form is not an attri bute of matter; it is an element of the combination. "Man" and "form of man" are one and the same thing.356 Matter also is an element of the combination; under this respect, it may be predicated of a subject, but this subject is identical with itself. On the contrary, whiteness, considered in itself, exists only in the subject of which it may be predicated. Consequently, the thing which exists only in the subject of which it is predicated is not (physical) "being."356 "Being," on the contrary, is that which is what it is by itself. In case it form part of some subject, then it completes the combination; whose elements exist each in itself, and which are predicated of the combination only in a condition other than that of existing in it. Considered as a part, "being" is relative to something other than itself; but considered in itself, in its nature, in what it is, it is not predicable of anything.357
  PHYSICAL BEING IS THE PRINCIPLE OF ALL OTHER THINGS.
  --
  Not to be in a subject is then the common characteristic of all "being," if, by "not being in a subject," we mean "not to form part of any subject," and "not to contri bute to the formation of a unity therewith." Indeed, that which contri butes to the formation of a composite being, with something else, could not be in that thing as in a subject; form therefore is not in matter as in a subject, and neither is "man" in Socrates as in a subject, because "man" forms part of Socrates.363 Thus, "being" is that which is not in a942 subject. If we add that "being" is not predicated of any subject, we must also add, "insofar as this subject is something different from itself;" otherwise "man," predicated of some one man, would not be comprised within the definition of "being," if (in asserting that "being" is not predicated of any subject), we did not add, "so far as this subject is something different from itself." When I say, " Socrates is a man," I am practically saying, "White is white," and not, "wood is white." While actually asserting that " Socrates is a man," I am asserting that a particular man is a man, and to say "The man who is in Socrates is a man," amounts to saying " Socrates is Socrates," or, "that particular reasonable living organism is a living organism."
  ALL THE OTHER PHYSICAL CATEGORIES REFER TO MATTER, FORM OR COMBINATION.
  --
  Then, in what consists the being of earth, fire, and other similar things? What is the difference between the being of these things and of others? The essence of the earth, of the fire, and so forth, exists in an absolute manner, while the essence of other things (is relative) and for instance, means merely being white. "Is" added to white is not the same thing as "essence" taken absolutely; is it? Certainly not. Essence taken absolutely is essence in the first degree; "to be" added to white, is essence by participation, essence in the second degree; for "to be," added to white, makes944 white an essence; and white added to essence makes the being white; that is why white is an accident for essence, and "to be" an accident to white. It is not the same thing as if we said, Socrates is white, and, the White is Socrates; for in both cases Socrates is the same being; but it is not thus with whiteness; for, in the second case, Socrates is contained in the white, and in the first case, white is a pure accident. When we say, the being is white, the white is an accident of being; but when we say, the White is essence, the white contains essence. In short, white possesses existence only because it refers to "being," and is in "being." It is therefore from "being" that it receives its existence. On the contrary, essence draws its existence from itself; and from white it receives whiteness, not because it is in the white, but because the white is within it.366 As the essence which is in the sense-world is not Essence by itself, we must say that it draws its existence from the veritable Essence, in itself; and, finally, the White in itself possesses essence because it participates in the intelligible Essence.
  BEING CANNOT BE ASCRIBED TO MATTER, WHICH DERIVES ITS BEING FROM THE INTELLIGIBLE.
  --
  It may further be objected that matter gives essence to material things, as Socrates gives essence to the white that is in him. We will answer that what possesses a superior degree of Essence may well confer a lesser degree of essence to what possesses a still inferior degree thereof, but that the reciprocal or converse condition is impossible. Now, as form is more essence than matter,369 essence cannot be predicated equally of matter and form, and "being" is not a genus whose species is matter, form and the combination.370 These three things have several common characteristics, as we have already said, but they differ in respect to essence; for when something which possesses a superior degree of essence approaches something which possesses an inferior degree (as when form approaches matter), this thing, although anterior in (the ontological) order, is posterior in respect to being; consequently, if matter, form and the combination be not "beings" equally, no longer is being for them something common, like a genus. Nevertheless, "being" will be in a less narrow relation with things which are posterior to matter, to form, and to the combination, though it gives each of them the property of belonging to themselves. It is thus that life has different degrees, one stronger, the other weaker, and that the images of a same object are some more lively, others more obscure.371 If essence be measured by a lower degree of essence, and if the superior degree which exists in other things be omitted, essence thus considered will be a common element. But that is not a good way of procedure. Indeed, each whole differs from the others, and the lesser degree of essence does not constitute something that was common to all; just as, for life, there is not something common to vegetative life, to sensitive life, and rational life.371
  946
  --
  As to the distinction drawn between primary and secondary being,376 it must be admitted that some particular fire, and the universal Fire differ from each other in this, that the one is individual, and the other universal; but the difference between them does not seem to be essential. Indeed, does the genus of quality contain both White, and a particular white; or Grammar, and some particular grammatical science? How far does Grammatical science then have less reality than some particular grammatical science, and Science, than some particular science? Grammatical science is not posterior to some particular grammatical science; Grammatical science must already have existed before the existence of the grammatical science in you, since the latter is some grammatical science because it is found in you; it is besides identical with universal Grammatical science. Likewise, it is not Socrates that caused him who was not a man to become a man; it is rather the universal Man who enabled Socrates to be a man; for the individual man is man by participation in the universal Man. What then is Socrates, if not some man? In what does such a man contri bute to render "being" more "being"? If the answer be that he contri butes thereto by the fact that the universal Man is only a form, while a particular man is a form in matter, the result will only be that a particular man will be less of a man; for reason (that is, essence) is weaker when it is in matter. If the universal Man consist not only in form itself, but is also in matter, in what will he be inferior to the form of the man who is in matter, since it will be the reason of the man which is950 in matter? By its nature the universal is anterior, and consequently the form is anterior to the individual. Now that which by its nature is anterior is an absolute anterior. How then would the universal be less in being? Doubtless the individual, being better known to us, is anterior for us; but no difference in the things themselves results.377 Besides, if we were to admit the distinction between primary and secondary beings, the definition of "being" would no longer be one; for that which is first and that which is second are not comprised under one single definition, and do not form a single and same genus.
  BODIES MAY BE CLASSIFIED NOT ONLY BY FORMS; BUT BY QUALITIES; ETC.
  --
  When we were treating of things that were qualified, we had already explained that matter, united to quantity, and taken with other things, constitutes sense-being; that this "being" seems to be a composite of several things, that it is not properly a "whatness,"396 but rather qualification (or, qualified thing). The ("seminal) reason," for instance that of fire, has more of a reference to "whatness," while the form that the reason begets is rather a qualification. Likewise, the ("seminal) reason" of man is a "whatness," whilst the form that this reason gives to the body, being only an image of reason, is rather a qualification. Thus if the Socrates that we see was the genuine Socrates, his960 mere portrait composed of no more than colors would also be called Socrates. Likewise, although this ("seminal) reason" of Socrates be that which constitutes the genuine Socrates, we nevertheless also apply the name of Socrates to the man that we see; yet the colors, or the figure of the Socrates we see, are only the image of those which are contained by his ("seminal) reason." Likewise, the reason of Socrates is itself only an image of the veritable reason (of the idea) of the man. This is our solution of the problem.397
  THE VARIOUS TERMS EXPRESSING QUALITY.

ENNEAD 06.05 - The One and Identical Being is Everywhere Present In Its Entirety.345, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  For details, the reader is referred to Zeller's fuller account of these pre-Platonic elements.471 But we may summarize as follows: the physical elements to which the Hylicists had in turn attri buted finality Plato united into Pythagorean matter, which remained as an element of Dualism. The world of nature became the becoming of Heraclitus. Above that he placed the Being of Parmenides, in which the concepts of Socrates found place as ideas. These he identified with the numbers and harmonies of Pythagoras, and united them in an Eleatic unity of many, as an intelligible world, or reason, which he owed to Anaxagoras. The chief idea, that of the Good, was Megaro-Socratic. His cosmology was that of Timaeus. His psychology was based on Anaxagoras, as mind; on Pythagoras, as immortal. His ethics are Socratic, his politics are Pythagorean. Who therefore would flout Plato, has all earlier Greek philosophy to combat; and whoever recognizes the achievements of the Hellenic mind will find something to praise in Plato. When, therefore, we are studying Platonism, we are only studying a blending of the rays of Greece, and we are chiefly interested in Greece as one of the latest, clearest, and most kindred expressions of human thought.
  1290 If however we should seek some one special Platonic element, it would be that genuineness of reflection, that sincerity of thought, that makes of his dialogues no cut and dried literary figments, but soul-tragedies, with living, breathing, interest and emotion. Plato thus practised his doctrine of the double self,472 the higher and the lower selves, of which the higher might be described as "superior to oneself." In his later period, that of the Laws, he applied this double psychology to cosmology, thereby producing doubleness in the world-Soul: besides the good one, appears the evil one, which introduces even into heaven things that are not good.

Euthyphro, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  In the Meno, Anytus had parted from Socrates with the significant words: 'That in any city, and particularly in the city of Athens, it is easier to do men harm than to do them good;' and Socrates was anticipating another opportunity of talking with him. In the Euthyphro, Socrates is awaiting his trial for impiety. But before the trial begins, Plato would like to put the world on their trial, and convince them of ignorance in that very matter touching which Socrates is accused. An incident which may perhaps really have occurred in the family of Euthyphro, a learned Athenian diviner and soothsayer, furnishes the occasion of the discussion.
  This Euthyphro and Socrates are represented as meeting in the porch of the King Archon. (Compare Theaet.) Both have legal business in hand. Socrates is defendant in a suit for impiety which Meletus has brought against him (it is remarked by the way that he is not a likely man himself to have brought a suit against another); and Euthyphro too is plaintiff in an action for murder, which he has brought against his own father. The latter has originated in the following manner:A poor dependant of the family had slain one of their domestic slaves in Naxos. The guilty person was bound and thrown into a ditch by the comm and of Euthyphro's father, who sent to the interpreters of religion at Athens to ask what should be done with him. Before the messenger came back the criminal had died from hunger and exposure.
  This is the origin of the charge of murder which Euthyphro brings against his father. Socrates is confident that before he could have undertaken the responsibility of such a prosecution, he must have been perfectly informed of the nature of piety and impiety; and as he is going to be tried for impiety himself, he thinks that he cannot do better than learn of Euthyphro (who will be admitted by everybody, including the judges, to be an unimpeachable authority) what piety is, and what is impiety. What then is piety?
  Euthyphro, who, in the abundance of his knowledge, is very willing to undertake all the responsibility, replies: That piety is doing as I do, prosecuting your father (if he is guilty) on a charge of murder; doing as the gods doas Zeus did to Cronos, and Cronos to Uranus.
   Socrates has a dislike to these tales of mythology, and he fancies that this dislike of his may be the reason why he is charged with impiety. 'Are they really true?' 'Yes, they are;' and Euthyphro will gladly tell Socrates some more of them. But Socrates would like first of all to have a more satisfactory answer to the question, 'What is piety?' 'Doing as I do, charging a father with murder,' may be a single instance of piety, but can hardly be regarded as a general definition.
  Euthyphro replies, that 'Piety is what is dear to the gods, and impiety is what is not dear to them.' But may there not be differences of opinion, as among men, so also among the gods? Especially, about good and evil, which have no fixed rule; and these are precisely the sort of differences which give rise to quarrels. And therefore what may be dear to one god may not be dear to another, and the same action may be both pious and impious; e.g. your chastisement of your father, Euthyphro, may be dear or pleasing to Zeus (who inflicted a similar chastisement on his own father), but not equally pleasing to Cronos or Uranus (who suffered at the hands of their sons).
  Euthyphro answers that there is no difference of opinion, either among gods or men, as to the propriety of punishing a murderer. Yes, rejoins Socrates, when they know him to be a murderer; but you are assuming the point at issue. If all the circumstances of the case are considered, are you able to show that your father was guilty of murder, or that all the gods are agreed in approving of our prosecution of him? And must you not allow that what is hated by one god may be liked by another? Waiving this last, however, Socrates proposes to amend the definition, and say that 'what all the gods love is pious, and what they all hate is impious.' To this Euthyphro agrees.
   Socrates proceeds to analyze the new form of the definition. He shows that in other cases the act precedes the state; e.g. the act of being carried, loved, etc. precedes the state of being carried, loved, etc., and therefore that which is dear to the gods is dear to the gods because it is first loved of them, not loved of them because it is dear to them. But the pious or holy is loved by the gods because it is pious or holy, which is equivalent to saying, that it is loved by them because it is dear to them. Here then appears to be a contradiction,Euthyphro has been giving an attribute or accident of piety only, and not the essence. Euthyphro acknowledges himself that his explanations seem to walk away or go round in a circle, like the moving figures of Daedalus, the ancestor of Socrates, who has communicated his art to his descendants.
   Socrates, who is desirous of stimulating the indolent intelligence of Euthyphro, raises the question in another manner: 'Is all the pious just?' 'Yes.' 'Is all the just pious?' 'No.' 'Then what part of justice is piety?' Euthyphro replies that piety is that part of justice which 'attends' to the gods, as there is another part of justice which 'attends' to men. But what is the meaning of 'attending' to the gods? The word 'attending,' when applied to dogs, horses, and men, implies that in some way they are made better. But how do pious or holy acts make the gods any better? Euthyphro explains that he means by pious acts, acts of service or ministration. Yes; but the ministrations of the husbandman, the physician, and the builder have an end. To what end do we serve the gods, and what do we help them to accomplish? Euthyphro replies, that all these difficult questions cannot be resolved in a short time; and he would rather say simply that piety is knowing how to please the gods in word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices. In other words, says Socrates, piety is 'a science of asking and giving'asking what we want and giving what they want; in short, a mode of doing business between gods and men. But although they are the givers of all good, how can we give them any good in return? 'Nay, but we give them honour.' Then we give them not what is beneficial, but what is pleasing or dear to them; and this is the point which has been already disproved.
   Socrates, although weary of the subterfuges and evasions of Euthyphro, remains unshaken in his conviction that he must know the nature of piety, or he would never have prosecuted his old father. He is still hoping that he will condescend to instruct him. But Euthyphro is in a hurry and cannot stay. And Socrates' last hope of knowing the nature of piety before he is prosecuted for impiety has disappeared. As in the Euthydemus the irony is carried on to the end.
  The Euthyphro is manifestly designed to contrast the real nature of piety and impiety with the popular conceptions of them. But when the popular conceptions of them have been overthrown, Socrates does not offer any definition of his own: as in the Laches and Lysis, he prepares the way for an answer to the question which he has raised; but true to his own character, refuses to answer himself.
  Euthyphro is a religionist, and is elsewhere spoken of, if he be the same person, as the author of a philosophy of names, by whose 'prancing steeds' Socrates in the Cratylus is carried away. He has the conceit and self-confidence of a Sophist; no doubt that he is right in prosecuting his father has ever entered into his mind. Like a Sophist too, he is incapable either of framing a general definition or of following the course of an argument. His wrong-headedness, one-sidedness, narrowness, positiveness, are characteristic of his priestly office. His failure to apprehend an argument may be compared to a similar defect which is observable in the rhapsode Ion. But he is not a bad man, and he is friendly to Socrates, whose familiar sign he recognizes with interest. Though unable to follow him he is very willing to be led by him, and eagerly catches at any suggestion which saves him from the trouble of thinking. Moreover he is the enemy of Meletus, who, as he says, is availing himself of the popular dislike to innovations in religion in order to injure Socrates; at the same time he is amusingly confident that he has weapons in his own armoury which would be more than a match for him. He is quite sincere in his prosecution of his father, who has accidentally been guilty of homicide, and is not wholly free from blame. To purge away the crime appears to him in the light of a duty, whoever may be the criminal.
  Thus begins the contrast between the religion of the letter, or of the narrow and unenlightened conscience, and the higher notion of religion which Socrates vainly endeavours to elicit from him. 'Piety is doing as I do' is the idea of religion which first occurs to him, and to many others who do not say what they think with equal frankness. For men are not easily persuaded that any other religion is better than their own; or that other nations, e.g. the Greeks in the time of Socrates, were equally serious in their religious beliefs and difficulties. The chief difference between us and them is, that they were slowly learning what we are in process of forgetting. Greek mythology hardly admitted of the distinction between accidental homicide and murder: that the pollution of blood was the same in both cases is also the feeling of the Athenian diviner. He had not as yet learned the lesson, which philosophy was teaching, that Homer and Hesiod, if not banished from the state, or whipped out of the assembly, as Heracleitus more rudely proposed, at any rate were not to be appealed to as authorities in religion; and he is ready to defend his conduct by the examples of the gods. These are the very tales which Socrates cannot abide; and his dislike of them, as he suspects, has branded him with the reputation of impiety. Here is one answer to the question, 'Why Socrates was put to death,' suggested by the way. Another is conveyed in the words, 'The Athenians do not care about any man being thought wise until he begins to make other men wise; and then for some reason or other they are angry:' which may be said to be the rule of popular toleration in most other countries, and not at Athens only. In the course of the argument Socrates remarks that the controversial nature of morals and religion arises out of the difficulty of verifying them. There is no measure or standard to which they can be referred.
  The next definition, 'Piety is that which is loved of the gods,' is shipwrecked on a refined distinction between the state and the act, corresponding respectively to the adjective (philon) and the participle (philoumenon), or rather perhaps to the participle and the verb (philoumenon and phileitai). The act is prior to the state (as in Aristotle the energeia precedes the dunamis); and the state of being loved is preceded by the act of being loved. But piety or holiness is preceded by the act of being pious, not by the act of being loved; and therefore piety and the state of being loved are different. Through such subtleties of dialectic Socrates is working his way into a deeper region of thought and feeling. He means to say that the words 'loved of the gods' express an attri bute only, and not the essence of piety.
  Then follows the third and last definition, 'Piety is a part of justice.' Thus far Socrates has proceeded in placing religion on a moral foundation. He is seeking to realize the harmony of religion and morality, which the great poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Pindar had unconsciously anticipated, and which is the universal want of all men. To this the soothsayer adds the ceremonial element, 'attending upon the gods.' When further interrogated by Socrates as to the nature of this 'attention to the gods,' he replies, that piety is an affair of business, a science of giving and asking, and the like. Socrates points out the anthropomorphism of these notions, (compare Symp.; Republic; Politicus.) But when we expect him to go on and show that the true service of the gods is the service of the spirit and the co-operation with them in all things true and good, he stops short; this was a lesson which the soothsayer could not have been made to understand, and which every one must learn for himself.
  There seem to be altogether three aims or interests in this little Dialogue: (1) the dialectical development of the idea of piety; (2) the antithesis of true and false religion, which is carried to a certain extent only; (3) the defence of Socrates.
  The subtle connection with the Apology and the Crito; the holding back of the conclusion, as in the Charmides, Lysis, Laches, Protagoras, and other Dialogues; the deep insight into the religious world; the dramatic power and play of the two characters; the inimitable irony, are reasons for believing that the Euthyphro is a genuine Platonic writing. The spirit in which the popular representations of mythology are denounced recalls Republic II. The virtue of piety has been already mentioned as one of five in the Protagoras, but is not reckoned among the four cardinal virtues of Republic IV. The figure of Daedalus has occurred in the Meno; that of Proteus in the Euthydemus and Io. The kingly science has already appeared in the Euthydemus, and will reappear in the Republic and Statesman. But neither from these nor any other indications of similarity or difference, and still less from arguments respecting the suitableness of this little work to aid Socrates at the time of his trial or the reverse, can any evidence of the date be obtained.
  EUTHYPHRO
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Euthyphro.
  SCENE: The Porch of the King Archon.
  EUTHYPHRO: Why have you left the Lyceum, Socrates? and what are you doing in the Porch of the King Archon? Surely you cannot be concerned in a suit before the King, like myself?
   Socrates: Not in a suit, Euthyphro; impeachment is the word which the Athenians use.
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: No, I do not remember him, Socrates. But what is the charge which he brings against you?
   Socrates: What is the charge? Well, a very serious charge, which shows a good deal of character in the young man, and for which he is certainly not to be despised. He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corruptors. I fancy that he must be a wise man, and seeing that I am the reverse of a wise man, he has found me out, and is going to accuse me of corrupting his young friends. And of this our mother the state is to be the judge. Of all our political men he is the only one who seems to me to begin in the right way, with the cultivation of virtue in youth; like a good husbandman, he makes the young shoots his first care, and clears away us who are the destroyers of them. This is only the first step; he will afterwards attend to the elder branches; and if he goes on as he has begun, he will be a very great public benefactor.
  EUTHYPHRO: I hope that he may; but I rather fear, Socrates, that the opposite will turn out to be the truth. My opinion is that in attacking you he is simply aiming a blow at the foundation of the state. But in what way does he say that you corrupt the young?
   Socrates: He brings a wonderful accusation against me, which at first hearing excites surprise: he says that I am a poet or maker of gods, and that I invent new gods and deny the existence of old ones; this is the ground of his indictment.
  EUTHYPHRO: I understand, Socrates; he means to attack you about the familiar sign which occasionally, as you say, comes to you. He thinks that you are a neologian, and he is going to have you up before the court for this. He knows that such a charge is readily received by the world, as I myself know too well; for when I speak in the assembly about divine things, and foretell the future to them, they laugh at me and think me a madman. Yet every word that I say is true. But they are jealous of us all; and we must be brave and go at them.
   Socrates: Their laughter, friend Euthyphro, is not a matter of much consequence. For a man may be thought wise; but the Athenians, I suspect, do not much trouble themselves about him until he begins to impart his wisdom to others, and then for some reason or other, perhaps, as you say, from jealousy, they are angry.
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: I dare say that the affair will end in nothing, Socrates, and that you will win your cause; and I think that I shall win my own.
   Socrates: And what is your suit, Euthyphro? are you the pursuer or the defendant?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Of murder, Socrates.
   Socrates: By the powers, Euthyphro! how little does the common herd know of the nature of right and truth. A man must be an extraordinary man, and have made great strides in wisdom, before he could have seen his way to bring such an action.
  EUTHYPHRO: Indeed, Socrates, he must.
   Socrates: I suppose that the man whom your father murdered was one of your relativesclearly he was; for if he had been a stranger you would never have thought of prosecuting him.
  EUTHYPHRO: I am amused, Socrates, at your making a distinction between one who is a relation and one who is not a relation; for surely the pollution is the same in either case, if you knowingly associate with the murderer when you ought to clear yourself and him by proceeding against him. The real question is whether the murdered man has been justly slain. If justly, then your duty is to let the matter alone; but if unjustly, then even if the murderer lives under the same roof with you and eats at the same table, proceed against him. Now the man who is dead was a poor dependant of mine who worked for us as a field labourer on our farm in Naxos, and one day in a fit of drunken passion he got into a quarrel with one of our domestic servants and slew him. My father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. Meanwhile he never attended to him and took no care about him, for he regarded him as a murderer; and thought that no great harm would be done even if he did die. Now this was just what happened. For such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon him, that before the messenger returned from the diviner, he was dead. And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father. They say that he did not kill him, and that if he did, the dead man was but a murderer, and I ought not to take any notice, for that a son is impious who prosecutes a father. Which shows, Socrates, how little they know what the gods think about piety and impiety.
   Socrates: Good heavens, Euthyphro! and is your knowledge of religion and of things pious and impious so very exact, that, supposing the circumstances to be as you state them, you are not afraid lest you too may be doing an impious thing in bringing an action against your father?
  EUTHYPHRO: The best of Euthyphro, and that which distinguishes him, Socrates, from other men, is his exact knowledge of all such matters. What should I be good for without it?
   Socrates: Rare friend! I think that I cannot do better than be your disciple. Then before the trial with Meletus comes on I shall challenge him, and say that I have always had a great interest in religious questions, and now, as he charges me with rash imaginations and innovations in religion, I have become your disciple. You, Meletus, as I shall say to him, acknowledge Euthyphro to be a great theologian, and sound in his opinions; and if you approve of him you ought to approve of me, and not have me into court; but if you disapprove, you should begin by indicting him who is my teacher, and who will be the ruin, not of the young, but of the old; that is to say, of myself whom he instructs, and of his old father whom he admonishes and chastises. And if Meletus refuses to listen to me, but will go on, and will not shift the indictment from me to you, I cannot do better than repeat this challenge in the court.
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes, indeed, Socrates; and if he attempts to indict me I am mistaken if I do not find a flaw in him; the court shall have a great deal more to say to him than to me.
   Socrates: And I, my dear friend, knowing this, am desirous of becoming your disciple. For I observe that no one appears to notice younot even this Meletus; but his sharp eyes have found me out at once, and he has indicted me for impiety. And therefore, I adjure you to tell me the nature of piety and impiety, which you said that you knew so well, and of murder, and of other offences against the gods. What are they? Is not piety in every action always the same? and impiety, againis it not always the opposite of piety, and also the same with itself, having, as impiety, one notion which includes whatever is impious?
  EUTHYPHRO: To be sure, Socrates.
   Socrates: And what is piety, and what is impiety?
  EUTHYPHRO: Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting any one who is guilty of murder, sacrilege, or of any similar crimewhether he be your father or mother, or whoever he may bethat makes no difference; and not to prosecute them is impiety. And please to consider, Socrates, what a notable proof I will give you of the truth of my words, a proof which I have already given to others:of the principle, I mean, that the impious, whoever he may be, ought not to go unpunished. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most righteous of the gods?and yet they admit that he bound his father (Cronos) because he wickedly devoured his sons, and that he too had punished his own father (Uranus) for a similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when I proceed against my father, they are angry with me. So inconsistent are they in their way of talking when the gods are concerned, and when I am concerned.
   Socrates: May not this be the reason, Euthyphro, why I am charged with impietythat I cannot away with these stories about the gods? and therefore I suppose that people think me wrong. But, as you who are well informed about them approve of them, I cannot do better than assent to your superior wisdom. What else can I say, confessing as I do, that I know nothing about them? Tell me, for the love of Zeus, whether you really believe that they are true.
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes, Socrates; and things more wonderful still, of which the world is in ignorance.
   Socrates: And do you really believe that the gods fought with one another, and had dire quarrels, battles, and the like, as the poets say, and as you may see represented in the works of great artists? The temples are full of them; and notably the robe of Athene, which is carried up to the Acropolis at the great Pana thenaea, is embroidered with them. Are all these tales of the gods true, Euthyphro?
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes, Socrates; and, as I was saying, I can tell you, if you would like to hear them, many other things about the gods which would quite amaze you.
   Socrates: I dare say; and you shall tell me them at some other time when I have leisure. But just at present I would rather hear from you a more precise answer, which you have not as yet given, my friend, to the question, What is 'piety'? When asked, you only replied, Doing as you do, charging your father with murder.
  EUTHYPHRO: And what I said was true, Socrates.
   Socrates: No doubt, Euthyphro; but you would admit that there are many other pious acts?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes, Socrates, I thought so; it was certainly said.
   Socrates: And further, Euthyphro, the gods were admitted to have enmities and hatreds and differences?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes, Socrates, the nature of the differences about which we quarrel is such as you describe.
   Socrates: And the quarrels of the gods, noble Euthyphro, when they occur, are of a like nature?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: But I believe, Socrates, that all the gods would be agreed as to the propriety of punishing a murderer: there would be no difference of opinion about that.
   Socrates: Well, but speaking of men, Euthyphro, did you ever hear any one arguing that a murderer or any sort of evil-doer ought to be let off?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: That is true, Socrates, in the main.
   Socrates: But they join issue about the particularsgods and men alike; and, if they dispute at all, they dispute about some act which is called in question, and which by some is affirmed to be just, by others to be unjust. Is not that true?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes indeed, Socrates; at least if they will listen to me.
   Socrates: But they will be sure to listen if they find that you are a good speaker. There was a notion that came into my mind while you were speaking; I said to myself: 'Well, and what if Euthyphro does prove to me that all the gods regarded the death of the serf as unjust, how do I know anything more of the nature of piety and impiety? for granting that this action may be hateful to the gods, still piety and impiety are not adequately defined by these distinctions, for that which is hateful to the gods has been shown to be also pleasing and dear to them.' And therefore, Euthyphro, I do not ask you to prove this; I will suppose, if you like, that all the gods condemn and abominate such an action. But I will amend the definition so far as to say that what all the gods hate is impious, and what they love pious or holy; and what some of them love and others hate is both or neither. Shall this be our definition of piety and impiety?
  EUTHYPHRO: Why not, Socrates?
   Socrates: Why not! certainly, as far as I am concerned, Euthyphro, there is no reason why not. But whether this admission will greatly assist you in the task of instructing me as you promised, is a matter for you to consider.
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: I do not understand your meaning, Socrates.
   Socrates: I will endeavour to explain: we, speak of carrying and we speak of being carried, of leading and being led, seeing and being seen. You know that in all such cases there is a difference, and you know also in what the difference lies?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: How do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: I mean to say that the holy has been acknowledged by us to be loved of God because it is holy, not to be holy because it is loved.
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.
   Socrates: Your words, Euthyphro, are like the handiwork of my ancestor Daedalus; and if I were the sayer or propounder of them, you might say that my arguments walk away and will not remain fixed where they are placed because I am a descendant of his. But now, since these notions are your own, you must find some other gibe, for they certainly, as you yourself allow, show an inclination to be on the move.
  EUTHYPHRO: Nay, Socrates, I shall still say that you are the Daedalus who sets arguments in motion; not I, certainly, but you make them move or go round, for they would never have stirred, as far as I am concerned.
   Socrates: Then I must be a greater than Daedalus: for whereas he only made his own inventions to move, I move those of other people as well. And the beauty of it is, that I would rather not. For I would give the wisdom of Daedalus, and the wealth of Tantalus, to be able to detain them and keep them fixed. But enough of this. As I perceive that you are lazy, I will myself endeavour to show you how you might instruct me in the nature of piety; and I hope that you will not grudge your labour. Tell me, thenIs not that which is pious necessarily just?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: I do not understand you, Socrates.
   Socrates: And yet I know that you are as much wiser than I am, as you are younger. But, as I was saying, revered friend, the abundance of your wisdom makes you lazy. Please to exert yourself, for there is no real difficulty in understanding me. What I mean I may explain by an illustration of what I do not mean. The poet (Stasinus) sings
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men.
   Socrates: That is good, Euthyphro; yet still there is a little point about which I should like to have further information, What is the meaning of 'attention'? For attention can hardly be used in the same sense when applied to the gods as when applied to other things. For instance, horses are said to require attention, and not every person is able to attend to them, but only a person skilled in horsemanship. Is it not so?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: You do me justice, Socrates; that is not the sort of attention which I mean.
   Socrates: Good: but I must still ask what is this attention to the gods which is called piety?
  EUTHYPHRO: It is such, Socrates, as servants show to their masters.
   Socrates: I understanda sort of ministration to the gods.
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes, Socrates, with a view to the building of a ship.
   Socrates: As there is an art which ministers to the house-builder with a view to the building of a house?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: And I speak the truth, Socrates.
   Socrates: Tell me then, oh tell mewhat is that fair work which the gods do by the help of our ministrations?
  EUTHYPHRO: Many and fair, Socrates, are the works which they do.
   Socrates: Why, my friend, and so are those of a general. But the chief of them is easily told. Would you not say that victory in war is the chief of them?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: I have told you already, Socrates, that to learn all these things accurately will be very tiresome. Let me simply say that piety or holiness is learning how to please the gods in word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices. Such piety is the salvation of families and states, just as the impious, which is unpleasing to the gods, is their ruin and destruction.
   Socrates: I think that you could have answered in much fewer words the chief question which I asked, Euthyphro, if you had chosen. But I see plainly that you are not disposed to instruct meclearly not: else why, when we reached the point, did you turn aside? Had you only answered me I should have truly learned of you by this time the nature of piety. Now, as the asker of a question is necessarily dependent on the answerer, whither he leads I must follow; and can only ask again, what is the pious, and what is piety? Do you mean that they are a sort of science of praying and sacrificing?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Yes, Socrates.
   Socrates: Upon this view, then, piety is a science of asking and giving?
  EUTHYPHRO: You understand me capitally, Socrates.
   Socrates: Yes, my friend; the reason is that I am a votary of your science, and give my mind to it, and therefore nothing which you say will be thrown away upon me. Please then to tell me, what is the nature of this service to the gods? Do you mean that we prefer requests and give gifts to them?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Very true, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then piety, Euthyphro, is an art which gods and men have of doing business with one another?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: And do you imagine, Socrates, that any benefit accrues to the gods from our gifts?
   Socrates: But if not, Euthyphro, what is the meaning of gifts which are conferred by us upon the gods?
  --
  EUTHYPHRO: Another time, Socrates; for I am in a hurry, and must go now.
   Socrates: Alas! my companion, and will you leave me in despair? I was hoping that you would instruct me in the nature of piety and impiety; and then I might have cleared myself of Meletus and his indictment. I would have told him that I had been enlightened by Euthyphro, and had given up rash innovations and speculations, in which I indulged only through ignorance, and that now I am about to lead a better life.

Gorgias, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  Like the Phaedrus, the Gorgias has puzzled students of Plato by the appearance of two or more subjects. Under the cover of rhetoric higher themes are introduced; the argument expands into a general view of the good and evil of man. After making an ineffectual attempt to obtain a sound definition of his art from Gorgias, Socrates assumes the existence of a universal art of flattery or simulation having several branches:this is the genus of which rhetoric is only one, and not the highest species. To flattery is opposed the true and noble art of life which he who possesses seeks always to impart to others, and which at last triumphs, if not here, at any rate in another world. These two aspects of life and knowledge appear to be the two leading ideas of the dialogue. The true and the false in individuals and states, in the treatment of the soul as well as of the body, are conceived under the forms of true and false art. In the development of this opposition there arise various other questions, such as the two famous paradoxes of Socrates (paradoxes as they are to the world in general, ideals as they may be more worthily called): (1) that to do is worse than to suffer evil; and (2) that when a man has done evil he had better be punished than unpunished; to which may be added (3) a third Socratic paradox or ideal, that bad men do what they think best, but not what they desire, for the desire of all is towards the good. That pleasure is to be distinguished from good is proved by the simultaneousness of pleasure and pain, and by the possibility of the bad having in certain cases pleasures as great as those of the good, or even greater. Not merely rhetoricians, but poets, musicians, and other artists, the whole tribe of statesmen, past as well as present, are included in the class of flatterers. The true and false finally appear before the judgment-seat of the gods below.
  The dialogue naturally falls into three divisions, to which the three characters of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles respectively correspond; and the form and manner change with the stages of the argument. Socrates is deferential towards Gorgias, playful and yet cutting in dealing with the youthful Polus, ironical and sarcastic in his encounter with Callicles. In the first division the question is askedWhat is rhetoric? To this there is no answer given, for Gorgias is soon made to contradict himself by Socrates, and the argument is transferred to the hands of his disciple Polus, who rushes to the defence of his master. The answer has at last to be given by Socrates himself, but before he can even explain his meaning to Polus, he must enlighten him upon the great subject of shams or flatteries. When Polus finds his favourite art reduced to the level of cookery, he replies that at any rate rhetoricians, like despots, have great power. Socrates denies that they have any real power, and hence arise the three paradoxes already mentioned. Although they are strange to him, Polus is at last convinced of their truth; at least, they seem to him to follow legitimately from the premises. Thus the second act of the dialogue closes. Then Callicles appears on the scene, at first maintaining that pleasure is good, and that might is right, and that law is nothing but the combination of the many weak against the few strong. When he is confuted he withdraws from the argument, and leaves Socrates to arrive at the conclusion by himself. The conclusion is that there are two kinds of statesmanship, a higher and a lowerthat which makes the people better, and that which only flatters them, and he exhorts Callicles to choose the higher. The dialogue terminates with a mythus of a final judgment, in which there will be no more flattery or disguise, and no further use for the teaching of rhetoric.
  The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now advanced in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents, and is celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the dialogues of Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain dignity, and is treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is no match for him in dialectics. Although he has been teaching rhetoric all his life, he is still incapable of defining his own art. When his ideas begin to clear up, he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can be wholly separated from justice and injustice, and this lingering sentiment of morality, or regard for public opinion, enables Socrates to detect him in a contradiction. Like Protagoras, he is described as of a generous nature; he expresses his approbation of Socrates' manner of approaching a question; he is quite 'one of Socrates' sort, ready to be refuted as well as to refute,' and very eager that Callicles and Socrates should have the game out. He knows by experience that rhetoric exercises great influence over other men, but he is unable to explain the puzzle how rhetoric can teach everything and know nothing.
  Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway 'colt,' as Socrates describes him, who wanted originally to have taken the place of Gorgias under the pretext that the old man was tired, and now avails himself of the earliest opportunity to enter the lists. He is said to be the author of a work on rhetoric, and is again mentioned in the Phaedrus, as the inventor of balanced or double forms of speech (compare Gorg.; Symp.). At first he is violent and ill-mannered, and is angry at seeing his master overthrown. But in the judicious hands of Socrates he is soon restored to good-humour, and compelled to assent to the required conclusion. Like Gorgias, he is overthrown because he compromises; he is unwilling to say that to do is fairer or more honourable than to suffer injustice. Though he is fascinated by the power of rhetoric, and dazzled by the splendour of success, he is not insensible to higher arguments. Plato may have felt that there would be an incongruity in a youth maintaining the cause of injustice against the world. He has never heard the other side of the question, and he listens to the paradoxes, as they appear to him, of Socrates with evident astonishment. He can hardly understand the meaning of Archelaus being miserable, or of rhetoric being only useful in self-accusation. When the argument with him has fairly run out.
  Callicles, in whose house they are assembled, is introduced on the stage: he is with difficulty convinced that Socrates is in earnest; for if these things are true, then, as he says with real emotion, the foundations of society are upside down. In him another type of character is represented; he is neither sophist nor philosopher, but man of the world, and an accomplished Athenian gentleman. He might be described in modern language as a cynic or materialist, a lover of power and also of pleasure, and unscrupulous in his means of attaining both. There is no desire on his part to offer any compromise in the interests of morality; nor is any concession made by him. Like Thrasymachus in the Republic, though he is not of the same weak and vulgar class, he consistently maintains that might is right. His great motive of action is political ambition; in this he is characteristically Greek. Like Anytus in the Meno, he is the enemy of the Sophists; but favours the new art of rhetoric, which he regards as an excellent weapon of attack and defence. He is a despiser of mankind as he is of philosophy, and sees in the laws of the state only a violation of the order of nature, which intended that the stronger should govern the weaker (compare Republic). Like other men of the world who are of a speculative turn of mind, he generalizes the bad side of human nature, and has easily brought down his principles to his practice. Philosophy and poetry alike supply him with distinctions suited to his view of human life. He has a good will to Socrates, whose talents he evidently admires, while he censures the puerile use which he makes of them. He expresses a keen intellectual interest in the argument. Like Anytus, again, he has a sympathy with other men of the world; the Athenian statesmen of a former generation, who showed no weakness and made no mistakes, such as Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, are his favourites. His ideal of human character is a man of great passions and great powers, which he has developed to the utmost, and which he uses in his own enjoyment and in the government of others. Had Critias been the name instead of Callicles, about whom we know nothing from other sources, the opinions of the man would have seemed to reflect the history of his life.
  And now the combat deepens. In Callicles, far more than in any sophist or rhetorician, is concentrated the spirit of evil against which Socrates is contending, the spirit of the world, the spirit of the many contending against the one wise man, of which the Sophists, as he describes them in the Republic, are the imitators rather than the authors, being themselves carried away by the great tide of public opinion. Socrates approaches his antagonist warily from a distance, with a sort of irony which touches with a light hand both his personal vices (probably in allusion to some scandal of the day) and his servility to the populace. At the same time, he is in most profound earnest, as Chaerephon remarks. Callicles soon loses his temper, but the more he is irritated, the more provoking and matter of fact does Socrates become. A repartee of his which appears to have been really made to the 'omniscient' Hippias, according to the testimony of Xenophon (Mem.), is introduced. He is called by Callicles a popular declaimer, and certainly shows that he has the power, in the words of Gorgias, of being 'as long as he pleases,' or 'as short as he pleases' (compare Protag.). Callicles exhibits great ability in defending himself and attacking Socrates, whom he accuses of trifling and word-splitting; he is scandalized that the legitimate consequences of his own argument should be stated in plain terms; after the manner of men of the world, he wishes to preserve the decencies of life. But he cannot consistently maintain the bad sense of words; and getting confused between the abstract notions of better, superior, stronger, he is easily turned round by Socrates, and only induced to continue the argument by the authority of Gorgias. Once, when Socrates is describing the manner in which the ambitious citizen has to identify himself with the people, he partially recognizes the truth of his words.
  The Socrates of the Gorgias may be compared with the Socrates of the Protagoras and Meno. As in other dialogues, he is the enemy of the Sophists and rhetoricians; and also of the statesmen, whom he regards as another variety of the same species. His behaviour is governed by that of his opponents; the least forwardness or egotism on their part is met by a corresponding irony on the part of Socrates. He must speak, for philosophy will not allow him to be silent. He is indeed more ironical and provoking than in any other of Plato's writings: for he is 'fooled to the top of his bent' by the worldliness of Callicles. But he is also more deeply in earnest. He rises higher than even in the Phaedo and Crito: at first enveloping his moral convictions in a cloud of dust and dialectics, he ends by losing his method, his life, himself, in them. As in the Protagoras and Phaedrus, throwing aside the veil of irony, he makes a speech, but, true to his character, not until his adversary has refused to answer any more questions. The presentiment of his own fate is hanging over him. He is aware that Socrates, the single real teacher of politics, as he ventures to call himself, cannot safely go to war with the whole world, and that in the courts of earth he will be condemned. But he will be justified in the world below. Then the position of Socrates and Callicles will be reversed; all those things 'unfit for ears polite' which Callicles has prophesied as likely to happen to him in this life, the insulting language, the box on the ears, will recoil upon his assailant. (Compare Republic, and the similar reversal of the position of the lawyer and the philosopher in the Theaetetus).
  There is an interesting allusion to his own behaviour at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae, which he ironically attributes to his ignorance of the manner in which a vote of the assembly should be taken. This is said to have happened 'last year' (B.C. 406), and therefore the assumed date of the dialogue has been fixed at 405 B.C., when Socrates would already have been an old man. The date is clearly marked, but is scarcely reconcilable with another indication of time, viz. the 'recent' usurpation of Archelaus, which occurred in the year 413; and still less with the 'recent' death of Pericles, who really died twenty-four years previously (429 B.C.) and is afterwards reckoned among the statesmen of a past age; or with the mention of Nicias, who died in 413, and is nevertheless spoken of as a living witness. But we shall hereafter have reason to observe, that although there is a general consistency of times and persons in the Dialogues of Plato, a precise dramatic date is an invention of his commentators (Preface to Republic).
  The conclusion of the Dialogue is remarkable, (1) for the truly characteristic declaration of Socrates that he is ignorant of the true nature and bearing of these things, while he affirms at the same time that no one can maintain any other view without being ridiculous. The profession of ignorance reminds us of the earlier and more exclusively Socratic Dialogues. But neither in them, nor in the Apology, nor in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, does Socrates express any doubt of the fundamental truths of morality. He evidently regards this 'among the multitude of questions' which agitate human life 'as the principle which alone remains unshaken.' He does not insist here, any more than in the Phaedo, on the literal truth of the myth, but only on the soundness of the doctrine which is contained in it, that doing wrong is worse than suffering, and that a man should be rather than seem; for the next best thing to a man's being just is that he should be corrected and become just; also that he should avoid all flattery, whether of himself or of others; and that rhetoric should be employed for the maintenance of the right only. The revelation of another life is a recapitulation of the argument in a figure.
  (2) Socrates makes the singular remark, that he is himself the only true politician of his age. In other passages, especially in the Apology, he disclaims being a politician at all. There he is convinced that he or any other good man who attempted to resist the popular will would be put to death before he had done any good to himself or others. Here he anticipates such a fate for himself, from the fact that he is 'the only man of the present day who performs his public duties at all.' The two points of view are not really inconsistent, but the difference between them is worth noticing: Socrates is and is not a public man. Not in the ordinary sense, like Alcibiades or Pericles, but in a higher one; and this will sooner or later entail the same consequences on him. He cannot be a private man if he would; neither can he separate morals from politics. Nor is he unwilling to be a politician, although he foresees the dangers which await him; but he must first become a better and wiser man, for he as well as Callicles is in a state of perplexity and uncertainty. And yet there is an inconsistency: for should not Socrates too have taught the citizens better than to put him to death?
  And now, as he himself says, we will 'resume the argument from the beginning.'
  --
  Polus suggests that Gorgias may be tired, and desires to answer for him. 'Who is Gorgias?' asks Chaerephon, imitating the manner of his master Socrates. 'One of the best of men, and a proficient in the best and noblest of experimental arts,' etc., replies Polus, in rhetorical and balanced phrases. Socrates is dissatisfied at the length and unmeaningness of the answer; he tells the disconcerted volunteer that he has mistaken the quality for the nature of the art, and remarks to Gorgias, that Polus has learnt how to make a speech, but not how to answer a question. He wishes that Gorgias would answer him. Gorgias is willing enough, and replies to the question asked by Chaerephon,that he is a rhetorician, and in Homeric language, 'boasts himself to be a good one.' At the request of Socrates he promises to be brief; for 'he can be as long as he pleases, and as short as he pleases.' Socrates would have him bestow his length on others, and proceeds to ask him a number of questions, which are answered by him to his own great satisfaction, and with a brevity which excites the admiration of Socrates. The result of the discussion may be summed up as follows:
  Rhetoric treats of discourse; but music and medicine, and other particular arts, are also concerned with discourse; in what way then does rhetoric differ from them? Gorgias draws a distinction between the arts which deal with words, and the arts which have to do with external actions. Socrates extends this distinction further, and divides all productive arts into two classes: (1) arts which may be carried on in silence; and (2) arts which have to do with words, or in which words are coextensive with action, such as arithmetic, geometry, rhetoric. But still Gorgias could hardly have meant to say that arithmetic was the same as rhetoric. Even in the arts which are concerned with words there are differences. What then distinguishes rhetoric from the other arts which have to do with words? 'The words which rhetoric uses relate to the best and greatest of human things.' But tell me, Gorgias, what are the best? 'Health first, beauty next, wealth third,' in the words of the old song, or how would you rank them? The arts will come to you in a body, each claiming precedence and saying that her own good is superior to that of the restHow will you choose between them? 'I should say, Socrates, that the art of persuasion, which gives freedom to all men, and to individuals power in the state, is the greatest good.' But what is the exact nature of this persuasion?is the persevering retort: You could not describe Zeuxis as a painter, or even as a painter of figures, if there were other painters of figures; neither can you define rhetoric simply as an art of persuasion, because there are other arts which persuade, such as arithmetic, which is an art of persuasion about odd and even numbers. Gorgias is made to see the necessity of a further limitation, and he now defines rhetoric as the art of persuading in the law courts, and in the assembly, about the just and unjust. But still there are two sorts of persuasion: one which gives knowledge, and another which gives belief without knowledge; and knowledge is always true, but belief may be either true or false,there is therefore a further question: which of the two sorts of persuasion does rhetoric effect in courts of law and assemblies? Plainly that which gives belief and not that which gives knowledge; for no one can impart a real knowledge of such matters to a crowd of persons in a few minutes. And there is another point to be considered:when the assembly meets to advise about walls or docks or military expeditions, the rhetorician is not taken into counsel, but the architect, or the general. How would Gorgias explain this phenomenon? All who intend to become disciples, of whom there are several in the company, and not Socrates only, are eagerly asking:About what then will rhetoric teach us to persuade or advise the state?
  Gorgias illustrates the nature of rhetoric by adducing the example of Themistocles, who persuaded the Athenians to build their docks and walls, and of Pericles, whom Socrates himself has heard speaking about the middle wall of the Piraeus. He adds that he has exercised a similar power over the patients of his brother Herodicus. He could be chosen a physician by the assembly if he pleased, for no physician could compete with a rhetorician in popularity and influence. He could persuade the multitude of anything by the power of his rhetoric; not that the rhetorician ought to abuse this power any more than a boxer should abuse the art of self-defence. Rhetoric is a good thing, but, like all good things, may be unlawfully used. Neither is the teacher of the art to be deemed unjust because his pupils are unjust and make a bad use of the lessons which they have learned from him.
   Socrates would like to know before he replies, whether Gorgias will quarrel with him if he points out a slight inconsistency into which he has fallen, or whether he, like himself, is one who loves to be refuted. Gorgias declares that he is quite one of his sort, but fears that the argument may be tedious to the company. The company cheer, and Chaerephon and Callicles exhort them to proceed. Socrates gently points out the supposed inconsistency into which Gorgias appears to have fallen, and which he is inclined to think may arise out of a misapprehension of his own. The rhetorician has been declared by Gorgias to be more persuasive to the ignorant than the physician, or any other expert. And he is said to be ignorant, and this ignorance of his is regarded by Gorgias as a happy condition, for he has escaped the trouble of learning. But is he as ignorant of just and unjust as he is of medicine or building? Gorgias is compelled to admit that if he did not know them previously he must learn them from his teacher as a part of the art of rhetoric. But he who has learned carpentry is a carpenter, and he who has learned music is a musician, and he who has learned justice is just. The rhetorician then must be a just man, and rhetoric is a just thing. But Gorgias has already admitted the opposite of this, viz. that rhetoric may be abused, and that the rhetorician may act unjustly. How is the inconsistency to be explained?
  The fallacy of this argument is twofold; for in the first place, a man may know justice and not be justhere is the old confusion of the arts and the virtues;nor can any teacher be expected to counteract wholly the bent of natural character; and secondly, a man may have a degree of justice, but not sufficient to prevent him from ever doing wrong. Polus is naturally exasperated at the sophism, which he is unable to detect; of course, he says, the rhetorician, like every one else, will admit that he knows justice (how can he do otherwise when pressed by the interrogations of Socrates?), but he thinks that great want of manners is shown in bringing the argument to such a pass. Socrates ironically replies, that when old men trip, the young set them on their legs again; and he is quite willing to retract, if he can be shown to be in error, but upon one condition, which is that Polus studies brevity. Polus is in great indignation at not being allowed to use as many words as he pleases in the free state of Athens. Socrates retorts, that yet harder will be his own case, if he is compelled to stay and listen to them. After some altercation they agree (compare Protag.), that Polus shall ask and Socrates answer.
  'What is the art of Rhetoric?' says Polus. Not an art at all, replies Socrates, but a thing which in your book you affirm to have created art. Polus asks, 'What thing?' and Socrates answers, An experience or routine of making a sort of delight or gratification. 'But is not rhetoric a fine thing?' I have not yet told you what rhetoric is. Will you ask me another questionWhat is cookery? 'What is cookery?' An experience or routine of making a sort of delight or gratification. Then they are the same, or rather fall under the same class, and rhetoric has still to be distinguished from cookery. 'What is rhetoric?' asks Polus once more. A part of a not very creditable whole, which may be termed flattery, is the reply. 'But what part?' A shadow of a part of politics. This, as might be expected, is wholly unintelligible, both to Gorgias and Polus; and, in order to explain his meaning to them, Socrates draws a distinction between shadows or appearances and realities; e.g. there is real health of body or soul, and the appearance of them; real arts and sciences, and the simulations of them. Now the soul and body have two arts waiting upon them, first the art of politics, which attends on the soul, having a legislative part and a judicial part; and another art attending on the body, which has no generic name, but may also be described as having two divisions, one of which is medicine and the other gymnastic. Corresponding with these four arts or sciences there are four shams or simulations of them, mere experiences, as they may be termed, because they give no reason of their own existence. The art of dressing up is the sham or simulation of gymnastic, the art of cookery, of medicine; rhetoric is the simulation of justice, and sophistic of legislation. They may be summed up in an arithmetical formula:
  Tiring: gymnastic:: cookery: medicine:: sophistic: legislation.
  --
  And this is the true scheme of them, but when measured only by the gratification which they procure, they become jumbled together and return to their aboriginal chaos. Socrates apologizes for the length of his speech, which was necessary to the explanation of the subject, and begs Polus not unnecessarily to retaliate on him.
  'Do you mean to say that the rhetoricians are esteemed flatterers?' They are not esteemed at all. 'Why, have they not great power, and can they not do whatever they desire?' They have no power, and they only do what they think best, and never what they desire; for they never attain the true object of desire, which is the good. 'As if you, Socrates, would not envy the possessor of despotic power, who can imprison, exile, kill any one whom he pleases.' But Socrates replies that he has no wish to put any one to death; he who kills another, even justly, is not to be envied, and he who kills him unjustly is to be pitied; it is better to suffer than to do injustice. He does not consider that going about with a dagger and putting men out of the way, or setting a house on fire, is real power. To this Polus assents, on the ground that such acts would be punished, but he is still of opinion that evil-doers, if they are unpunished, may be happy enough. He instances Archelaus, son of Perdiccas, the usurper of Macedonia. Does not Socrates think him happy? Socrates would like to know more about him; he cannot pronounce even the great king to be happy, unless he knows his mental and moral condition. Polus explains that Archelaus was a slave, being the son of a woman who was the slave of Alcetas, brother of Perdiccas king of Macedonand he, by every species of crime, first murdering his uncle and then his cousin and half-brother, obtained the kingdom. This was very wicked, and yet all the world, including Socrates, would like to have his place. Socrates dismisses the appeal to numbers; Polus, if he will, may summon all the rich men of Athens, Nicias and his brothers, Aristocrates, the house of Pericles, or any other great familythis is the kind of evidence which is adduced in courts of justice, where truth depends upon numbers. But Socrates employs proof of another sort; his appeal is to one witness only,that is to say, the person with whom he is speaking; him he will convict out of his own mouth. And he is prepared to show, after his manner, that Archelaus cannot be a wicked man and yet happy.
  The evil-doer is deemed happy if he escapes, and miserable if he suffers punishment; but Socrates thinks him less miserable if he suffers than if he escapes. Polus is of opinion that such a paradox as this hardly deserves refutation, and is at any rate sufficiently refuted by the fact. Socrates has only to compare the lot of the successful tyrant who is the envy of the world, and of the wretch who, having been detected in a criminal attempt against the state, is crucified or burnt to death. Socrates replies, that if they are both criminal they are both miserable, but that the unpunished is the more miserable of the two. At this Polus laughs outright, which leads Socrates to remark that laughter is a new species of refutation. Polus replies, that he is already refuted; for if he will take the votes of the company, he will find that no one agrees with him. To this Socrates rejoins, that he is not a public man, and (referring to his own conduct at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae) is unable to take the suffrages of any company, as he had shown on a recent occasion; he can only deal with one witness at a time, and that is the person with whom he is arguing. But he is certain that in the opinion of any man to do is worse than to suffer evil.
  Polus, though he will not admit this, is ready to acknowledge that to do evil is considered the more foul or dishonourable of the two. But what is fair and what is foul; whether the terms are applied to bodies, colours, figures, laws, habits, studies, must they not be defined with reference to pleasure and utility? Polus assents to this latter doctrine, and is easily persuaded that the fouler of two things must exceed either in pain or in hurt. But the doing cannot exceed the suffering of evil in pain, and therefore must exceed in hurt. Thus doing is proved by the testimony of Polus himself to be worse or more hurtful than suffering.
  There remains the other question: Is a guilty man better off when he is punished or when he is unpunished? Socrates replies, that what is done justly is suffered justly: if the act is just, the effect is just; if to punish is just, to be punished is just, and therefore fair, and therefore beneficent; and the benefit is that the soul is improved. There are three evils from which a man may suffer, and which affect him in estate, body, and soul;these are, poverty, disease, injustice; and the foulest of these is injustice, the evil of the soul, because that brings the greatest hurt. And there are three arts which heal these evilstrading, medicine, justiceand the fairest of these is justice. Happy is he who has never committed injustice, and happy in the second degree he who has been healed by punishment. And therefore the criminal should himself go to the judge as he would to the physician, and purge away his crime. Rhetoric will enable him to display his guilt in proper colours, and to sustain himself and others in enduring the necessary penalty. And similarly if a man has an enemy, he will desire not to punish him, but that he shall go unpunished and become worse and worse, taking care only that he does no injury to himself. These are at least conceivable uses of the art, and no others have been discovered by us.
  Here Callicles, who has been listening in silent amazement, asks Chaerephon whether Socrates is in earnest, and on receiving the assurance that he is, proceeds to ask the same question of Socrates himself. For if such doctrines are true, life must have been turned upside down, and all of us are doing the opposite of what we ought to be doing.
   Socrates replies in a style of playful irony, that before men can understand one another they must have some common feeling. And such a community of feeling exists between himself and Callicles, for both of them are lovers, and they have both a pair of loves; the beloved of Callicles are the Athenian Demos and Demos the son of Pyrilampes; the beloved of Socrates are Alcibiades and philosophy. The peculiarity of Callicles is that he can never contradict his loves; he changes as his Demos changes in all his opinions; he watches the countenance of both his loves, and repeats their sentiments, and if any one is surprised at his sayings and doings, the explanation of them is, that he is not a free agent, but must always be imitating his two loves. And this is the explanation of Socrates' peculiarities also. He is always repeating what his mistress, Philosophy, is saying to him, who unlike his other love, Alcibiades, is ever the same, ever true. Callicles must refute her, or he will never be at unity with himself; and discord in life is far worse than the discord of musical sounds.
  Callicles answers, that Gorgias was overthrown because, as Polus said, in compliance with popular prejudice he had admitted that if his pupil did not know justice the rhetorician must teach him; and Polus has been similarly entangled, because his modesty led him to admit that to suffer is more honourable than to do injustice. By custom 'yes,' but not by nature, says Callicles. And Socrates is always playing between the two points of view, and putting one in the place of the other. In this very argument, what Polus only meant in a conventional sense has been affirmed by him to be a law of nature. For convention says that 'injustice is dishonourable,' but nature says that 'might is right.' And we are always taming down the nobler spirits among us to the conventional level. But sometimes a great man will rise up and reassert his original rights, trampling under foot all our formularies, and then the light of natural justice shines forth. Pindar says, 'Law, the king of all, does violence with high hand;' as is indeed proved by the example of Heracles, who drove off the oxen of Geryon and never paid for them.
  This is the truth, Socrates, as you will be convinced, if you leave philosophy and pass on to the real business of life. A little philosophy is an excellent thing; too much is the ruin of a man. He who has not 'passed his metaphysics' before he has grown up to manhood will never know the world. Philosophers are ridiculous when they take to politics, and I dare say that politicians are equally ridiculous when they take to philosophy: 'Every man,' as Euripides says, 'is fondest of that in which he is best.' Philosophy is graceful in youth, like the lisp of infancy, and should be cultivated as a part of education; but when a grown-up man lisps or studies philosophy, I should like to beat him. None of those over-refined natures ever come to any good; they avoid the busy haunts of men, and skulk in corners, whispering to a few admiring youths, and never giving utterance to any noble sentiments.
  For you, Socrates, I have a regard, and therefore I say to you, as Zethus says to Amphion in the play, that you have 'a noble soul disguised in a puerile exterior.' And I would have you consider the danger which you and other philosophers incur. For you would not know how to defend yourself if any one accused you in a law-court,there you would stand, with gaping mouth and dizzy brain, and might be murdered, robbed, boxed on the ears with impunity. Take my advice, then, and get a little common sense; leave to others these frivolities; walk in the ways of the wealthy and be wise.
   Socrates professes to have found in Callicles the philosopher's touchstone; and he is certain that any opinion in which they both agree must be the very truth. Callicles has all the three qualities which are needed in a criticknowledge, good-will, frankness; Gorgias and Polus, although learned men, were too modest, and their modesty made them contradict themselves. But Callicles is well-educated; and he is not too modest to speak out (of this he has already given proof), and his good-will is shown both by his own profession and by his giving the same caution against philosophy to Socrates, which Socrates remembers hearing him give long ago to his own clique of friends. He will pledge himself to retract any error into which he may have fallen, and which Callicles may point out. But he would like to know first of all what he and Pindar mean by natural justice. Do they suppose that the rule of justice is the rule of the stronger or of the better?' 'There is no difference.' Then are not the many superior to the one, and the opinions of the many better? And their opinion is that justice is equality, and that to do is more dishonourable than to suffer wrong. And as they are the superior or stronger, this opinion of theirs must be in accordance with natural as well as conventional justice. 'Why will you continue splitting words? Have I not told you that the superior is the better?' But what do you mean by the better? Tell me that, and please to be a little milder in your language, if you do not wish to drive me away. 'I mean the worthier, the wiser.' You mean to say that one man of sense ought to rule over ten thousand fools? 'Yes, that is my meaning.' Ought the physician then to have a larger share of meats and drinks? or the weaver to have more coats, or the cobbler larger shoes, or the farmer more seed? 'You are always saying the same things, Socrates.' Yes, and on the same subjects too; but you are never saying the same things. For, first, you defined the superior to be the stronger, and then the wiser, and now something else;what DO you mean? 'I mean men of political ability, who ought to govern and to have more than the governed.' Than themselves? 'What do you mean?' I mean to say that every man is his own governor. 'I see that you mean those dolts, the temperate. But my doctrine is, that a man should let his desires grow, and take the means of satisfying them. To the many this is impossible, and therefore they combine to prevent him. But if he is a king, and has power, how base would he be in submitting to them! To invite the common herd to be lord over him, when he might have the enjoyment of all things! For the truth is, Socrates, that luxury and self-indulgence are virtue and happiness; all the rest is mere talk.'
   Socrates compliments Callicles on his frankness in saying what other men only think. According to his view, those who want nothing are not happy. 'Why,' says Callicles, 'if they were, stones and the dead would be happy.' Socrates in reply is led into a half-serious, half-comic vein of reflection. 'Who knows,' as Euripides says, 'whether life may not be death, and death life?' Nay, there are philosophers who maintain that even in life we are dead, and that the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of the soul. And some ingenious Sicilian has made an allegory, in which he represents fools as the uninitiated, who are supposed to be carrying water to a vessel, which is full of holes, in a similarly holey sieve, and this sieve is their own soul. The idea is fanciful, but nevertheless is a figure of a truth which I want to make you acknowledge, viz. that the life of contentment is better than the life of indulgence. Are you disposed to admit that? 'Far otherwise.' Then hear another parable. The life of self-contentment and self-indulgence may be represented respectively by two men, who are filling jars with streams of wine, honey, milk,the jars of the one are sound, and the jars of the other leaky; the first fils his jars, and has no more trouble with them; the second is always filling them, and would suffer extreme misery if he desisted. Are you of the same opinion still? 'Yes, Socrates, and the figure expresses what I mean. For true pleasure is a perpetual stream, flowing in and flowing out. To be hungry and always eating, to be thirsty and always drinking, and to have all the other desires and to satisfy them, that, as I admit, is my idea of happiness.' And to be itching and always scratching? 'I do not deny that there may be happiness even in that.' And to indulge unnatural desires, if they are abundantly satisfied? Callicles is indignant at the introduction of such topics. But he is reminded by Socrates that they are introduced, not by him, but by the maintainer of the identity of pleasure and good. Will Callicles still maintain this? 'Yes, for the sake of consistency, he will.' The answer does not satisfy Socrates, who fears that he is losing his touchstone. A profession of seriousness on the part of Callicles reassures him, and they proceed with the argument. Pleasure and good are the same, but knowledge and courage are not the same either with pleasure or good, or with one another. Socrates disproves the first of these statements by showing that two opposites cannot coexist, but must alternate with one anotherto be well and ill together is impossible. But pleasure and pain are simultaneous, and the cessation of them is simultaneous; e.g. in the case of drinking and thirsting, whereas good and evil are not simultaneous, and do not cease simultaneously, and therefore pleasure cannot be the same as good.
  Callicles has already lost his temper, and can only be persuaded to go on by the interposition of Gorgias. Socrates, having already guarded against objections by distinguishing courage and knowledge from pleasure and good, proceeds:The good are good by the presence of good, and the bad are bad by the presence of evil. And the brave and wise are good, and the cowardly and foolish are bad. And he who feels pleasure is good, and he who feels pain is bad, and both feel pleasure and pain in nearly the same degree, and sometimes the bad man or coward in a greater degree. Therefore the bad man or coward is as good as the brave or may be even better.
  Callicles endeavours now to avert the inevitable absurdity by affirming that he and all mankind admitted some pleasures to be good and others bad. The good are the beneficial, and the bad are the hurtful, and we should choose the one and avoid the other. But this, as Socrates observes, is a return to the old doctrine of himself and Polus, that all things should be done for the sake of the good.
  Callicles assents to this, and Socrates, finding that they are agreed in distinguishing pleasure from good, returns to his old division of empirical habits, or shams, or flatteries, which study pleasure only, and the arts which are concerned with the higher interests of soul and body. Does Callicles agree to this division? Callicles will agree to anything, in order that he may get through the argument. Which of the arts then are flatteries? Flute-playing, harp-playing, choral exhibitions, the dithyrambics of Cinesias are all equally condemned on the ground that they give pleasure only; and Meles the harp-player, who was the father of Cinesias, failed even in that. The stately muse of Tragedy is bent upon pleasure, and not upon improvement. Poetry in general is only a rhetorical address to a mixed audience of men, women, and children. And the orators are very far from speaking with a view to what is best; their way is to humour the assembly as if they were children.
  Callicles replies, that this is only true of some of them; others have a real regard for their fellow-citizens. Granted; then there are two species of oratory; the one a flattery, another which has a real regard for the citizens. But where are the orators among whom you find the latter? Callicles admits that there are none remaining, but there were such in the days when Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and the great Pericles were still alive. Socrates replies that none of these were true artists, setting before themselves the duty of bringing order out of disorder. The good man and true orator has a settled design, running through his life, to which he conforms all his words and actions; he desires to implant justice and eradicate injustice, to implant all virtue and eradicate all vice in the minds of his citizens. He is the physician who will not allow the sick man to indulge his appetites with a variety of meats and drinks, but insists on his exercising self-restraint. And this is good for the soul, and better than the unrestrained indulgence which Callicles was recently approving.
  Here Callicles, who had been with difficulty brought to this point, turns restive, and suggests that Socrates shall answer his own questions. 'Then,' says Socrates, 'one man must do for two;' and though he had hoped to have given Callicles an 'Amphion' in return for his 'Zethus,' he is willing to proceed; at the same time, he hopes that Callicles will correct him, if he falls into error. He recapitulates the advantages which he has already won:
  The pleasant is not the same as the goodCallicles and I are agreed about that,but pleasure is to be pursued for the sake of the good, and the good is that of which the presence makes us good; we and all things good have acquired some virtue or other. And virtue, whether of body or soul, of things or persons, is not attained by accident, but is due to order and harmonious arrangement. And the soul which has order is better than the soul which is without order, and is therefore temperate and is therefore good, and the intemperate is bad. And he who is temperate is also just and brave and pious, and has attained the perfection of goodness and therefore of happiness, and the intemperate whom you approve is the opposite of all this and is wretched. He therefore who would be happy must pursue temperance and avoid intemperance, and if possible escape the necessity of punishment, but if he have done wrong he must endure punishment. In this way states and individuals should seek to attain harmony, which, as the wise tell us, is the bond of heaven and earth, of gods and men. Callicles has never discovered the power of geometrical proportion in both worlds; he would have men aim at disproportion and excess. But if he be wrong in this, and if self-control is the true secret of happiness, then the paradox is true that the only use of rhetoric is in self-accusation, and Polus was right in saying that to do wrong is worse than to suffer wrong, and Gorgias was right in saying that the rhetorician must be a just man. And you were wrong in taunting me with my defenceless condition, and in saying that I might be accused or put to death or boxed on the ears with impunity. For I may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to be strickento do than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in adamantine bonds. I myself know not the true nature of these things, but I know that no one can deny my words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong is the greatest of evils, and to suffer wrong is the next greatest evil. He who would avoid the last must be a ruler, or the friend of a ruler; and to be the friend he must be the equal of the ruler, and must also resemble him. Under his protection he will suffer no evil, but will he also do no evil? Nay, will he not rather do all the evil which he can and escape? And in this way the greatest of all evils will befall him. 'But this imitator of the tyrant,' rejoins Callicles, 'will kill any one who does not similarly imitate him.' Socrates replies that he is not deaf, and that he has heard that repeated many times, and can only reply, that a bad man will kill a good one. 'Yes, and that is the provoking thing.' Not provoking to a man of sense who is not studying the arts which will preserve him from danger; and this, as you say, is the use of rhetoric in courts of justice. But how many other arts are there which also save men from death, and are yet quite humble in their pretensionssuch as the art of swimming, or the art of the pilot? Does not the pilot do men at least as much service as the rhetorician, and yet for the voyage from Aegina to Athens he does not charge more than two obols, and when he disembarks is quite unassuming in his demeanour? The reason is that he is not certain whether he has done his passengers any good in saving them from death, if one of them is diseased in body, and still more if he is diseased in mindwho can say? The engineer too will often save whole cities, and yet you despise him, and would not allow your son to marry his daughter, or his son to marry yours. But what reason is there in this? For if virtue only means the saving of life, whether your own or another's, you have no right to despise him or any practiser of saving arts. But is not virtue something different from saving and being saved? I would have you rather consider whether you ought not to disregard length of life, and think only how you can live best, leaving all besides to the will of Heaven. For you must not expect to have influence either with the Athenian Demos or with Demos the son of Pyrilampes, unless you become like them. What do you say to this?
  'There is some truth in what you are saying, but I do not entirely believe you.'
  --
   Socrates concludes by finally asking, to which of the two modes of serving the state Callicles invites him:'to the inferior and ministerial one,' is the ingenuous reply. That is the only way of avoiding death, replies Socrates; and he has heard often enough, and would rather not hear again, that the bad man will kill the good. But he thinks that such a fate is very likely reserved for him, because he remarks that he is the only person who teaches the true art of politics. And very probably, as in the case which he described to Polus, he may be the physician who is tried by a jury of children. He cannot say that he has procured the citizens any pleasure, and if any one charges him with perplexing them, or with reviling their elders, he will not be able to make them understand that he has only been actuated by a desire for their good. And therefore there is no saying what his fate may be. 'And do you think that a man who is unable to help himself is in a good condition?' Yes, Callicles, if he have the true self-help, which is never to have said or done any wrong to himself or others. If I had not this kind of self-help, I should be ashamed; but if I die for want of your flattering rhetoric, I shall die in peace. For death is no evil, but to go to the world below laden with offences is the worst of evils. In proof of which I will tell you a tale:
  Under the rule of Cronos, men were judged on the day of their death, and when judgment had been given upon them they departedthe good to the islands of the blest, the bad to the house of vengeance. But as they were still living, and had their clothes on at the time when they were being judged, there was favouritism, and Zeus, when he came to the throne, was obliged to alter the mode of procedure, and try them after death, having first sent down Prometheus to take away from them the foreknowledge of death. Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus were appointed to be the judges; Rhadamanthus for Asia, Aeacus for Europe, and Minos was to hold the court of appeal. Now death is the separation of soul and body, but after death soul and body alike retain their characteristics; the fat man, the dandy, the branded slave, are all distinguishable. Some prince or potentate, perhaps even the great king himself, appears before Rhadamanthus, and he instantly detects him, though he knows not who he is; he sees the scars of perjury and iniquity, and sends him away to the house of torment.
  --
  (1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, we are made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The old difficulty of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the arts and the virtues also continues. The ambiguity of several words, such as nature, custom, the honourable, the good, is not cleared up. The Sophists are still floundering about the distinction of the real and seeming. Figures of speech are made the basis of arguments. The possibility of conceiving a universal art or science, which admits of application to a particular subject-matter, is a difficulty which remains unsolved, and has not altogether ceased to haunt the world at the present day (compare Charmides). The defect of clearness is also apparent in Socrates himself, unless we suppose him to be practising on the simplicity of his opponent, or rather perhaps trying an experiment in dialectics. Nothing can be more fallacious than the contradiction which he pretends to have discovered in the answers of Gorgias (see above). The advantages which he gains over Polus are also due to a false antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an erroneous assertion that an agent and a patient may be described by similar predicates;a mistake which Aristotle partly shares and partly corrects in the Nicomachean Ethics. Traces of a 'robust sophistry' are likewise discernible in his argument with Callicles.
  (2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced by reason only, yet the argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he conducts himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may sometimes wish that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists, or pointed out to them the rocks which lay concealed under the ambiguous terms good, pleasure, and the like. But it would be as useless to examine his arguments by the requirements of modern logic, as to criticise this ideal from a merely utilitarian point of view. If we say that the ideal is generally regarded as unattainable, and that mankind will by no means agree in thinking that the criminal is happier when punished than when unpunished, any more than they would agree to the stoical paradox that a man may be happy on the rack, Plato has already admitted that the world is against him. Neither does he mean to say that Archelaus is tormented by the stings of conscience; or that the sensations of the impaled criminal are more agreeable than those of the tyrant drowned in luxurious enjoyment. Neither is he speaking, as in the Protagoras, of virtue as a calculation of pleasure, an opinion which he afterwards repudiates in the Phaedo. What then is his meaning? His meaning we shall be able to illustrate best by parallel notions, which, whether justifiable by logic or not, have always existed among mankind. We must remind the reader that Socrates himself implies that he will be understood or appreciated by very few.
  He is speaking not of the consciousness of happiness, but of the idea of happiness. When a martyr dies in a good cause, when a soldier falls in battle, we do not suppose that death or wounds are without pain, or that their physical suffering is always compensated by a mental satisfaction. Still we regard them as happy, and we would a thousand times rather have their death than a shameful life. Nor is this only because we believe that they will obtain an immortality of fame, or that they will have crowns of glory in another world, when their enemies and persecutors will be proportionably tormented. Men are found in a few instances to do what is right, without reference to public opinion or to consequences. And we regard them as happy on this ground only, much as Socrates' friends in the opening of the Phaedo are described as regarding him; or as was said of another, 'they looked upon his face as upon the face of an angel.' We are not concerned to justify this idealism by the standard of utility or public opinion, but merely to point out the existence of such a sentiment in the better part of human nature.
  The idealism of Plato is founded upon this sentiment. He would maintain that in some sense or other truth and right are alone to be sought, and that all other goods are only desirable as means towards these. He is thought to have erred in 'considering the agent only, and making no reference to the happiness of others, as affected by him.' But the happiness of others or of mankind, if regarded as an end, is really quite as ideal and almost as paradoxical to the common understanding as Plato's conception of happiness. For the greatest happiness of the greatest number may mean also the greatest pain of the individual which will procure the greatest pleasure of the greatest number. Ideas of utility, like those of duty and right, may be pushed to unpleasant consequences. Nor can Plato in the Gorgias be deemed purely self-regarding, considering that Socrates expressly mentions the duty of imparting the truth when discovered to others. Nor must we forget that the side of ethics which regards others is by the ancients merged in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in the Stoics, the social principle, though taking another form, is really far more prominent than in most modern treatises on ethics.
  The idealizing of suffering is one of the conceptions which have exercised the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological import of this, or into the consideration of the errors to which the idea may have given rise, we need not now enter. All will agree that the ideal of the Divine Sufferer, whose words the world would not receive, the man of sorrows of whom the Hebrew prophets spoke, has sunk deep into the heart of the human race. It is a similar picture of suffering goodness which Plato desires to pourtray, not without an allusion to the fate of his master Socrates. He is convinced that, somehow or other, such an one must be happy in life or after death. In the Republic, he endeavours to show that his happiness would be assured here in a well-ordered state. But in the actual condition of human things the wise and good are weak and miserable; such an one is like a man fallen among wild beasts, exposed to every sort of wrong and obloquy.
  Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led on to the conclusion, that if 'the ways of God' to man are to be 'justified,' the hopes of another life must be included. If the question could have been put to him, whether a man dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he suggests in the Apology, 'death be only a long sleep,' we can hardly tell what would have been his answer. There have been a few, who, quite independently of rewards and punishments or of posthumous reputation, or any other influence of public opinion, have been willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of others. It is difficult to say how far in such cases an unconscious hope of a future life, or a general faith in the victory of good in the world, may have supported the sufferers. But this extreme idealism is not in accordance with the spirit of Plato. He supposes a day of retri bution, in which the good are to be rewarded and the wicked punished. Though, as he says in the Phaedo, no man of sense will maintain that the details of the stories about another world are true, he will insist that something of the kind is true, and will frame his life with a view to this unknown future. Even in the Republic he introduces a future life as an afterthought, when the superior happiness of the just has been established on what is thought to be an immutable foundation. At the same time he makes a point of determining his main thesis independently of remoter consequences.
  --
  It is scarcely necessary to repeat that Plato is playing 'both sides of the game,' and that in criticising the characters of Gorgias and Polus, we are not passing any judgment on historical individuals, but only attempting to analyze the 'dramatis personae' as they were conceived by him. Neither is it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that Plato is a dramatic writer, whose real opinions cannot always be assumed to be those which he puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any other speaker who appears to have the best of the argument; or to repeat the observation that he is a poet as well as a philosopher; or to remark that he is not to be tried by a modern standard, but interpreted with reference to his place in the history of thought and the opinion of his time.
  It has been said that the most characteristic feature of the Gorgias is the assertion of the right of dissent, or private judgment. But this mode of stating the question is really opposed both to the spirit of Plato and of ancient philosophy generally. For Plato is not asserting any abstract right or duty of toleration, or advantage to be derived from freedom of thought; indeed, in some other parts of his writings (e.g. Laws), he has fairly laid himself open to the charge of intolerance. No speculations had as yet arisen respecting the 'liberty of prophesying;' and Plato is not affirming any abstract right of this nature: but he is asserting the duty and right of the one wise and true man to dissent from the folly and falsehood of the many. At the same time he acknowledges the natural result, which he hardly seeks to avert, that he who speaks the truth to a multitude, regardless of consequences, will probably share the fate of Socrates.
  The irony of Plato sometimes veils from us the height of idealism to which he soars. When declaring truths which the many will not receive, he puts on an armour which cannot be pierced by them. The weapons of ridicule are taken out of their hands and the laugh is turned against themselves. The disguises which Socrates assumes are like the parables of the New Testament, or the oracles of the Delphian God; they half conceal, half reveal, his meaning. The more he is in earnest, the more ironical he becomes; and he is never more in earnest or more ironical than in the Gorgias. He hardly troubles himself to answer seriously the objections of Gorgias and Polus, and therefore he sometimes appears to be careless of the ordinary requirements of logic. Yet in the highest sense he is always logical and consistent with himself. The form of the argument may be paradoxical; the substance is an appeal to the higher reason. He is uttering truths before they can be understood, as in all ages the words of philosophers, when they are first uttered, have found the world unprepared for them. A further misunderstanding arises out of the wildness of his humour; he is supposed not only by Callicles, but by the rest of mankind, to be jesting when he is profoundly serious. At length he makes even Polus in earnest. Finally, he drops the argument, and heedless any longer of the forms of dialectic, he loses himself in a sort of triumph, while at the same time he retaliates upon his adversaries. From this confusion of jest and earnest, we may now return to the ideal truth, and draw out in a simple form the main theses of the dialogue.
  First Thesis:
  --
  The words of Socrates are more abstract than the words of Christ, but they equally imply that the only real evil is moral evil. The righteous may suffer or die, but they have their reward; and even if they had no reward, would be happier than the wicked. The world, represented by Polus, is ready, when they are asked, to acknowledge that injustice is dishonourable, and for their own sakes men are willing to punish the offender (compare Republic). But they are not equally willing to acknowledge that injustice, even if successful, is essentially evil, and has the nature of disease and death. Especially when crimes are committed on the great scalethe crimes of tyrants, ancient or modernafter a while, seeing that they cannot be undone, and have become a part of history, mankind are disposed to forgive them, not from any magnanimity or charity, but because their feelings are blunted by time, and 'to forgive is convenient to them.' The tangle of good and evil can no longer be unravelled; and although they know that the end cannot justify the means, they feel also that good has often come out of evil. But Socrates would have us pass the same judgment on the tyrant now and always; though he is surrounded by his satellites, and has the applauses of Europe and Asia ringing in his ears; though he is the civilizer or liberator of half a continent, he is, and always will be, the most miserable of men. The greatest consequences for good or for evil cannot alter a hair's breadth the morality of actions which are right or wrong in themselves. This is the standard which Socrates holds up to us. Because politics, and perhaps human life generally, are of a mixed nature we must not allow our principles to sink to the level of our practice.
  And so of private individualsto them, too, the world occasionally speaks of the consequences of their actions:if they are lovers of pleasure, they will ruin their health; if they are false or dishonest, they will lose their character. But Socrates would speak to them, not of what will be, but of what isof the present consequence of lowering and degrading the soul. And all higher natures, or perhaps all men everywhere, if they were not tempted by interest or passion, would agree with himthey would rather be the victims than the perpetrators of an act of treachery or of tyranny. Reason tells them that death comes sooner or later to all, and is not so great an evil as an unworthy life, or rather, if rightly regarded, not an evil at all, but to a good man the greatest good. For in all of us there are slumbering ideals of truth and right, which may at any time awaken and develop a new life in us.
  Second Thesis:
  --
  The 'accustomed irony' of Socrates adds a corollary to the argument:'Would you punish your enemy, you should allow him to escape unpunished'this is the true retaliation. (Compare the obscure verse of Proverbs, 'Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him,' etc., quoted in Romans.)
  Men are not in the habit of dwelling upon the dark side of their own lives: they do not easily see themselves as others see them. They are very kind and very blind to their own faults; the rhetoric of self-love is always pleading with them on their own behalf. Adopting a similar figure of speech, Socrates would have them use rhetoric, not in defence but in accusation of themselves. As they are guided by feeling rather than by reason, to their feelings the appeal must be made. They must speak to themselves; they must argue with themselves; they must paint in eloquent words the character of their own evil deeds. To any suffering which they have deserved, they must persuade themselves to submit. Under the figure there lurks a real thought, which, expressed in another form, admits of an easy application to ourselves. For do not we too accuse as well as excuse ourselves? And we call to our aid the rhetoric of prayer and preaching, which the mind silently employs while the struggle between the better and the worse is going on within us. And sometimes we are too hard upon ourselves, because we want to restore the balance which self-love has overthrown or disturbed; and then again we may hear a voice as of a parent consoling us. In religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the consciences of men 'accusing or else excusing them.' For all our life long we are talking with ourselves:What is thought but speech? What is feeling but rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be always in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at first sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.
  Third Thesis:
  --
   Socrates would teach us a lesson which we are slow to learnthat good intentions, and even benevolent actions, when they are not prompted by wisdom, are of no value. We believe something to be for our good which we afterwards find out not to be for our good. The consequences may be inevitable, for they may follow an invariable law, yet they may often be the very opposite of what is expected by us. When we increase pauperism by almsgiving; when we tie up property without regard to changes of circumstances; when we say hastily what we deliberately disapprove; when we do in a moment of passion what upon reflection we regret; when from any want of self-control we give another an advantage over uswe are doing not what we will, but what we wish. All actions of which the consequences are not weighed and foreseen, are of this impotent and paralytic sort; and the author of them has 'the least possible power' while seeming to have the greatest. For he is actually bringing about the reverse of what he intended. And yet the book of nature is open to him, in which he who runs may read if he will exercise ordinary attention; every day offers him experiences of his own and of other men's characters, and he passes them unheeded by. The contemplation of the consequences of actions, and the ignorance of men in regard to them, seems to have led Socrates to his famous thesis:'Virtue is knowledge;' which is not so much an error or paradox as a half truth, seen first in the twilight of ethical philosophy, but also the half of the truth which is especially needed in the present age. For as the world has grown older men have been too apt to imagine a right and wrong apart from consequences; while a few, on the other hand, have sought to resolve them wholly into their consequences. But Socrates, or Plato for him, neither divides nor identifies them; though the time has not yet arrived either for utilitarian or transcendental systems of moral philosophy, he recognizes the two elements which seem to lie at the basis of morality. (Compare the following: 'Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenize and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraized too much and have overvalued doing. But the habits and discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal possession. And as humanity is constituted, one must never assign the second rank to-day without being ready to restore them to the first to-morrow.' Sir William W. Hunter, Preface to Orissa.)
  Fourth Thesis:
  --
  The Greek in the age of Plato admitted praise to be one of the chief incentives to moral virtue, and to most men the opinion of their fellows is a leading principle of action. Hence a certain element of seeming enters into all things; all or almost all desire to appear better than they are, that they may win the esteem or admiration of others. A man of ability can easily feign the language of piety or virtue; and there is an unconscious as well as a conscious hypocrisy which, according to Socrates, is the worst of the two. Again, there is the sophistry of classes and professions. There are the different opinions about themselves and one another which prevail in different ranks of society. There is the bias given to the mind by the study of one department of human knowledge to the exclusion of the rest; and stronger far the prejudice engendered by a pecuniary or party interest in certain tenets. There is the sophistry of law, the sophistry of medicine, the sophistry of politics, the sophistry of theology. All of these disguises wear the appearance of the truth; some of them are very ancient, and we do not easily disengage ourselves from them; for we have inherited them, and they have become a part of us. The sophistry of an ancient Greek sophist is nothing compared with the sophistry of a religious order, or of a church in which during many ages falsehood has been accumulating, and everything has been said on one side, and nothing on the other. The conventions and customs which we observe in conversation, and the opposition of our interests when we have dealings with one another ('the buyer saith, it is noughtit is nought,' etc.), are always obscuring our sense of truth and right. The sophistry of human nature is far more subtle than the deceit of any one man. Few persons speak freely from their own natures, and scarcely any one dares to think for himself: most of us imperceptibly fall into the opinions of those around us, which we partly help to make. A man who would shake himself loose from them, requires great force of mind; he hardly knows where to begin in the search after truth. On every side he is met by the world, which is not an abstraction of theologians, but the most real of all things, being another name for ourselves when regarded collectively and subjected to the influences of society.
  Then comes Socrates, impressed as no other man ever was, with the unreality and untruthfulness of popular opinion, and tells mankind that they must be and not seem. How are they to be? At any rate they must have the spirit and desire to be. If they are ignorant, they must acknowledge their ignorance to themselves; if they are conscious of doing evil, they must learn to do well; if they are weak, and have nothing in them which they can call themselves, they must acquire firmness and consistency; if they are indifferent, they must begin to take an interest in the great questions which surround them. They must try to be what they would fain appear in the eyes of their fellow-men. A single individual cannot easily change public opinion; but he can be true and innocent, simple and independent; he can know what he does, and what he does not know; and though not without an effort, he can form a judgment of his own, at least in common matters. In his most secret actions he can show the same high principle (compare Republic) which he shows when supported and watched by public opinion. And on some fitting occasion, on some question of humanity or truth or right, even an ordinary man, from the natural rectitude of his disposition, may be found to take up arms against a whole tribe of politicians and lawyers, and be too much for them.
  Who is the true and who the false statesman?
  --
  The false politician asks not what is true, but what is the opinion of the worldnot what is right, but what is expedient. The only measures of which he approves are the measures which will pass. He has no intention of fighting an uphill battle; he keeps the roadway of politics. He is unwilling to incur the persecution and enmity which political convictions would entail upon him. He begins with popularity, and in fair weather sails gallantly along. But unpopularity soon follows him. For men expect their leaders to be better and wiser than themselves: to be their guides in danger, their saviours in extremity; they do not really desire them to obey all the ignorant impulses of the popular mind; and if they fail them in a crisis they are disappointed. Then, as Socrates says, the cry of ingratitude is heard, which is most unreasonable; for the people, who have been taught no better, have done what might be expected of them, and their statesmen have received justice at their hands.
  The true statesman is aware that he must adapt himself to times and circumstances. He must have allies if he is to fight against the world; he must enlighten public opinion; he must accustom his followers to act together. Although he is not the mere executor of the will of the majority, he must win over the majority to himself. He is their leader and not their follower, but in order to lead he must also follow. He will neither exaggerate nor undervalue the power of a statesman, neither adopting the 'laissez faire' nor the 'paternal government' principle; but he will, whether he is dealing with children in politics, or with full-grown men, seek to do for the people what the government can do for them, and what, from imperfect education or deficient powers of combination, they cannot do for themselves. He knows that if he does too much for them they will do nothing; and that if he does nothing for them they will in some states of society be utterly helpless. For the many cannot exist without the few, if the material force of a country is from below, wisdom and experience are from above. It is not a small part of human evils which kings and governments make or cure. The statesman is well aware that a great purpose carried out consistently during many years will at last be executed. He is playing for a stake which may be partly determined by some accident, and therefore he will allow largely for the unknown element of politics. But the game being one in which chance and skill are combined, if he plays long enough he is certain of victory. He will not be always consistent, for the world is changing; and though he depends upon the support of a party, he will remember that he is the minister of the whole. He lives not for the present, but for the future, and he is not at all sure that he will be appreciated either now or then. For he may have the existing order of society against him, and may not be remembered by a distant posterity.
  There are always discontented idealists in politics who, like Socrates in the Gorgias, find fault with all statesmen past as well as present, not excepting the greatest names of history. Mankind have an uneasy feeling that they ought to be better governed than they are. Just as the actual philosopher falls short of the one wise man, so does the actual statesman fall short of the ideal. And so partly from vanity and egotism, but partly also from a true sense of the faults of eminent men, a temper of dissatisfaction and criticism springs up among those who are ready enough to acknowledge the inferiority of their own powers. No matter whether a statesman makes high professions or none at allthey are reduced sooner or later to the same level. And sometimes the more unscrupulous man is better esteemed than the more conscientious, because he has not equally deceived expectations. Such sentiments may be unjust, but they are widely spread; we constantly find them recurring in reviews and newspapers, and still oftener in private conversation.
  We may further observe that the art of government, while in some respects tending to improve, has in others a tendency to degenerate, as institutions become more popular. Governing for the people cannot easily be combined with governing by the people: the interests of classes are too strong for the ideas of the statesman who takes a comprehensive view of the whole. According to Socrates the true governor will find ruin or death staring him in the face, and will only be induced to govern from the fear of being governed by a worse man than himself (Republic). And in modern times, though the world has grown milder, and the terrible consequences which Plato foretells no longer await an English statesman, any one who is not actuated by a blind ambition will only undertake from a sense of duty a work in which he is most likely to fail; and even if he succeed, will rarely be rewarded by the gratitude of his own generation.
   Socrates, who is not a politician at all, tells us that he is the only real politician of his time. Let us illustrate the meaning of his words by applying them to the history of our own country. He would have said that not Pitt or Fox, or Canning or Sir R. Peel, are the real politicians of their time, but Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Ricardo. These during the greater part of their lives occupied an inconsiderable space in the eyes of the public. They were private persons; nevertheless they sowed in the minds of men seeds which in the next generation have become an irresistible power. 'Herein is that saying true, One soweth and another reapeth.' We may imagine with Plato an ideal statesman in whom practice and speculation are perfectly harmonized; for there is no necessary opposition between them. But experience shows that they are commonly divorcedthe ordinary politician is the interpreter or executor of the thoughts of others, and hardly ever brings to the birth a new political conception. One or two only in modern times, like the Italian statesman Cavour, have created the world in which they moved. The philosopher is naturally unfitted for political life; his great ideas are not understood by the many; he is a thousand miles away from the questions of the day. Yet perhaps the lives of thinkers, as they are stiller and deeper, are also happier than the lives of those who are more in the public eye. They have the promise of the future, though they are regarded as dreamers and visionaries by their own contemporaries. And when they are no longer here, those who would have been ashamed of them during their lives claim kindred with them, and are proud to be called by their names. (Compare Thucyd.)
  --
  The myths of Plato are a phenomenon unique in literature. There are four longer ones: these occur in the Phaedrus, Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic. That in the Republic is the most elaborate and finished of them. Three of these greater myths, namely those contained in the Phaedo, the Gorgias and the Republic, relate to the destiny of human souls in a future life. The magnificent myth in the Phaedrus treats of the immortality, or rather the eternity of the soul, in which is included a former as well as a future state of existence. To these may be added, (1) the myth, or rather fable, occurring in the Statesman, in which the life of innocence is contrasted with the ordinary life of man and the consciousness of evil: (2) the legend of the Island of Atlantis, an imaginary history, which is a fragment only, commenced in the Timaeus and continued in the Critias: (3) the much less artistic fiction of the foundation of the Cretan colony which is introduced in the preface to the Laws, but soon falls into the background: (4) the beautiful but rather artificial tale of Prometheus and Epimetheus narrated in his rhetorical manner by Protagoras in the dialogue called after him: (5) the speech at the beginning of the Phaedrus, which is a parody of the orator Lysias; the rival speech of Socrates and the recantation of it. To these may be added (6) the tale of the grasshoppers, and (7) the tale of Thamus and of Theuth, both in the Phaedrus: (8) the parable of the Cave (Republic), in which the previous argument is recapitulated, and the nature and degrees of knowledge having been previously set forth in the abstract are represented in a picture: (9) the fiction of the earth-born men (Republic; compare Laws), in which by the adaptation of an old tradition Plato makes a new beginning for his society: (10) the myth of Aristophanes respecting the division of the sexes, Sym.: (11) the parable of the noble captain, the pilot, and the mutinous sailors (Republic), in which is represented the relation of the better part of the world, and of the philosopher, to the mob of politicians: (12) the ironical tale of the pilot who plies between Athens and Aegina charging only a small payment for saving men from death, the reason being that he is uncertain whether to live or die is better for them (Gor.): (13) the treatment of freemen and citizens by physicians and of slaves by their apprentices,a somewhat laboured figure of speech intended to illustrate the two different ways in which the laws speak to men (Laws). There also occur in Plato continuous images; some of them extend over several pages, appearing and reappearing at intervals: such as the bees stinging and stingless (paupers and thieves) in the Eighth Book of the Republic, who are generated in the transition from timocracy to oligarchy: the sun, which is to the visible world what the idea of good is to the intellectual, in the Sixth Book of the Republic: the composite animal, having the form of a man, but containing under a human skin a lion and a many-headed monster (Republic): the great beast, i.e. the populace: and the wild beast within us, meaning the passions which are always liable to break out: the animated comparisons of the degradation of philosophy by the arts to the dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant to the parricide, who 'beats his father, having first taken away his arms': the dog, who is your only philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry image of the argument wandering about without a head (Laws), which is repeated, not improved, from the Gorgias: the argument personified as veiling her face (Republic), as engaged in a chase, as breaking upon us in a first, second and third wave:on these figures of speech the changes are rung many times over. It is observable that nearly all these parables or continuous images are found in the Republic; that which occurs in the Theaetetus, of the midwifery of Socrates, is perhaps the only exception. To make the list complete, the mathematical figure of the number of the state (Republic), or the numerical interval which separates king from tyrant, should not be forgotten.
  The myth in the Gorgias is one of those descriptions of another life which, like the Sixth Aeneid of Virgil, appear to contain reminiscences of the mysteries. It is a vision of the rewards and punishments which await good and bad men after death. It supposes the body to continue and to be in another world what it has become in this. It includes a Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno, like the sister myths of the Phaedo and the Republic. The Inferno is reserved for great criminals only. The argument of the dialogue is frequently referred to, and the meaning breaks through so as rather to destroy the liveliness and consistency of the picture. The structure of the fiction is very slight, the chief point or moral being that in the judgments of another world there is no possibility of concealment: Zeus has taken from men the power of foreseeing death, and brings together the souls both of them and their judges naked and undisguised at the judgment-seat. Both are exposed to view, stripped of the veils and clothes which might prevent them from seeing into or being seen by one another.
  --
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Callicles, Socrates, Chaerephon, Gorgias, Polus.
  SCENE: The house of Callicles.
  --
  CHAEREPHON: Never mind, Socrates; the misfortune of which I have been the cause I will also repair; for Gorgias is a friend of mine, and I will make him give the exhibition again either now, or, if you prefer, at some other time.
  CALLICLES: What is the matter, Chaerephondoes Socrates want to hear Gorgias?
  CHAEREPHON: Yes, that was our intention in coming.
  --
  CALLICLES: There is nothing like asking him, Socrates; and indeed to answer questions is a part of his exhibition, for he was saying only just now, that any one in my house might put any question to him, and that he would answer.
   Socrates: How fortunate! will you ask him, Chaerephon?
  --
  GORGIAS: What do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: I mean that he has not exactly answered the question which he was asked.
  --
  POLUS: What makes you say so, Socrates?
   Socrates: Because, Polus, when Chaerephon asked you what was the art which Gorgias knows, you praised it as if you were answering some one who found fault with it, but you never said what the art was.
  --
  GORGIAS: Rhetoric, Socrates, is my art.
   Socrates: Then I am to call you a rhetorician?
  GORGIAS: Yes, Socrates, and a good one too, if you would call me that which, in Homeric language, 'I boast myself to be.'
   Socrates: I should wish to do so.
  --
  GORGIAS: Some answers, Socrates, are of necessity longer; but I will do my best to make them as short as possible; for a part of my profession is that I can be as short as any one.
   Socrates: That is what is wanted, Gorgias; exhibit the shorter method now, and the longer one at some other time.
  --
  GORGIAS: Yes, Socrates, I do think myself good at that.
   Socrates: I am glad to hear it; answer me in like manner about rhetoric: with what is rhetoric concerned?
  --
  GORGIAS: Because, Socrates, the knowledge of the other arts has only to do with some sort of external action, as of the hand; but there is no such action of the hand in rhetoric which works and takes effect only through the medium of discourse. And therefore I am justified in saying that rhetoric treats of discourse.
   Socrates: I am not sure whether I entirely understand you, but I dare say I shall soon know better; please to answer me a question:you would allow that there are arts?
  --
  GORGIAS: You perfectly conceive my meaning, Socrates.
   Socrates: But there are other arts which work wholly through the medium of language, and require either no action or very little, as, for example, the arts of arithmetic, of calculation, of geometry, and of playing draughts; in some of these speech is pretty nearly co-extensive with action, but in most of them the verbal element is greaterthey depend wholly on words for their efficacy and power: and I take your meaning to be that rhetoric is an art of this latter sort?
  --
  GORGIAS: You are quite right, Socrates, in your apprehension of my meaning.
   Socrates: Well, then, let me now have the rest of my answer:seeing that rhetoric is one of those arts which works mainly by the use of words, and there are other arts which also use words, tell me what is that quality in words with which rhetoric is concerned:Suppose that a person asks me about some of the arts which I was mentioning just now; he might say, ' Socrates, what is arithmetic?' and I should reply to him, as you replied to me, that arithmetic is one of those arts which take effect through words. And then he would proceed to ask: 'Words about what?' and I should reply, Words about odd and even numbers, and how many there are of each. And if he asked again: 'What is the art of calculation?' I should say, That also is one of the arts which is concerned wholly with words. And if he further said, 'Concerned with what?' I should say, like the clerks in the assembly, 'as aforesaid' of arithmetic, but with a difference, the difference being that the art of calculation considers not only the quantities of odd and even numbers, but also their numerical relations to themselves and to one another. And suppose, again, I were to say that astronomy is only wordshe would ask, 'Words about what, Socrates?' and I should answer, that astronomy tells us about the motions of the stars and sun and moon, and their relative swiftness.
  GORGIAS: You would be quite right, Socrates.
   Socrates: And now let us have from you, Gorgias, the truth about rhetoric: which you would admit (would you not?) to be one of those arts which act always and fulfil all their ends through the medium of words?
  --
  GORGIAS: To the greatest, Socrates, and the best of human things.
   Socrates: That again, Gorgias is ambiguous; I am still in the dark: for which are the greatest and best of human things? I dare say that you have heard men singing at feasts the old drinking song, in which the singers enumerate the goods of life, first health, beauty next, thirdly, as the writer of the song says, wealth honestly obtained.
  --
   Socrates: I mean to say, that the producers of those things which the author of the song praises, that is to say, the physician, the trainer, the money-maker, will at once come to you, and first the physician will say: 'O Socrates, Gorgias is deceiving you, for my art is concerned with the greatest good of men and not his.' And when I ask, Who are you? he will reply, 'I am a physician.' What do you mean? I shall say. Do you mean that your art produces the greatest good? 'Certainly,' he will answer, 'for is not health the greatest good? What greater good can men have, Socrates?' And after him the trainer will come and say, 'I too, Socrates, shall be greatly surprised if Gorgias can show more good of his art than I can show of mine.' To him again I shall say, Who are you, honest friend, and what is your business? 'I am a trainer,' he will reply, 'and my business is to make men beautiful and strong in body.' When I have done with the trainer, there arrives the money-maker, and he, as I expect, will utterly despise them all. 'Consider Socrates,' he will say, 'whether Gorgias or any one else can produce any greater good than wealth.' Well, you and I say to him, and are you a creator of wealth? 'Yes,' he replies. And who are you? 'A money-maker.' And do you consider wealth to be the greatest good of man? 'Of course,' will be his reply. And we shall rejoin: Yes; but our friend Gorgias contends that his art produces a greater good than yours. And then he will be sure to go on and ask, 'What good? Let Gorgias answer.' Now I want you, Gorgias, to imagine that this question is asked of you by them and by me; What is that which, as you say, is the greatest good of man, and of which you are the creator? Answer us.
  GORGIAS: That good, Socrates, which is truly the greatest, being that which gives to men freedom in their own persons, and to individuals the power of ruling over others in their several states.
   Socrates: And what would you consider this to be?
  --
  GORGIAS: No: the definition seems to me very fair, Socrates; for persuasion is the chief end of rhetoric.
   Socrates: Then hear me, Gorgias, for I am quite sure that if there ever was a man who entered on the discussion of a matter from a pure love of knowing the truth, I am such a one, and I should say the same of you.
  GORGIAS: What is coming, Socrates?
   Socrates: I will tell you: I am very well aware that I do not know what, according to you, is the exact nature, or what are the topics of that persuasion of which you speak, and which is given by rhetoric; although I have a suspicion about both the one and the other. And I am going to askwhat is this power of persuasion which is given by rhetoric, and about what? But why, if I have a suspicion, do I ask instead of telling you? Not for your sake, but in order that the argument may proceed in such a manner as is most likely to set forth the truth. And I would have you observe, that I am right in asking this further question: If I asked, 'What sort of a painter is Zeuxis?' and you said, 'The painter of figures,' should I not be right in asking, 'What kind of figures, and where do you find them?'
  --
  GORGIAS: He persuades, Socrates,there can be no mistake about that.
   Socrates: Again, if we take the arts of which we were just now speaking:do not arithmetic and the arithmeticians teach us the properties of number?
  --
  GORGIAS: I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.
   Socrates: And that, Gorgias, was what I was suspecting to be your notion; yet I would not have you wonder if by-and-by I am found repeating a seemingly plain question; for I ask not in order to confute you, but as I was saying that the argument may proceed consecutively, and that we may not get the habit of anticipating and suspecting the meaning of one another's words; I would have you develope your own views in your own way, whatever may be your hypothesis.
  GORGIAS: I think that you are quite right, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then let me raise another question; there is such a thing as 'having learned'?
  --
  GORGIAS: In my judgment, Socrates, they are not the same.
   Socrates: And your judgment is right, as you may ascertain in this way:If a person were to say to you, 'Is there, Gorgias, a false belief as well as a true?'you would reply, if I am not mistaken, that there is.
  --
  GORGIAS: Clearly, Socrates, that which only gives belief.
   Socrates: Then rhetoric, as would appear, is the artificer of a persuasion which creates belief about the just and unjust, but gives no instruction about them?
  --
   Socrates: Come, then, and let us see what we really mean about rhetoric; for I do not know what my own meaning is as yet. When the assembly meets to elect a physician or a shipwright or any other craftsman, will the rhetorician be taken into counsel? Surely not. For at every election he ought to be chosen who is most skilled; and, again, when walls have to be built or harbours or docks to be constructed, not the rhetorician but the master workman will advise; or when generals have to be chosen and an order of battle arranged, or a position taken, then the military will advise and not the rhetoricians: what do you say, Gorgias? Since you profess to be a rhetorician and a maker of rhetoricians, I cannot do better than learn the nature of your art from you. And here let me assure you that I have your interest in view as well as my own. For likely enough some one or other of the young men present might desire to become your pupil, and in fact I see some, and a good many too, who have this wish, but they would be too modest to question you. And therefore when you are interrogated by me, I would have you imagine that you are interrogated by them. 'What is the use of coming to you, Gorgias?' they will say'about what will you teach us to advise the state?about the just and unjust only, or about those other things also which Socrates has just mentioned?' How will you answer them?
  GORGIAS: I like your way of leading us on, Socrates, and I will endeavour to reveal to you the whole nature of rhetoric. You must have heard, I think, that the docks and the walls of the Athenians and the plan of the harbour were devised in accordance with the counsels, partly of Themistocles, and partly of Pericles, and not at the suggestion of the builders.
   Socrates: Such is the tradition, Gorgias, about Themistocles; and I myself heard the speech of Pericles when he advised us about the middle wall.
  GORGIAS: And you will observe, Socrates, that when a decision has to be given in such matters the rhetoricians are the advisers; they are the men who win their point.
   Socrates: I had that in my admiring mind, Gorgias, when I asked what is the nature of rhetoric, which always appears to me, when I look at the matter in this way, to be a marvel of greatness.
  GORGIAS: A marvel, indeed, Socrates, if you only knew how rhetoric comprehends and holds under her sway all the inferior arts. Let me offer you a striking example of this. On several occasions I have been with my brother Herodicus or some other physician to see one of his patients, who would not allow the physician to give him medicine, or apply the knife or hot iron to him; and I have persuaded him to do for me what he would not do for the physician just by the use of rhetoric. And I say that if a rhetorician and a physician were to go to any city, and had there to argue in the Ecclesia or any other assembly as to which of them should be elected state-physician, the physician would have no chance; but he who could speak would be chosen if he wished; and in a contest with a man of any other profession the rhetorician more than any one would have the power of getting himself chosen, for he can speak more persuasively to the multitude than any of them, and on any subject. Such is the nature and power of the art of rhetoric! And yet, Socrates, rhetoric should be used like any other competitive art, not against everybody,the rhetorician ought not to abuse his strength any more than a pugilist or pancratiast or other master of fence;because he has powers which are more than a match either for friend or enemy, he ought not therefore to strike, stab, or slay his friends. Suppose a man to have been trained in the palestra and to be a skilful boxer,he in the fulness of his strength goes and strikes his father or mother or one of his familiars or friends; but that is no reason why the trainers or fencing-masters should be held in detestation or banished from the city;surely not. For they taught their art for a good purpose, to be used against enemies and evil-doers, in self-defence not in aggression, and others have perverted their instructions, and turned to a bad use their own strength and skill. But not on this account are the teachers bad, neither is the art in fault, or bad in itself; I should rather say that those who make a bad use of the art are to blame. And the same argument holds good of rhetoric; for the rhetorician can speak against all men and upon any subject,in short, he can persuade the multitude better than any other man of anything which he pleases, but he should not therefore seek to defraud the physician or any other artist of his reputation merely because he has the power; he ought to use rhetoric fairly, as he would also use his athletic powers. And if after having become a rhetorician he makes a bad use of his strength and skill, his instructor surely ought not on that account to be held in detestation or banished. For he was intended by his teacher to make a good use of his instructions, but he abuses them. And therefore he is the person who ought to be held in detestation, banished, and put to death, and not his instructor.
   Socrates: You, Gorgias, like myself, have had great experience of disputations, and you must have observed, I think, that they do not always terminate in mutual edification, or in the definition by either party of the subjects which they are discussing; but disagreements are apt to arisesomebody says that another has not spoken truly or clearly; and then they get into a passion and begin to quarrel, both parties conceiving that their opponents are arguing from personal feeling only and jealousy of themselves, not from any interest in the question at issue. And sometimes they will go on abusing one another until the company at last are quite vexed at themselves for ever listening to such fellows. Why do I say this? Why, because I cannot help feeling that you are now saying what is not quite consistent or accordant with what you were saying at first about rhetoric. And I am afraid to point this out to you, lest you should think that I have some animosity against you, and that I speak, not for the sake of discovering the truth, but from jealousy of you. Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but if not I will let you alone. And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute; for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another. For I imagine that there is no evil which a man can endure so great as an erroneous opinion about the matters of which we are speaking; and if you claim to be one of my sort, let us have the discussion out, but if you would rather have done, no matter;let us make an end of it.
  GORGIAS: I should say, Socrates, that I am quite the man whom you indicate; but, perhaps, we ought to consider the audience, for, before you came, I had already given a long exhibition, and if we proceed the argument may run on to a great length. And therefore I think that we should consider whether we may not be detaining some part of the company when they are wanting to do something else.
  CHAEREPHON: You hear the audience cheering, Gorgias and Socrates, which shows their desire to listen to you; and for myself, Heaven forbid that I should have any business on hand which would take me away from a discussion so interesting and so ably maintained.
  CALLICLES: By the gods, Chaerephon, although I have been present at many discussions, I doubt whether I was ever so much delighted before, and therefore if you go on discoursing all day I shall be the better pleased.
  --
  GORGIAS: After all this, Socrates, I should be disgraced if I refused, especially as I have promised to answer all comers; in accordance with the wishes of the company, then, do you begin, and ask of me any question which you like.
   Socrates: Let me tell you then, Gorgias, what surprises me in your words; though I dare say that you may be right, and I may have misunderstood your meaning. You say that you can make any man, who will learn of you, a rhetorician?
  --
  GORGIAS: Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?
   Socrates: Whether the rhetorician is or not inferior on this account is a question which we will hereafter examine if the enquiry is likely to be of any service to us; but I would rather begin by asking, whether he is or is not as ignorant of the just and unjust, base and honourable, good and evil, as he is of medicine and the other arts; I mean to say, does he really know anything of what is good and evil, base or honourable, just or unjust in them; or has he only a way with the ignorant of persuading them that he not knowing is to be esteemed to know more about these things than some one else who knows? Or must the pupil know these things and come to you knowing them before he can acquire the art of rhetoric? If he is ignorant, you who are the teacher of rhetoric will not teach himit is not your business; but you will make him seem to the multitude to know them, when he does not know them; and seem to be a good man, when he is not. Or will you be unable to teach him rhetoric at all, unless he knows the truth of these things first? What is to be said about all this? By heavens, Gorgias, I wish that you would reveal to me the power of rhetoric, as you were saying that you would.
  GORGIAS: Well, Socrates, I suppose that if the pupil does chance not to know them, he will have to learn of me these things as well.
   Socrates: Say no more, for there you are right; and so he whom you make a rhetorician must either know the nature of the just and unjust already, or he must be taught by you.
  --
  POLUS: And do even you, Socrates, seriously believe what you are now saying about rhetoric? What! because Gorgias was ashamed to deny that the rhetorician knew the just and the honourable and the good, and admitted that to any one who came to him ignorant of them he could teach them, and then out of this admission there arose a contradictionthe thing which you dearly love, and to which not he, but you, brought the argument by your captious questions(do you seriously believe that there is any truth in all this?) For will any one ever acknowledge that he does not know, or cannot teach, the nature of justice? The truth is, that there is great want of manners in bringing the argument to such a pass.
   Socrates: Illustrious Polus, the reason why we provide ourselves with friends and children is, that when we get old and stumble, a younger generation may be at hand to set us on our legs again in our words and in our actions: and now, if I and Gorgias are stumbling, here are you who should raise us up; and I for my part engage to retract any error into which you may think that I have fallen-upon one condition:
  --
  POLUS: I will ask; and do you answer me, Socrates, the same question which Gorgias, as you suppose, is unable to answer: What is rhetoric?
   Socrates: Do you mean what sort of an art?
  --
  GORGIAS: A part of what, Socrates? Say what you mean, and never mind me.
   Socrates: In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind: this habit I sum up under the word 'flattery'; and it appears to me to have many other parts, one of which is cookery, which may seem to be an art, but, as I maintain, is only an experience or routine and not an art:another part is rhetoric, and the art of attiring and sophistry are two others: thus there are four branches, and four different things answering to them. And Polus may ask, if he likes, for he has not as yet been informed, what part of flattery is rhetoric: he did not see that I had not yet answered him when he proceeded to ask a further question: Whether I do not think rhetoric a fine thing? But I shall not tell him whether rhetoric is a fine thing or not, until I have first answered, 'What is rhetoric?' For that would not be right, Polus; but I shall be happy to answer, if you will ask me, What part of flattery is rhetoric?
  --
  GORGIAS: Indeed, Socrates, I cannot say that I understand myself.
   Socrates: I do not wonder, Gorgias; for I have not as yet explained myself, and our friend Polus, colt by name and colt by nature, is apt to run away. (This is an untranslatable play on the name 'Polus,' which means 'a colt.')
  --
   Socrates: How then can the rhetoricians or the tyrants have great power in states, unless Polus can refute Socrates, and prove to him that they do as they will?
  POLUS: This fellow
  --
  POLUS: That, Socrates, is monstrous and absurd.
   Socrates: Good words, good Polus, as I may say in your own peculiar style; but if you have any questions to ask of me, either prove that I am in error or give the answer yourself.
  --
  POLUS: To be sure, Socrates.
   Socrates: Wisdom and health and wealth and the like you would call goods, and their opposites evils?
  --
  POLUS: As though you, Socrates, would not like to have the power of doing what seemed good to you in the state, rather than not; you would not be jealous when you saw any one killing or despoiling or imprisoning whom he pleased, Oh, no!
   Socrates: Justly or unjustly, do you mean?
  --
  POLUS: How can that be, Socrates?
   Socrates: That may very well be, inasmuch as doing injustice is the greatest of evils.
  --
   Socrates: Well then, illustrious friend, when I have said my say, do you reply to me. Suppose that I go into a crowded Agora, and take a dagger under my arm. Polus, I say to you, I have just acquired rare power, and become a tyrant; for if I think that any of these men whom you see ought to be put to death, the man whom I have a mind to kill is as good as dead; and if I am disposed to break his head or tear his garment, he will have his head broken or his garment torn in an instant. Such is my great power in this city. And if you do not believe me, and I show you the dagger, you would probably reply: Socrates, in that sort of way any one may have great powerhe may burn any house which he pleases, and the docks and triremes of the Athenians, and all their other vessels, whether public or privatebut can you believe that this mere doing as you think best is great power?
  POLUS: Certainly not such doing as this.
  --
  POLUS: I would rather, Socrates, that you should answer as well as ask that question.
   Socrates: Well, Polus, since you would rather have the answer from me, I say that they are good when they are just, and evil when they are unjust.
  POLUS: You are hard of refutation, Socrates, but might not a child refute that statement?
   Socrates: Then I shall be very grateful to the child, and equally grateful to you if you will refute me and deliver me from my foolishness. And I hope that refute me you will, and not weary of doing good to a friend.
  POLUS: Yes, Socrates, and I need not go far or appeal to antiquity; events which happened only a few days ago are enough to refute you, and to prove that many men who do wrong are happy.
   Socrates: What events?
  --
  POLUS: Then clearly, Socrates, you would say that you did not even know whether the great king was a happy man?
   Socrates: And I should speak the truth; for I do not know how he stands in the matter of education and justice.
  --
  POLUS: You are maintaining a strange doctrine, Socrates.
   Socrates: I shall try to make you agree with me, O my friend, for as a friend I regard you. Then these are the points at issue between usare they not? I was saying that to do is worse than to suffer injustice?
  --
  POLUS: A proposition which is harder of refutation than the other, Socrates.
   Socrates: Say rather, Polus, impossible; for who can refute the truth?
  --
  POLUS: But do you not think, Socrates, that you have been sufficiently refuted, when you say that which no human being will allow? Ask the company.
   Socrates: O Polus, I am not a public man, and only last year, when my tribe were serving as Prytanes, and it became my duty as their president to take the votes, there was a laugh at me, because I was unable to take them. And as I failed then, you must not ask me to count the suffrages of the company now; but if, as I was saying, you have no better argument than numbers, let me have a turn, and do you make trial of the sort of proof which, as I think, is required; for I shall produce one witness only of the truth of my words, and he is the person with whom I am arguing; his suffrage I know how to take; but with the many I have nothing to do, and do not even address myself to them. May I ask then whether you will answer in turn and have your words put to the proof? For I certainly think that I and you and every man do really believe, that to do is a greater evil than to suffer injustice: and not to be punished than to be punished.
  --
  POLUS: To be sure, Socrates; and I very much approve of your measuring beauty by the standard of pleasure and utility.
   Socrates: And deformity or disgrace may be equally measured by the opposite standard of pain and evil?
  --
  POLUS: No, Socrates; certainly not.
   Socrates: Then they do not exceed in pain?
  --
  POLUS: No, not according to this way of putting the case, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then I said truly, Polus, that neither you, nor I, nor any man, would rather do than suffer injustice; for to do injustice is the greater evil of the two.
  --
  POLUS: Yes, Socrates, I think that they are.
   Socrates: Consider again:Where there is an agent, must there not also be a patient?
  --
  POLUS: Suffering, Socrates; there can be no doubt of that.
   Socrates: And suffering implies an agent?
  POLUS: Certainly, Socrates; and he is the punisher.
   Socrates: And he who punishes rightly, punishes justly?
  --
  POLUS: What do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: I mean to say, that is most disgraceful has been already admitted to be most painful or hurtful, or both.
  --
  POLUS: Nay, Socrates; the painfulness does not appear to me to follow from your premises.
   Socrates: Then, if, as you would argue, not more painful, the evil of the soul is of all evils the most disgraceful; and the excess of disgrace must be caused by some preternatural greatness, or extraordinary hurtfulness of the evil.
  --
  POLUS: To the physicians, Socrates.
   Socrates: And to whom do we go with the unjust and intemperate?
  --
  POLUS: Justice, Socrates, far excels the two others.
   Socrates: And justice, if the best, gives the greatest pleasure or advantage or both?
  --
  POLUS: To that, Socrates, there can be but one answer.
   Socrates: Then rhetoric is of no use to us, Polus, in helping a man to excuse his own injustice, that of his parents or friends, or children or country; but may be of use to any one who holds that instead of excusing he ought to accusehimself above all, and in the next degree his family or any of his friends who may be doing wrong; he should bring to light the iniquity and not conceal it, that so the wrong-doer may suffer and be made whole; and he should even force himself and others not to shrink, but with closed eyes like brave men to let the physician operate with knife or searing iron, not regarding the pain, in the hope of attaining the good and the honourable; let him who has done things worthy of stripes, allow himself to be scourged, if of bonds, to be bound, if of a fine, to be fined, if of exile, to be exiled, if of death, to die, himself being the first to accuse himself and his own relations, and using rhetoric to this end, that his and their unjust actions may be made manifest, and that they themselves may be delivered from injustice, which is the greatest evil. Then, Polus, rhetoric would indeed be useful. Do you say 'Yes' or 'No' to that?
  POLUS: To me, Socrates, what you are saying appears very strange, though probably in agreement with your premises.
   Socrates: Is not this the conclusion, if the premises are not disproven?
  --
  CALLICLES: Tell me, Chaerephon, is Socrates in earnest, or is he joking?
  CHAEREPHON: I should say, Callicles, that he is in most profound earnest; but you may well ask him.
  CALLICLES: By the gods, and I will. Tell me, Socrates, are you in earnest, or only in jest? For if you are in earnest, and what you say is true, is not the whole of human life turned upside down; and are we not doing, as would appear, in everything the opposite of what we ought to be doing?
   Socrates: O Callicles, if there were not some community of feelings among mankind, however varying in different personsI mean to say, if every man's feelings were peculiar to himself and were not shared by the rest of his speciesI do not see how we could ever communicate our impressions to one another. I make this remark because I perceive that you and I have a common feeling. For we are lovers both, and both of us have two loves apiece:I am the lover of Alcibiades, the son of Cleinias, and of philosophy; and you of the Athenian Demus, and of Demus the son of Pyrilampes. Now, I observe that you, with all your cleverness, do not venture to contradict your favourite in any word or opinion of his; but as he changes you change, backwards and forwards. When the Athenian Demus denies anything that you are saying in the assembly, you go over to his opinion; and you do the same with Demus, the fair young son of Pyrilampes. For you have not the power to resist the words and ideas of your loves; and if a person were to express surprise at the strangeness of what you say from time to time when under their influence, you would probably reply to him, if you were honest, that you cannot help saying what your loves say unless they are prevented; and that you can only be silent when they are. Now you must understand that my words are an echo too, and therefore you need not wonder at me; but if you want to silence me, silence philosophy, who is my love, for she is always telling me what I am now telling you, my friend; neither is she capricious like my other love, for the son of Cleinias says one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow, but philosophy is always true. She is the teacher at whose words you are now wondering, and you have heard her yourself. Her you must refute, and either show, as I was saying, that to do injustice and to escape punishment is not the worst of all evils; or, if you leave her word unrefuted, by the dog the god of Egypt, I declare, O Callicles, that Callicles will never be at one with himself, but that his whole life will be a discord. And yet, my friend, I would rather that my lyre should be inharmonious, and that there should be no music in the chorus which I provided; aye, or that the whole world should be at odds with me, and oppose me, rather than that I myself should be at odds with myself, and contradict myself.
  CALLICLES: O Socrates, you are a regular declaimer, and seem to be running riot in the argument. And now you are declaiming in this way because Polus has fallen into the same error himself of which he accused Gorgias:for he said that when Gorgias was asked by you, whether, if some one came to him who wanted to learn rhetoric, and did not know justice, he would teach him justice, Gorgias in his modesty replied that he would, because he thought that mankind in general would be displeased if he answered 'No'; and then in consequence of this admission, Gorgias was compelled to contradict himself, that being just the sort of thing in which you delight. Whereupon Polus laughed at you deservedly, as I think; but now he has himself fallen into the same trap. I cannot say very much for his wit when he conceded to you that to do is more dishonourable than to suffer injustice, for this was the admission which led to his being entangled by you; and because he was too modest to say what he thought, he had his mouth stopped. For the truth is, Socrates, that you, who pretend to be engaged in the pursuit of truth, are appealing now to the popular and vulgar notions of right, which are not natural, but only conventional. Convention and nature are generally at variance with one another: and hence, if a person is too modest to say what he thinks, he is compelled to contradict himself; and you, in your ingenuity perceiving the advantage to be thereby gained, slyly ask of him who is arguing conventionally a question which is to be determined by the rule of nature; and if he is talking of the rule of nature, you slip away to custom: as, for instance, you did in this very discussion about doing and suffering injustice. When Polus was speaking of the conventionally dishonourable, you assailed him from the point of view of nature; for by the rule of nature, to suffer injustice is the greater disgrace because the greater evil; but conventionally, to do evil is the more disgraceful. For the suffering of injustice is not the part of a man, but of a slave, who indeed had better die than live; since when he is wronged and trampled upon, he is unable to help himself, or any other about whom he cares. The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbours; for knowing their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of equality. And therefore the endeavour to have more than the many, is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice (compare Republic), whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. For on what principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples). Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honourable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth. And this I take to be the sentiment of Pindar, when he says in his poem, that
  'Law is the king of all, of mortals as well as of immortals;'
  --
  'Makes might to be right, doing violence with highest hand; as I infer from the deeds of Heracles, for without buying them' (Fragm. Incert. 151 (Bockh).) I do not remember the exact words, but the meaning is, that without buying them, and without their being given to him, he carried off the oxen of Geryon, according to the law of natural right, and that the oxen and other possessions of the weaker and inferior properly belong to the stronger and superior. And this is true, as you may ascertain, if you will leave philosophy and go on to higher things: for philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know; he is inexperienced in the laws of the State, and in the language which ought to be used in the dealings of man with man, whether private or public, and utterly ignorant of the pleasures and desires of mankind and of human character in general. And people of this sort, when they betake themselves to politics or business, are as ridiculous as I imagine the politicians to be, when they make their appearance in the arena of philosophy. For, as Euripides says,
  'Every man shines in that and pursues that, and devotes the greatest portion of the day to that in which he most excels,' (Antiope, fragm. 20 (Dindorf).)
  but anything in which he is inferior, he avoids and depreciates, and praises the opposite from partiality to himself, and because he thinks that he will thus praise himself. The true principle is to unite them. Philosophy, as a part of education, is an excellent thing, and there is no disgrace to a man while he is young in pursuing such a study; but when he is more advanced in years, the thing becomes ridiculous, and I feel towards philosophers as I do towards those who lisp and imitate children. For I love to see a little child, who is not of an age to speak plainly, lisping at his play; there is an appearance of grace and freedom in his utterance, which is natural to his childish years. But when I hear some small creature carefully articulating its words, I am offended; the sound is disagreeable, and has to my ears the twang of slavery. So when I hear a man lisping, or see him playing like a child, his behaviour appears to me ridiculous and unmanly and worthy of stripes. And I have the same feeling about students of philosophy; when I see a youth thus engaged,the study appears to me to be in character, and becoming a man of liberal education, and him who neglects philosophy I regard as an inferior man, who will never aspire to anything great or noble. But if I see him continuing the study in later life, and not leaving off, I should like to beat him, Socrates; for, as I was saying, such a one, even though he have good natural parts, becomes effeminate. He flies from the busy centre and the market-place, in which, as the poet says, men become distinguished; he creeps into a corner for the rest of his life, and talks in a whisper with three or four admiring youths, but never speaks out like a freeman in a satisfactory manner. Now I, Socrates, am very well inclined towards you, and my feeling may be compared with that of Zethus towards Amphion, in the play of Euripides, whom I was mentioning just now: for I am disposed to say to you much what Zethus said to his brother, that you, Socrates, are careless about the things of which you ought to be careful; and that you
  'Who have a soul so noble, are remarkable for a puerile exterior; Neither in a court of justice could you state a case, or give any reason or proof, Or offer valiant counsel on another's behalf.'
  And you must not be offended, my dear Socrates, for I am speaking out of good-will towards you, if I ask whether you are not ashamed of being thus defenceless; which I affirm to be the condition not of you only but of all those who will carry the study of philosophy too far. For suppose that some one were to take you, or any one of your sort, off to prison, declaring that you had done wrong when you had done no wrong, you must allow that you would not know what to do:there you would stand giddy and gaping, and not having a word to say; and when you went up before the Court, even if the accuser were a poor creature and not good for much, you would die if he were disposed to claim the penalty of death. And yet, Socrates, what is the value of
     'An art which converts a man of sense into a fool,'
  --
  CALLICLES: What is your meaning, Socrates?
   Socrates: I will tell you; I think that I have found in you the desired touchstone.
  --
  CALLICLES: This man will never cease talking nonsense. At your age, Socrates, are you not ashamed to be catching at words and chuckling over some verbal slip? do you not seehave I not told you already, that by superior I mean better: do you imagine me to say, that if a rabble of slaves and nondescripts, who are of no use except perhaps for their physical strength, get together, their ipsissima verba are laws?
   Socrates: Ho! my philosopher, is that your line?
  --
  CALLICLES: How you go on, always talking in the same way, Socrates!
   Socrates: Yes, Callicles, and also about the same things.
  --
  CALLICLES: Quite so, Socrates; and they are really fools, for how can a man be happy who is the servant of anything? On the contrary, I plainly assert, that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. To this however the many cannot attain; and they blame the strong man because they are ashamed of their own weakness, which they desire to conceal, and hence they say that intemperance is base. As I have remarked already, they enslave the nobler natures, and being unable to satisfy their pleasures, they praise temperance and justice out of their own cowardice. For if a man had been originally the son of a king, or had a nature capable of acquiring an empire or a tyranny or sovereignty, what could be more truly base or evil than temperanceto a man like him, I say, who might freely be enjoying every good, and has no one to stand in his way, and yet has admitted custom and reason and the opinion of other men to be lords over him?must not he be in a miserable plight whom the reputation of justice and temperance hinders from giving more to his friends than to his enemies, even though he be a ruler in his city? Nay, Socrates, for you profess to be a votary of the truth, and the truth is this:that luxury and intemperance and licence, if they be provided with means, are virtue and happinessall the rest is a mere bauble, agreements contrary to nature, foolish talk of men, nothing worth. (Compare Republic.)
   Socrates: There is a noble freedom, Callicles, in your way of approaching the argument; for what you say is what the rest of the world think, but do not like to say. And I must beg of you to persevere, that the true rule of human life may become manifest. Tell me, then:you say, do you not, that in the rightly-developed man the passions ought not to be controlled, but that we should let them grow to the utmost and somehow or other satisfy them, and that this is virtue?
  --
  CALLICLES: The latter, Socrates, is more like the truth.
   Socrates: Well, I will tell you another image, which comes out of the same school:Let me request you to consider how far you would accept this as an account of the two lives of the temperate and intemperate in a figure:There are two men, both of whom have a number of casks; the one man has his casks sound and full, one of wine, another of honey, and a third of milk, besides others filled with other liquids, and the streams which fill them are few and scanty, and he can only obtain them with a great deal of toil and difficulty; but when his casks are once filled he has no need to feed them any more, and has no further trouble with them or care about them. The other, in like manner, can procure streams, though not without difficulty; but his vessels are leaky and unsound, and night and day he is compelled to be filling them, and if he pauses for a moment, he is in an agony of pain. Such are their respective lives:And now would you say that the life of the intemperate is happier than that of the temperate? Do I not convince you that the opposite is the truth?
  CALLICLES: You do not convince me, Socrates, for the one who has filled himself has no longer any pleasure left; and this, as I was just now saying, is the life of a stone: he has neither joy nor sorrow after he is once filled; but the pleasure depends on the superabundance of the influx.
   Socrates: But the more you pour in, the greater the waste; and the holes must be large for the liquid to escape.
  --
  CALLICLES: What a strange being you are, Socrates! a regular mob-orator.
   Socrates: That was the reason, Callicles, why I scared Polus and Gorgias, until they were too modest to say what they thought; but you will not be too modest and will not be scared, for you are a brave man. And now, answer my question.
  --
  CALLICLES: Are you not ashamed, Socrates, of introducing such topics into the argument?
   Socrates: Well, my fine friend, but am I the introducer of these topics, or he who says without any qualification that all who feel pleasure in whatever manner are happy, and who admits of no distinction between good and bad pleasures? And I would still ask, whether you say that pleasure and good are the same, or whether there is some pleasure which is not a good?
  --
  CALLICLES: Why, that is what you are doing too, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then we are both doing wrong. Still, my dear friend, I would ask you to consider whether pleasure, from whatever source derived, is the good; for, if this be true, then the disagreeable consequences which have been darkly intimated must follow, and many others.
  CALLICLES: That, Socrates, is only your opinion.
   Socrates: And do you, Callicles, seriously maintain what you are saying?
  --
  CALLICLES: And what does our friend Socrates, of Foxton, saydoes he assent to this, or not?
   Socrates: He does not assent; neither will Callicles, when he sees himself truly. You will admit, I suppose, that good and evil fortune are opposed to each other?
  --
  CALLICLES: I wish I knew, Socrates, what your quibbling means.
   Socrates: You know, Callicles, but you affect not to know.
  --
  CALLICLES: Yes, Gorgias, but I must complain of the habitual trifling of Socrates; he is always arguing about little and unworthy questions.
  GORGIAS: What matter? Your reputation, Callicles, is not at stake. Let Socrates argue in his own fashion.
  CALLICLES: Well, then, Socrates, you shall ask these little peddling questions, since Gorgias wishes to have them.
   Socrates: I envy you, Callicles, for having been initiated into the great mysteries before you were initiated into the lesser. I thought that this was not allowable. But to return to our argument:Does not a man cease from thirsting and from the pleasure of drinking at the same moment?
  --
  CALLICLES: I have been listening and making admissions to you, Socrates; and I remark that if a person grants you anything in play, you, like a child, want to keep hold and will not give it back. But do you really suppose that I or any other human being denies that some pleasures are good and others bad?
   Socrates: Alas, Callicles, how unfair you are! you certainly treat me as if I were a child, sometimes saying one thing, and then another, as if you were meaning to deceive me. And yet I thought at first that you were my friend, and would not have deceived me if you could have helped. But I see that I was mistaken; and now I suppose that I must make the best of a bad business, as they said of old, and take what I can get out of you.Well, then, as I understand you to say, I may assume that some pleasures are good and others evil?
  --
  CALLICLES: There can be no mistake about Cinesias, Socrates.
   Socrates: And what do you say of his father, Meles the harp-player? Did he perform with any view to the good of his hearers? Could he be said to regard even their pleasure? For his singing was an infliction to his audience. And of harp-playing and dithyrambic poetry in general, what would you say? Have they not been invented wholly for the sake of pleasure?
  --
  CALLICLES: There can be no doubt, Socrates, that Tragedy has her face turned towards pleasure and the gratification of the audience.
   Socrates: And is not that the sort of thing, Callicles, which we were just now describing as flattery?
  --
  CALLICLES: Why not give the name yourself, Socrates?
   Socrates: Well, if you had rather that I should, I will; and you shall say whether you agree with me, and if not, you shall refute and answer me. 'Healthy,' as I conceive, is the name which is given to the regular order of the body, whence comes health and every other bodily excellence: is that true or not?
  --
  CALLICLES: I do not understand you, Socrates, and I wish that you would ask some one who does.
   Socrates: Here is a gentleman who cannot endure to be improved or to subject himself to that very chastisement of which the argument speaks!
  --
  CALLICLES: How tyrannical you are, Socrates! I wish that you and your argument would rest, or that you would get some one else to argue with you.
   Socrates: But who else is willing?I want to finish the argument.
  --
  GORGIAS: I think, Socrates, that we should not go our ways until you have completed the argument; and this appears to me to be the wish of the rest of the company; I myself should very much like to hear what more you have to say.
   Socrates: I too, Gorgias, should have liked to continue the argument with Callicles, and then I might have given him an 'Amphion' in return for his 'Zethus'; but since you, Callicles, are unwilling to continue, I hope that you will listen, and interrupt me if I seem to you to be in error. And if you refute me, I shall not be angry with you as you are with me, but I shall inscribe you as the greatest of benefactors on the tablets of my soul.
  --
  CALLICLES: Granted, Socrates, if you will only have done.
   Socrates: Then, as would appear, power and art have to be provided in order that we may do no injustice?
  --
  CALLICLES: Well said, Socrates; and please to observe how ready I am to praise you when you talk sense.
   Socrates: Think and tell me whether you would approve of another view of mine: To me every man appears to be most the friend of him who is most like to himlike to like, as ancient sages say: Would you not agree to this?
  --
  CALLICLES: You always contrive somehow or other, Socrates, to invert everything: do you not know that he who imitates the tyrant will, if he has a mind, kill him who does not imitate him and take away his goods?
   Socrates: Excellent Callicles, I am not deaf, and I have heard that a great many times from you and from Polus and from nearly every man in the city, but I wish that you would hear me too. I dare say that he will kill him if he has a mindthe bad man will kill the good and true.
  --
  CALLICLES: Somehow or other your words, Socrates, always appear to me to be good words; and yet, like the rest of the world, I am not quite convinced by them. (Compare Symp.: 1 Alcib.)
   Socrates: The reason is, Callicles, that the love of Demus which abides in your soul is an adversary to me; but I dare say that if we recur to these same matters, and consider them more thoroughly, you may be convinced for all that. Please, then, to remember that there are two processes of training all things, including body and soul; in the one, as we said, we treat them with a view to pleasure, and in the other with a view to the highest good, and then we do not indulge but resist them: was not that the distinction which we drew?
  --
   Socrates: And does not the same hold in all other cases? If you and I were physicians, and were advising one another that we were competent to practise as state-physicians, should I not ask about you, and would you not ask about me, Well, but how about Socrates himself, has he good health? and was any one else ever known to be cured by him, whether slave or freeman? And I should make the same enquiries about you. And if we arrived at the conclusion that no one, whether citizen or stranger, man or woman, had ever been any the better for the medical skill of either of us, then, by Heaven, Callicles, what an absurdity to think that we or any human being should be so silly as to set up as state-physicians and advise others like ourselves to do the same, without having first practised in private, whether successfully or not, and acquired experience of the art! Is not this, as they say, to begin with the big jar when you are learning the potter's art; which is a foolish thing?
  CALLICLES: True.
  --
  CALLICLES: You are contentious, Socrates.
   Socrates: Nay, I ask you, not from a love of contention, but because I really want to know in what way you think that affairs should be administered among uswhether, when you come to the administration of them, you have any other aim but the improvement of the citizens? Have we not already admitted many times over that such is the duty of a public man? Nay, we have surely said so; for if you will not answer for yourself I must answer for you. But if this is what the good man ought to effect for the benefit of his own state, allow me to recall to you the names of those whom you were just now mentioning, Pericles, and Cimon, and Miltiades, and Themistocles, and ask whether you still think that they were good citizens.
  --
  CALLICLES: You heard that, Socrates, from the laconising set who bruise their ears.
   Socrates: But what I am going to tell you now is not mere hearsay, but well known both to you and me: that at first, Pericles was glorious and his character unimpeached by any verdict of the Atheniansthis was during the time when they were not so goodyet afterwards, when they had been made good and gentle by him, at the very end of his life they convicted him of theft, and almost put him to death, clearly under the notion that he was a malefactor.
  --
  CALLICLES: But surely, Socrates, no living man ever came near any one of them in his performances.
   Socrates: O, my dear friend, I say nothing against them regarded as the serving-men of the State; and I do think that they were certainly more serviceable than those who are living now, and better able to gratify the wishes of the State; but as to transforming those desires and not allowing them to have their way, and using the powers which they had, whether of persuasion or of force, in the improvement of their fellow citizens, which is the prime object of the truly good citizen, I do not see that in these respects they were a whit superior to our present statesmen, although I do admit that they were more clever at providing ships and walls and docks, and all that. You and I have a ridiculous way, for during the whole time that we are arguing, we are always going round and round to the same point, and constantly misunderstanding one another. If I am not mistaken, you have admitted and acknowledged more than once, that there are two kinds of operations which have to do with the body, and two which have to do with the soul: one of the two is ministerial, and if our bodies are hungry provides food for them, and if they are thirsty gives them drink, or if they are cold supplies them with garments, blankets, shoes, and all that they crave. I use the same images as before intentionally, in order that you may understand me the better. The purveyor of the articles may provide them either wholesale or retail, or he may be the maker of any of them,the baker, or the cook, or the weaver, or the shoemaker, or the currier; and in so doing, being such as he is, he is naturally supposed by himself and every one to minister to the body. For none of them know that there is another artan art of gymnastic and medicine which is the true minister of the body, and ought to be the mistress of all the rest, and to use their results according to the knowledge which she has and they have not, of the real good or bad effects of meats and drinks on the body. All other arts which have to do with the body are servile and menial and illiberal; and gymnastic and medicine are, as they ought to be, their mistresses. Now, when I say that all this is equally true of the soul, you seem at first to know and understand and assent to my words, and then a little while afterwards you come repeating, Has not the State had good and noble citizens? and when I ask you who they are, you reply, seemingly quite in earnest, as if I had asked, Who are or have been good trainers?and you had replied, Thearion, the baker, Mithoecus, who wrote the Sicilian cookery-book, Sarambus, the vintner: these are ministers of the body, first-rate in their art; for the first makes admirable loaves, the second excellent dishes, and the third capital wine;to me these appear to be the exact parallel of the statesmen whom you mention. Now you would not be altogether pleased if I said to you, My friend, you know nothing of gymnastics; those of whom you are speaking to me are only the ministers and purveyors of luxury, who have no good or noble notions of their art, and may very likely be filling and fattening men's bodies and gaining their approval, although the result is that they lose their original flesh in the long run, and become thinner than they were before; and yet they, in their simplicity, will not attri bute their diseases and loss of flesh to their entertainers; but when in after years the unhealthy surfeit brings the attendant penalty of disease, he who happens to be near them at the time, and offers them advice, is accused and blamed by them, and if they could they would do him some harm; while they proceed to eulogize the men who have been the real authors of the mischief. And that, Callicles, is just what you are now doing. You praise the men who feasted the citizens and satisfied their desires, and people say that they have made the city great, not seeing that the swollen and ulcerated condition of the State is to be attri buted to these elder statesmen; for they have filled the city full of harbours and docks and walls and revenues and all that, and have left no room for justice and temperance. And when the crisis of the disorder comes, the people will blame the advisers of the hour, and applaud Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, who are the real authors of their calamities; and if you are not careful they may assail you and my friend Alcibiades, when they are losing not only their new acquisitions, but also their original possessions; not that you are the authors of these misfortunes of theirs, although you may perhaps be accessories to them. A great piece of work is always being made, as I see and am told, now as of old; about our statesmen. When the State treats any of them as malefactors, I observe that there is a great uproar and indignation at the supposed wrong which is done to them; 'after all their many services to the State, that they should unjustly perish,'so the tale runs. But the cry is all a lie; for no statesman ever could be unjustly put to death by the city of which he is the head. The case of the professed statesman is, I believe, very much like that of the professed sophist; for the sophists, although they are wise men, are nevertheless guilty of a strange piece of folly; professing to be teachers of virtue, they will often accuse their disciples of wronging them, and defrauding them of their pay, and showing no gratitude for their services. Yet what can be more absurd than that men who have become just and good, and whose injustice has been taken away from them, and who have had justice implanted in them by their teachers, should act unjustly by reason of the injustice which is not in them? Can anything be more irrational, my friends, than this? You, Callicles, compel me to be a mob-orator, because you will not answer.
  --
  CALLICLES: The Mysian, Socrates, or what you please. For if you refuse, the consequences will be
   Socrates: Do not repeat the old storythat he who likes will kill me and get my money; for then I shall have to repeat the old answer, that he will be a bad man and will kill the good, and that the money will be of no use to him, but that he will wrongly use that which he wrongly took, and if wrongly, basely, and if basely, hurtfully.
  CALLICLES: How confident you are, Socrates, that you will never come to harm! you seem to think that you are living in another country, and can never be brought into a court of justice, as you very likely may be brought by some miserable and mean person.
   Socrates: Then I must indeed be a fool, Callicles, if I do not know that in the Athenian State any man may suffer anything. And if I am brought to trial and incur the dangers of which you speak, he will be a villain who brings me to trialof that I am very sure, for no good man would accuse the innocent. Nor shall I be surprised if I am put to death. Shall I tell you why I anticipate this?
  --
  CALLICLES: And do you think, Socrates, that a man who is thus defenceless is in a good position?
   Socrates: Yes, Callicles, if he have that defence, which as you have often acknowledged he should haveif he be his own defence, and have never said or done anything wrong, either in respect of gods or men; and this has been repeatedly acknowledged by us to be the best sort of defence. And if any one could convict me of inability to defend myself or others after this sort, I should blush for shame, whether I was convicted before many, or before a few, or by myself alone; and if I died from want of ability to do so, that would indeed grieve me. But if I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one's soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils. And in proof of what I say, if you have no objection, I should like to tell you a story.

Ion, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The Ion is the shortest, or nearly the shortest, of all the writings which bear the name of Plato, and is not au thenticated by any early external testimony. The grace and beauty of this little work supply the only, and perhaps a sufficient, proof of its genuineness. The plan is simple; the dramatic interest consists entirely in the contrast between the irony of Socrates and the transparent vanity and childlike enthusiasm of the rhapsode Ion. The theme of the Dialogue may possibly have been suggested by the passage of Xenophon's Memorabilia in which the rhapsodists are described by Euthydemus as 'very precise about the exact words of Homer, but very idiotic themselves.' (Compare Aristotle, Met.)
  Ion the rhapsode has just come to Athens; he has been exhibiting in Epidaurus at the festival of Asclepius, and is intending to exhibit at the festival of the Pana thenaea. Socrates admires and envies the rhapsode's art; for he is always well dressed and in good companyin the company of good poets and of Homer, who is the prince of them. In the course of conversation the admission is elicited from Ion that his skill is restricted to Homer, and that he knows nothing of inferior poets, such as Hesiod and Archilochus;he brightens up and is wide awake when Homer is being recited, but is apt to go to sleep at the recitations of any other poet. 'And yet, surely, he who knows the superior ought to know the inferior also;he who can judge of the good speaker is able to judge of the bad. And poetry is a whole; and he who judges of poetry by rules of art ought to be able to judge of all poetry.' This is confirmed by the analogy of sculpture, painting, flute-playing, and the other arts. The argument is at last brought home to the mind of Ion, who asks how this contradiction is to be solved. The solution given by Socrates is as follows:
  The rhapsode is not guided by rules of art, but is an inspired person who derives a mysterious power from the poet; and the poet, in like manner, is inspired by the God. The poets and their interpreters may be compared to a chain of magnetic rings suspended from one another, and from a magnet. The magnet is the Muse, and the ring which immediately follows is the poet himself; from him are suspended other poets; there is also a chain of rhapsodes and actors, who also hang from the Muses, but are let down at the side; and the last ring of all is the spectator. The poet is the inspired interpreter of the God, and this is the reason why some poets, like Homer, are restricted to a single theme, or, like Tynnichus, are famous for a single poem; and the rhapsode is the inspired interpreter of the poet, and for a similar reason some rhapsodes, like Ion, are the interpreters of single poets.
  Ion is delighted at the notion of being inspired, and acknowledges that he is beside himself when he is performing;his eyes rain tears and his hair stands on end. Socrates is of opinion that a man must be mad who behaves in this way at a festival when he is surrounded by his friends and there is nothing to trouble him. Ion is confident that Socrates would never think him mad if he could only hear his embellishments of Homer. Socrates asks whether he can speak well about everything in Homer. 'Yes, indeed he can.' 'What about things of which he has no knowledge?' Ion answers that he can interpret anything in Homer. But, rejoins Socrates, when Homer speaks of the arts, as for example, of chariot-driving, or of medicine, or of prophecy, or of navigationwill he, or will the charioteer or physician or prophet or pilot be the better judge? Ion is compelled to admit that every man will judge of his own particular art better than the rhapsode. He still maintains, however, that he understands the art of the general as well as any one. 'Then why in this city of Athens, in which men of merit are always being sought after, is he not at once appointed a general?' Ion replies that he is a foreigner, and the Athenians and Spartans will not appoint a foreigner to be their general. 'No, that is not the real reason; there are many examples to the contrary. But Ion has long been playing tricks with the argument; like Proteus, he transforms himself into a variety of shapes, and is at last about to run away in the disguise of a general. Would he rather be regarded as inspired or dishonest?' Ion, who has no suspicion of the irony of Socrates, eagerly embraces the alternative of inspiration.
  The Ion, like the other earlier Platonic Dialogues, is a mixture of jest and earnest, in which no definite result is obtained, but some Socratic or Platonic truths are allowed dimly to appear.
  --
  The old quarrel between philosophy and poetry, which in the Republic leads to their final separation, is already working in the mind of Plato, and is embodied by him in the contrast between Socrates and Ion. Yet here, as in the Republic, Socrates shows a sympathy with the poetic nature. Also, the manner in which Ion is affected by his own recitations affords a lively illustration of the power which, in the Republic, Socrates attributes to dramatic performances over the mind of the performer. His allusion to his embellishments of Homer, in which he declares himself to have surpassed Metrodorus of Lampsacus and Stesimbrotus of Thasos, seems to show that, like them, he belonged to the allegorical school of interpreters. The circumstance that nothing more is known of him may be adduced in confirmation of the argument that this truly Platonic little work is not a forgery of later times.
  ION
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Ion.
   Socrates: Welcome, Ion. Are you from your native city of Ephesus?
  ION: No, Socrates; but from Epidaurus, where I attended the festival of Asclepius.
   Socrates: And do the Epidaurians have contests of rhapsodes at the festival?
  --
  ION: I obtained the first prize of all, Socrates.
   Socrates: Well done; and I hope that you will do the same for us at the Pana thenaea.
  --
  ION: Very true, Socrates; interpretation has certainly been the most laborious part of my art; and I believe myself able to speak about Homer better than any man; and that neither Metrodorus of Lampsacus, nor Stesimbrotus of Thasos, nor Glaucon, nor any one else who ever was, had as good ideas about Homer as I have, or as many.
   Socrates: I am glad to hear you say so, Ion; I see that you will not refuse to acquaint me with them.
  ION: Certainly, Socrates; and you really ought to hear how exquisitely I render Homer. I think that the Homeridae should give me a golden crown.
   Socrates: I shall take an opportunity of hearing your embellishments of him at some other time. But just now I should like to ask you a question: Does your art extend to Hesiod and Archilochus, or to Homer only?
  --
  ION: I can interpret them equally well, Socrates, where they agree.
   Socrates: But what about matters in which they do not agree?for example, about divination, of which both Homer and Hesiod have something to say,
  --
  ION: Very true, Socrates.
   Socrates: And do not the other poets sing of the same?
  ION: Yes, Socrates; but not in the same way as Homer.
   Socrates: What, in a worse way?
  --
  ION: Why then, Socrates, do I lose attention and go to sleep and have absolutely no ideas of the least value, when any one speaks of any other poet; but when Homer is mentioned, I wake up at once and am all attention and have plenty to say?
   Socrates: The reason, my friend, is obvious. No one can fail to see that you speak of Homer without any art or knowledge. If you were able to speak of him by rules of art, you would have been able to speak of all other poets; for poetry is a whole.
  --
  ION: Yes, indeed, Socrates; I very much wish that you would: for I love to hear you wise men talk.
   Socrates: O that we were wise, Ion, and that you could truly call us so; but you rhapsodes and actors, and the poets whose verses you sing, are wise; whereas I am a common man, who only speak the truth. For consider what a very commonplace and trivial thing is this which I have saida thing which any man might say: that when a man has acquired a knowledge of a whole art, the enquiry into good and bad is one and the same. Let us consider this matter; is not the art of painting a whole?
  --
  ION: I cannot deny what you say, Socrates. Nevertheless I am conscious in my own self, and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man. But I do not speak equally well about otherstell me the reason of this.
   Socrates: I perceive, Ion; and I will proceed to explain to you what I imagine to be the reason of this. The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic versesand he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. And Tynnichus the Chalcidian affords a striking instance of what I am saying: he wrote nothing that any one would care to remember but the famous paean which is in every one's mouth, one of the finest poems ever written, simply an invention of the Muses, as he himself says. For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are severally possessed. Was not this the lesson which the God intended to teach when by the mouth of the worst of poets he sang the best of songs? Am I not right, Ion?
  ION: Yes, indeed, Socrates, I feel that you are; for your words touch my soul, and I am persuaded that good poets by a divine inspiration interpret the things of the Gods to us.
   Socrates: And you rhapsodists are the interpreters of the poets?
  --
  ION: That proof strikes home to me, Socrates. For I must frankly confess that at the tale of pity my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs.
   Socrates: Well, Ion, and what are we to say of a man who at a sacrifice or festival, when he is dressed in holiday attire, and has golden crowns upon his head, of which nobody has robbed him, appears weeping or panic-stricken in the presence of more than twenty thousand friendly faces, when there is no one despoiling or wronging him;is he in his right mind or is he not?
  ION: No indeed, Socrates, I must say that, strictly speaking, he is not in his right mind.
   Socrates: And are you aware that you produce similar effects on most of the spectators?
  --
  ION: That is good, Socrates; and yet I doubt whether you will ever have eloquence enough to persuade me that I praise Homer only when I am mad and possessed; and if you could hear me speak of him I am sure you would never think this to be the case.
   Socrates: I should like very much to hear you, but not until you have answered a question which I have to ask. On what part of Homer do you speak well?not surely about every part.
  ION: There is no part, Socrates, about which I do not speak well: of that I can assure you.
   Socrates: Surely not about things in Homer of which you have no knowledge?
  --
  ION: That is my opinion, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then he who has no knowledge of a particular art will have no right judgment of the sayings and doings of that art?
  --
  ION: Clearly, Socrates, the art of the fisherman.
   Socrates: Come now, suppose that you were to say to me: 'Since you, Socrates, are able to assign different passages in Homer to their corresponding arts, I wish that you would tell me what are the passages of which the excellence ought to be judged by the prophet and prophetic art'; and you will see how readily and truly I shall answer you. For there are many such passages, particularly in the Odyssee; as, for example, the passage in which Theoclymenus the prophet of the house of Melampus says to the suitors:
  'Wretched men! what is happening to you? Your heads and your faces and your limbs underneath are shrouded in night; and the voice of lamentation bursts forth, and your cheeks are wet with tears. And the vestibule is full, and the court is full, of ghosts descending into the darkness of Erebus, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist is spread abroad (Od.).'
  --
  ION: And you are quite right, Socrates, in saying so.
   Socrates: Yes, Ion, and you are right also. And as I have selected from the Iliad and Odyssee for you passages which describe the office of the prophet and the physician and the fisherman, do you, who know Homer so much better than I do, Ion, select for me passages which relate to the rhapsode and the rhapsode's art, and which the rhapsode ought to examine and judge of better than other men.
  ION: All passages, I should say, Socrates.
   Socrates: Not all, Ion, surely. Have you already forgotten what you were saying? A rhapsode ought to have a better memory.
  --
  ION: I should exclude certain things, Socrates.
   Socrates: You mean to say that you would exclude pretty much the subjects of the other arts. As he does not know all of them, which of them will he know?
  --
  ION: Certainly, Socrates.
   Socrates: And he who is a good general is also a good rhapsode?
  --
  ION: Far the best, Socrates.
   Socrates: And are you the best general, Ion?
  ION: To be sure, Socrates; and Homer was my master.
   Socrates: But then, Ion, what in the name of goodness can be the reason why you, who are the best of generals as well as the best of rhapsodes in all Hellas, go about as a rhapsode when you might be a general? Do you think that the Hellenes want a rhapsode with his golden crown, and do not want a general?
  ION: Why, Socrates, the reason is, that my countrymen, the Ephesians, are the servants and soldiers of Athens, and do not need a general; and you and Sparta are not likely to have me, for you think that you have enough generals of your own.
   Socrates: My good Ion, did you never hear of Apollodorus of Cyzicus?
  --
  ION: There is a great difference, Socrates, between the two alternatives; and inspiration is by far the nobler.
   Socrates: Then, Ion, I shall assume the nobler alternative; and attri bute to you in your praises of Homer inspiration, and not art.

Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
   Socrates and Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, resume, in explaining
   them, all the aspirations and all the glories of the ancient world; the
  --
   pay a ransom proportional to the sum of these errors: Socrates pays for
   Aneitus, and Jesus was obliged to suffer a torment whose terror was

Meno, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  This Dialogue begins abruptly with a question of Meno, who asks, 'whether virtue can be taught.' Socrates replies that he does not as yet know what virtue is, and has never known anyone who did. 'Then he cannot have met Gorgias when he was at Athens.' Yes, Socrates had met him, but he has a bad memory, and has forgotten what Gorgias said. Will Meno tell him his own notion, which is probably not very different from that of Gorgias? 'O yesnothing easier: there is the virtue of a man, of a woman, of an old man, and of a child; there is a virtue of every age and state of life, all of which may be easily described.'
   Socrates reminds Meno that this is only an enumeration of the virtues and not a definition of the notion which is common to them all. In a second attempt Meno defines virtue to be 'the power of command.' But to this, again, exceptions are taken. For there must be a virtue of those who obey, as well as of those who command; and the power of comm and must be justly or not unjustly exercised. Meno is very ready to admit that justice is virtue: 'Would you say virtue or a virtue, for there are other virtues, such as courage, temperance, and the like; just as round is a figure, and black and white are colours, and yet there are other figures and other colours. Let Meno take the examples of figure and colour, and try to define them.' Meno confesses his inability, and after a process of interrogation, in which Socrates explains to him the nature of a 'simile in multis,' Socrates himself defines figure as 'the accompaniment of colour.' But some one may object that he does not know the meaning of the word 'colour;' and if he is a candid friend, and not a mere disputant, Socrates is willing to furnish him with a simpler and more philosophical definition, into which no disputed word is allowed to intrude: 'Figure is the limit of form.' Meno imperiously insists that he must still have a definition of colour. Some raillery follows; and at length Socrates is induced to reply, 'that colour is the effluence of form, sensible, and in due proportion to the sight.' This definition is exactly suited to the taste of Meno, who welcomes the familiar language of Gorgias and Empedocles. Socrates is of opinion that the more abstract or dialectical definition of figure is far better.
  Now that Meno has been made to understand the nature of a general definition, he answers in the spirit of a Greek gentleman, and in the words of a poet, 'that virtue is to delight in things honourable, and to have the power of getting them.' This is a nearer approximation than he has yet made to a complete definition, and, regarded as a piece of proverbial or popular morality, is not far from the truth. But the objection is urged, 'that the honourable is the good,' and as every one equally desires the good, the point of the definition is contained in the words, 'the power of getting them.' 'And they must be got justly or with justice.' The definition will then stand thus: 'Virtue is the power of getting good with justice.' But justice is a part of virtue, and therefore virtue is the getting of good with a part of virtue. The definition repeats the word defined.
  Meno complains that the conversation of Socrates has the effect of a torpedo's shock upon him. When he talks with other persons he has plenty to say about virtue; in the presence of Socrates, his thoughts desert him. Socrates replies that he is only the cause of perplexity in others, because he is himself perplexed. He proposes to continue the enquiry. But how, asks Meno, can he enquire either into what he knows or into what he does not know? This is a sophistical puzzle, which, as Socrates remarks, saves a great deal of trouble to him who accepts it. But the puzzle has a real difficulty latent under it, to which Socrates will endeavour to find a reply. The difficulty is the origin of knowledge:
  He has heard from priests and priestesses, and from the poet Pindar, of an immortal soul which is born again and again in successive periods of existence, returning into this world when she has paid the penalty of ancient crime, and, having wandered over all places of the upper and under world, and seen and known all things at one time or other, is by association out of one thing capable of recovering all. For nature is of one kindred; and every soul has a seed or germ which may be developed into all knowledge. The existence of this latent knowledge is further proved by the interrogation of one of Meno's slaves, who, in the skilful hands of Socrates, is made to acknowledge some elementary relations of geometrical figures. The theorem that the square of the diagonal is double the square of the sidethat famous discovery of primitive mathematics, in honour of which the legendary Pythagoras is said to have sacrificed a hecatombis elicited from him. The first step in the process of teaching has made him conscious of his own ignorance. He has had the 'torpedo's shock' given him, and is the better for the operation. But whence had the uneducated man this knowledge? He had never learnt geometry in this world; nor was it born with him; he must therefore have had it when he was not a man. And as he always either was or was not a man, he must have always had it. (Compare Phaedo.)
  After Socrates has given this specimen of the true nature of teaching, the original question of the teachableness of virtue is renewed. Again he professes a desire to know 'what virtue is' first. But he is willing to argue the question, as mathematicians say, under an hypothesis. He will assume that if virtue is knowledge, then virtue can be taught. (This was the stage of the argument at which the Protagoras concluded.)
   Socrates has no difficulty in showing that virtue is a good, and that goods, whether of body or mind, must be under the direction of knowledge. Upon the assumption just made, then, virtue is teachable. But where are the teachers? There are none to be found. This is extremely discouraging. Virtue is no sooner discovered to be teachable, than the discovery follows that it is not taught. Virtue, therefore, is and is not teachable.
  In this dilemma an appeal is made to Anytus, a respectable and well-to-do citizen of the old school, and a family friend of Meno, who happens to be present. He is asked 'whether Meno shall go to the Sophists and be taught.' The suggestion throws him into a rage. 'To whom, then, shall Meno go?' asks Socrates. To any Athenian gentlemanto the great Athenian statesmen of past times. Socrates replies here, as elsewhere (Laches, Prot.), that Themistocles, Pericles, and other great men, had sons to whom they would surely, if they could have done so, have imparted their own political wisdom; but no one ever heard that these sons of theirs were remarkable for anything except riding and wrestling and similar accomplishments. Anytus is angry at the imputation which is cast on his favourite statesmen, and on a class to which he supposes himself to belong; he breaks off with a significant hint. The mention of another opportunity of talking with him, and the suggestion that Meno may do the Athenian people a service by pacifying him, are evident allusions to the trial of Socrates.
   Socrates returns to the consideration of the question 'whether virtue is teachable,' which was denied on the ground that there are no teachers of it: (for the Sophists are bad teachers, and the rest of the world do not profess to teach). But there is another point which we failed to observe, and in which Gorgias has never instructed Meno, nor Prodicus Socrates. This is the nature of right opinion. For virtue may be under the guidance of right opinion as well as of knowledge; and right opinion is for practical purposes as good as knowledge, but is incapable of being taught, and is also liable, like the images of Daedalus, to 'walk off,' because not bound by the tie of the cause. This is the sort of instinct which is possessed by statesmen, who are not wise or knowing persons, but only inspired or divine. The higher virtue, which is identical with knowledge, is an ideal only. If the statesman had this knowledge, and could teach what he knew, he would be like Tiresias in the world below,'he alone has wisdom, but the rest flit like shadows.'
  This Dialogue is an attempt to answer the question, Can virtue be taught? No one would either ask or answer such a question in modern times. But in the age of Socrates it was only by an effort that the mind could rise to a general notion of virtue as distinct from the particular virtues of courage, liberality, and the like. And when a hazy conception of this ideal was attained, it was only by a further effort that the question of the teachableness of virtue could be resolved.
  The answer which is given by Plato is paradoxical enough, and seems rather intended to stimulate than to satisfy enquiry. Virtue is knowledge, and therefore virtue can be taught. But virtue is not taught, and therefore in this higher and ideal sense there is no virtue and no knowledge. The teaching of the Sophists is confessedly inadequate, and Meno, who is their pupil, is ignorant of the very nature of general terms. He can only produce out of their armoury the sophism, 'that you can neither enquire into what you know nor into what you do not know;' to which Socrates replies by his theory of reminiscence.
  To the doctrine that virtue is knowledge, Plato has been constantly tending in the previous Dialogues. But the new truth is no sooner found than it vanishes away. 'If there is knowledge, there must be teachers; and where are the teachers?' There is no knowledge in the higher sense of systematic, connected, reasoned knowledge, such as may one day be attained, and such as Plato himself seems to see in some far off vision of a single science. And there are no teachers in the higher sense of the word; that is to say, no real teachers who will arouse the spirit of enquiry in their pupils, and not merely instruct them in rhetoric or impart to them ready-made information for a fee of 'one' or of 'fifty drachms.' Plato is desirous of deepening the notion of education, and therefore he asserts the paradox that there are no educators. This paradox, though different in form, is not really different from the remark which is often made in modern times by those who would depreciate either the methods of education commonly employed, or the standard attainedthat 'there is no true education among us.'
  --
  Also here, as in the Ion and Phaedrus, Plato appears to acknowledge an unreasoning element in the higher nature of man. The philosopher only has knowledge, and yet the statesman and the poet are inspired. There may be a sort of irony in regarding in this way the gifts of genius. But there is no reason to suppose that he is deriding them, any more than he is deriding the phenomena of love or of enthusiasm in the Symposium, or of oracles in the Apology, or of divine intimations when he is speaking of the daemonium of Socrates. He recognizes the lower form of right opinion, as well as the higher one of science, in the spirit of one who desires to include in his philosophy every aspect of human life; just as he recognizes the existence of popular opinion as a fact, and the Sophists as the expression of it.
  This Dialogue contains the first intimation of the doctrine of reminiscence and of the immortality of the soul. The proof is very slight, even slighter than in the Phaedo and Republic. Because men had abstract ideas in a previous state, they must have always had them, and their souls therefore must have always existed. For they must always have been either men or not men. The fallacy of the latter words is transparent. And Socrates himself appears to be conscious of their weakness; for he adds immediately afterwards, 'I have said some things of which I am not altogether confident.' (Compare Phaedo.) It may be observed, however, that the fanciful notion of pre-existence is combined with a true but partial view of the origin and unity of knowledge, and of the association of ideas. Knowledge is prior to any particular knowledge, and exists not in the previous state of the individual, but of the race. It is potential, not actual, and can only be appropriated by strenuous exertion.
  The idealism of Plato is here presented in a less developed form than in the Phaedo and Phaedrus. Nothing is said of the pre-existence of ideas of justice, temperance, and the like. Nor is Socrates positive of anything but the duty of enquiry. The doctrine of reminiscence too is explained more in accordance with fact and experience as arising out of the affinities of nature (ate tes thuseos oles suggenous ouses). Modern philosophy says that all things in nature are dependent on one another; the ancient philosopher had the same truth latent in his mind when he affirmed that out of one thing all the rest may be recovered. The subjective was converted by him into an objective; the mental phenomenon of the association of ideas (compare Phaedo) became a real chain of existences. The germs of two valuable principles of education may also be gathered from the 'words of priests and priestesses:' (1) that true knowledge is a knowledge of causes (compare Aristotle's theory of episteme); and (2) that the process of learning consists not in what is brought to the learner, but in what is drawn out of him.
  Some lesser points of the dialogue may be noted, such as (1) the acute observation that Meno prefers the familiar definition, which is embellished with poetical language, to the better and truer one; or (2) the shrewd reflection, which may admit of an application to modern as well as to ancient teachers, that the Sophists having made large fortunes; this must surely be a criterion of their powers of teaching, for that no man could get a living by shoemaking who was not a good shoemaker; or (3) the remark conveyed, almost in a word, that the verbal sceptic is saved the labour of thought and enquiry (ouden dei to toiouto zeteseos). Characteristic also of the temper of the Socratic enquiry is, (4) the proposal to discuss the teachableness of virtue under an hypothesis, after the manner of the mathematicians; and (5) the repetition of the favourite doctrine which occurs so frequently in the earlier and more Socratic Dialogues, and gives a colour to all of themthat mankind only desire evil through ignorance; (6) the experiment of eliciting from the slave-boy the mathematical truth which is latent in him, and (7) the remark that he is all the better for knowing his ignorance.
  The character of Meno, like that of Critias, has no relation to the actual circumstances of his life. Plato is silent about his treachery to the ten thousand Greeks, which Xenophon has recorded, as he is also silent about the crimes of Critias. He is a Thessalian Alcibiades, rich and luxuriousa spoilt child of fortune, and is described as the hereditary friend of the great king. Like Alcibiades he is inspired with an ardent desire of knowledge, and is equally willing to learn of Socrates and of the Sophists. He may be regarded as standing in the same relation to Gorgias as Hippocrates in the Protagoras to the other great Sophist. He is the sophisticated youth on whom Socrates tries his cross-examining powers, just as in the Charmides, the Lysis, and the Euthydemus, ingenuous boyhood is made the subject of a similar experiment. He is treated by Socrates in a half-playful manner suited to his character; at the same time he appears not quite to understand the process to which he is being subjected. For he is exhibited as ignorant of the very elements of dialectics, in which the Sophists have failed to instruct their disciple. His definition of virtue as 'the power and desire of attaining things honourable,' like the first definition of justice in the Republic, is taken from a poet. His answers have a sophistical ring, and at the same time show the sophistical incapacity to grasp a general notion.
  Anytus is the type of the narrow-minded man of the world, who is indignant at innovation, and equally detests the popular teacher and the true philosopher. He seems, like Aristophanes, to regard the new opinions, whether of Socrates or the Sophists, as fatal to Athenian greatness. He is of the same class as Callicles in the Gorgias, but of a different variety; the immoral and sophistical doctrines of Callicles are not attributed to him. The moderation with which he is described is remarkable, if he be the accuser of Socrates, as is apparently indicated by his parting words. Perhaps Plato may have been desirous of showing that the accusation of Socrates was not to be attri buted to badness or malevolence, but rather to a tendency in men's minds. Or he may have been regardless of the historical truth of the characters of his dialogue, as in the case of Meno and Critias. Like Chaerephon (Apol.) the real Anytus was a democrat, and had joined Thrasybulus in the conflict with the thirty.
  The Protagoras arrived at a sort of hypothetical conclusion, that if 'virtue is knowledge, it can be taught.' In the Euthydemus, Socrates himself offered an example of the manner in which the true teacher may draw out the mind of youth; this was in contrast to the quibbling follies of the Sophists. In the Meno the subject is more developed; the foundations of the enquiry are laid deeper, and the nature of knowledge is more distinctly explained. There is a progression by antagonism of two opposite aspects of philosophy. But at the moment when we approach nearest, the truth doubles upon us and passes out of our reach. We seem to find that the ideal of knowledge is irreconcilable with experience. In human life there is indeed the profession of knowledge, but right opinion is our actual guide. There is another sort of progress from the general notions of Socrates, who asked simply, 'what is friendship?' 'what is temperance?' 'what is courage?' as in the Lysis, Charmides, Laches, to the transcendentalism of Plato, who, in the second stage of his philosophy, sought to find the nature of knowledge in a prior and future state of existence.
  The difficulty in framing general notions which has appeared in this and in all the previous Dialogues recurs in the Gorgias and Theaetetus as well as in the Republic. In the Gorgias too the statesmen reappear, but in stronger opposition to the philosopher. They are no longer allowed to have a divine insight, but, though acknowledged to have been clever men and good speakers, are denounced as 'blind leaders of the blind.' The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also carried further, being made the foundation not only of a theory of knowledge, but of a doctrine of rewards and punishments. In the Republic the relation of knowledge to virtue is described in a manner more consistent with modern distinctions. The existence of the virtues without the possession of knowledge in the higher or philosophical sense is admitted to be possible. Right opinion is again introduced in the Theaetetus as an account of knowledge, but is rejected on the ground that it is irrational (as here, because it is not bound by the tie of the cause), and also because the conception of false opinion is given up as hopeless. The doctrines of Plato are necessarily different at different times of his life, as new distinctions are realized, or new stages of thought attained by him. We are not therefore justified, in order to take away the appearance of inconsistency, in attri buting to him hidden meanings or remote allusions.
  There are no external criteria by which we can determine the date of the Meno. There is no reason to suppose that any of the Dialogues of Plato were written before the death of Socrates; the Meno, which appears to be one of the earliest of them, is proved to have been of a later date by the allusion of Anytus.
  We cannot argue that Plato was more likely to have written, as he has done, of Meno before than after his miserable death; for we have already seen, in the examples of Charmides and Critias, that the characters in Plato are very far from resembling the same characters in history. The repulsive picture which is given of him in the Anabasis of Xenophon, where he also appears as the friend of Aristippus 'and a fair youth having lovers,' has no other trait of likeness to the Meno of Plato.
  The place of the Meno in the series is doubtfully indicated by internal evidence. The main character of the Dialogue is Socrates; but to the 'general definitions' of Socrates is added the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. The problems of virtue and knowledge have been discussed in the Lysis, Laches, Charmides, and Protagoras; the puzzle about knowing and learning has already appeared in the Euthydemus. The doctrines of immortality and pre-existence are carried further in the Phaedrus and Phaedo; the distinction between opinion and knowledge is more fully developed in the Theaetetus. The lessons of Prodicus, whom he facetiously calls his master, are still running in the mind of Socrates. Unlike the later Platonic Dialogues, the Meno arrives at no conclusion. Hence we are led to place the Dialogue at some point of time later than the Protagoras, and earlier than the Phaedrus and Gorgias. The place which is assigned to it in this work is due mainly to the desire to bring together in a single volume all the Dialogues which contain allusions to the trial and death of Socrates.
  ON THE IDEAS OF PLATO.
  --
  The Meno goes back to a former state of existence, in which men did and suffered good and evil, and received the reward or punishment of them until their sin was purged away and they were allowed to return to earth. This is a tradition of the olden time, to which priests and poets bear witness. The souls of men returning to earth bring back a latent memory of ideas, which were known to them in a former state. The recollection is awakened into life and consciousness by the sight of the things which resemble them on earth. The soul evidently possesses such innate ideas before she has had time to acquire them. This is proved by an experiment tried on one of Meno's slaves, from whom Socrates elicits truths of arithmetic and geometry, which he had never learned in this world. He must therefore have brought them with him from another.
  The notion of a previous state of existence is found in the verses of Empedocles and in the fragments of Heracleitus. It was the natural answer to two questions, 'Whence came the soul? What is the origin of evil?' and prevailed far and wide in the east. It found its way into Hellas probably through the medium of Orphic and Pythagorean rites and mysteries. It was easier to think of a former than of a future life, because such a life has really existed for the race though not for the individual, and all men come into the world, if not 'trailing clouds of glory,' at any rate able to enter into the inheritance of the past. In the Phaedrus, as well as in the Meno, it is this former rather than a future life on which Plato is disposed to dwell. There the Gods, and men following in their train, go forth to contemplate the heavens, and are borne round in the revolutions of them. There they see the divine forms of justice, temperance, and the like, in their unchangeable beauty, but not without an effort more than human. The soul of man is likened to a charioteer and two steeds, one mortal, the other immortal. The charioteer and the mortal steed are in fierce conflict; at length the animal principle is finally overpowered, though not extinguished, by the combined energies of the passionate and rational elements. This is one of those passages in Plato which, partaking both of a philosophical and poetical character, is necessarily indistinct and inconsistent. The magnificent figure under which the nature of the soul is described has not much to do with the popular doctrine of the ideas. Yet there is one little trait in the description which shows that they are present to Plato's mind, namely, the remark that the soul, which had seen truths in the form of the universal, cannot again return to the nature of an animal.
  In the Phaedo, as in the Meno, the origin of ideas is sought for in a previous state of existence. There was no time when they could have been acquired in this life, and therefore they must have been recovered from another. The process of recovery is no other than the ordinary law of association, by which in daily life the sight of one thing or person recalls another to our minds, and by which in scientific enquiry from any part of knowledge we may be led on to infer the whole. It is also argued that ideas, or rather ideals, must be derived from a previous state of existence because they are more perfect than the sensible forms of them which are given by experience. But in the Phaedo the doctrine of ideas is subordinate to the proof of the immortality of the soul. 'If the soul existed in a previous state, then it will exist in a future state, for a law of alternation pervades all things.' And, 'If the ideas exist, then the soul exists; if not, not.' It is to be observed, both in the Meno and the Phaedo, that Socrates expresses himself with diffidence. He speaks in the Phaedo of the words with which he has comforted himself and his friends, and will not be too confident that the description which he has given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true, but he 'ventures to think that something of the kind is true.' And in the Meno, after dwelling upon the immortality of the soul, he adds, 'Of some things which I have said I am not altogether confident' (compare Apology; Gorgias). From this class of uncertainties he exempts the difference between truth and appearance, of which he is absolutely convinced.
  In the Republic the ideas are spoken of in two ways, which though not contradictory are different. In the tenth book they are represented as the genera or general ideas under which individuals having a common name are contained. For example, there is the bed which the carpenter makes, the picture of the bed which is drawn by the painter, the bed existing in nature of which God is the author. Of the latter all visible beds are only the shadows or reflections. This and similar illustrations or explanations are put forth, not for their own sake, or as an exposition of Plato's theory of ideas, but with a view of showing that poetry and the mimetic arts are concerned with an inferior part of the soul and a lower kind of knowledge. On the other hand, in the 6th and 7th books of the Republic we reach the highest and most perfect conception, which Plato is able to attain, of the nature of knowledge. The ideas are now finally seen to be one as well as many, causes as well as ideas, and to have a unity which is the idea of good and the cause of all the rest. They seem, however, to have lost their first aspect of universals under which individuals are contained, and to have been converted into forms of another kind, which are inconsistently regarded from the one side as images or ideals of justice, temperance, holiness and the like; from the other as hypotheses, or mathematical truths or principles.
  --
  Passing on to the Parmenides, we find in that dialogue not an exposition or defence of the doctrine of ideas, but an assault upon them, which is put into the mouth of the veteran Parmenides, and might be ascribed to Aristotle himself, or to one of his disciples. The doctrine which is assailed takes two or three forms, but fails in any of them to escape the dialectical difficulties which are urged against it. It is admitted that there are ideas of all things, but the manner in which individuals partake of them, whether of the whole or of the part, and in which they become like them, or how ideas can be either within or without the sphere of human knowledge, or how the human and divine can have any relation to each other, is held to be incapable of explanation. And yet, if there are no universal ideas, what becomes of philosophy? (Parmenides.) In the Sophist the theory of ideas is spoken of as a doctrine held not by Plato, but by another sect of philosophers, called 'the Friends of Ideas,' probably the Megarians, who were very distinct from him, if not opposed to him (Sophist). Nor in what may be termed Plato's abridgement of the history of philosophy (Soph.), is any mention made such as we find in the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, of the derivation of such a theory or of any part of it from the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the Heracleiteans, or even from Socrates. In the Philebus, probably one of the latest of the Platonic Dialogues, the conception of a personal or semi-personal deity expressed under the figure of mind, the king of all, who is also the cause, is retained. The one and many of the Phaedrus and Theaetetus is still working in the mind of Plato, and the correlation of ideas, not of 'all with all,' but of 'some with some,' is asserted and explained. But they are spoken of in a different manner, and are not supposed to be recovered from a former state of existence. The metaphysical conception of truth passes into a psychological one, which is continued in the Laws, and is the final form of the Platonic philosophy, so far as can be gathered from his own writings (see especially Laws). In the Laws he harps once more on the old string, and returns to general notions:these he acknowledges to be many, and yet he insists that they are also one. The guardian must be made to recognize the truth, for which he has contended long ago in the Protagoras, that the virtues are four, but they are also in some sense one (Laws; compare Protagoras).
  So various, and if regarded on the surface only, inconsistent, are the statements of Plato respecting the doctrine of ideas. If we attempted to harmonize or to combine them, we should make out of them, not a system, but the caricature of a system. They are the ever-varying expression of Plato's Idealism. The terms used in them are in their substance and general meaning the same, although they seem to be different. They pass from the subject to the object, from earth (diesseits) to heaven (jenseits) without regard to the gulf which later theology and philosophy have made between them. They are also intended to supplement or explain each other. They relate to a subject of which Plato himself would have said that 'he was not confident of the precise form of his own statements, but was strong in the belief that something of the kind was true.' It is the spirit, not the letter, in which they agreethe spirit which places the divine above the human, the spiritual above the material, the one above the many, the mind before the body.
  --
  Not very different from Descartes in his relation to ancient philosophy is his successor Spinoza, who lived in the following generation. The system of Spinoza is less personal and also less dualistic than that of Descartes. In this respect the difference between them is like that between Xenophanes and Parmenides. The teaching of Spinoza might be described generally as the Jewish religion reduced to an abstraction and taking the form of the Eleatic philosophy. Like Parmenides, he is overpowered and intoxicated with the idea of Being or God. The greatness of both philosophies consists in the immensity of a thought which excludes all other thoughts; their weakness is the necessary separation of this thought from actual existence and from practical life. In neither of them is there any clear opposition between the inward and outward world. The substance of Spinoza has two attri butes, which alone are cognizable by man, thought and extension; these are in extreme opposition to one another, and also in inseparable identity. They may be regarded as the two aspects or expressions under which God or substance is unfolded to man. Here a step is made beyond the limits of the Eleatic philosophy. The famous theorem of Spinoza, 'Omnis determinatio est negatio,' is already contained in the 'negation is relation' of Plato's Sophist. The grand description of the philosopher in Republic VI, as the spectator of all time and all existence, may be paralleled with another famous expression of Spinoza, 'Contemplatio rerum sub specie eternitatis.' According to Spinoza finite objects are unreal, for they are conditioned by what is alien to them, and by one another. Human beings are included in the number of them. Hence there is no reality in human action and no place for right and wrong. Individuality is accident. The boasted freedom of the will is only a consciousness of necessity. Truth, he says, is the direction of the reason towards the infinite, in which all things repose; and herein lies the secret of man's well-being. In the exaltation of the reason or intellect, in the denial of the voluntariness of evil (Timaeus; Laws) Spinoza approaches nearer to Plato than in his conception of an infinite substance. As Socrates said that virtue is knowledge, so Spinoza would have maintained that knowledge alone is good, and what contri butes to knowledge useful. Both are equally far from any real experience or observation of nature. And the same difficulty is found in both when we seek to apply their ideas to life and practice. There is a gulf fixed between the infinite substance and finite objects or individuals of Spinoza, just as there is between the ideas of Plato and the world of sense.
  Removed from Spinoza by less than a generation is the philosopher Leibnitz, who after deepening and intensifying the opposition between mind and matter, reunites them by his preconcerted harmony (compare again Phaedrus). To him all the particles of matter are living beings which reflect on one another, and in the least of them the whole is contained. Here we catch a reminiscence both of the omoiomere, or similar particles of Anaxagoras, and of the world-animal of the Timaeus.
  --
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Meno, Socrates, A Slave of Meno (Boy), Anytus.
  MENO: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor by practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?
   Socrates: O Meno, there was a time when the Thessalians were famous among the other Hellenes only for their riches and their riding; but now, if I am not mistaken, they are equally famous for their wisdom, especially at Larisa, which is the native city of your friend Aristippus. And this is Gorgias' doing; for when he came there, the flower of the Aleuadae, among them your admirer Aristippus, and the other chiefs of the Thessalians, fell in love with his wisdom. And he has taught you the habit of answering questions in a grand and bold style, which becomes those who know, and is the style in which he himself answers all comers; and any Hellene who likes may ask him anything. How different is our lot! my dear Meno. Here at Athens there is a dearth of the commodity, and all wisdom seems to have emigrated from us to you. I am certain that if you were to ask any Athenian whether virtue was natural or acquired, he would laugh in your face, and say: 'Stranger, you have far too good an opinion of me, if you think that I can answer your question. For I literally do not know what virtue is, and much less whether it is acquired by teaching or not.' And I myself, Meno, living as I do in this region of poverty, am as poor as the rest of the world; and I confess with shame that I know literally nothing about virtue; and when I do not know the 'quid' of anything how can I know the 'quale'? How, if I knew nothing at all of Meno, could I tell if he was fair, or the opposite of fair; rich and noble, or the reverse of rich and noble? Do you think that I could?
  MENO: No, indeed. But are you in earnest, Socrates, in saying that you do not know what virtue is? And am I to carry back this report of you to Thessaly?
   Socrates: Not only that, my dear boy, but you may say further that I have never known of any one else who did, in my judgment.
  --
  MENO: There will be no difficulty, Socrates, in answering your question. Let us take first the virtue of a manhe should know how to administer the state, and in the administration of it to benefit his friends and harm his enemies; and he must also be careful not to suffer harm himself. A woman's virtue, if you wish to know about that, may also be easily described: her duty is to order her house, and keep what is indoors, and obey her husband. Every age, every condition of life, young or old, male or female, bond or free, has a different virtue: there are virtues numberless, and no lack of definitions of them; for virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do. And the same may be said of vice, Socrates (Compare Arist. Pol.).
   Socrates: How fortunate I am, Meno! When I ask you for one virtue, you present me with a swarm of them (Compare Theaet.), which are in your keeping. Suppose that I carry on the figure of the swarm, and ask of you, What is the nature of the bee? and you answer that there are many kinds of bees, and I reply: But do bees differ as bees, because there are many and different kinds of them; or are they not rather to be distinguished by some other quality, as for example beauty, size, or shape? How would you answer me?
  --
  MENO: I cannot help feeling, Socrates, that this case is different from the others.
   Socrates: But why? Were you not saying that the virtue of a man was to order a state, and the virtue of a woman was to order a house?
  --
  MENO: I think not, Socrates.
   Socrates: No, indeed; there would be small reason in that. Yet once more, fair friend; according to you, virtue is 'the power of governing;' but do you not add 'justly and not unjustly'?
  MENO: Yes, Socrates; I agree there; for justice is virtue.
   Socrates: Would you say 'virtue,' Meno, or 'a virtue'?
  --
  MENO: Why, Socrates, even now I am not able to follow you in the attempt to get at one common notion of virtue as of other things.
   Socrates: No wonder; but I will try to get nearer if I can, for you know that all things have a common notion. Suppose now that some one asked you the question which I asked before: Meno, he would say, what is figure? And if you answered 'roundness,' he would reply to you, in my way of speaking, by asking whether you would say that roundness is 'figure' or 'a figure;' and you would answer 'a figure.'
  --
  MENO: I would rather that you should answer, Socrates.
   Socrates: Shall I indulge you?
  --
  MENO: But, Socrates, it is such a simple answer.
   Socrates: Why simple?
  --
  MENO: And now, Socrates, what is colour?
   Socrates: You are outrageous, Meno, in thus plaguing a poor old man to give you an answer, when you will not take the trouble of remembering what is Gorgias' definition of virtue.
  MENO: When you have told me what I ask, I will tell you, Socrates.
   Socrates: A man who was blindfolded has only to hear you talking, and he would know that you are a fair creature and have still many lovers.
  --
  MENO: That, Socrates, appears to me to be an admirable answer.
   Socrates: Why, yes, because it happens to be one which you have been in the habit of hearing: and your wit will have discovered, I suspect, that you may explain in the same way the nature of sound and smell, and of many other similar phenomena.
  --
  MENO: But I will stay, Socrates, if you will give me many such answers.
   Socrates: Well then, for my own sake as well as for yours, I will do my very best; but I am afraid that I shall not be able to give you very many as good: and now, in your turn, you are to fulfil your promise, and tell me what virtue is in the universal; and do not make a singular into a plural, as the facetious say of those who break a thing, but deliver virtue to me whole and sound, and not broken into a number of pieces: I have given you the pattern.
  MENO: Well then, Socrates, virtue, as I take it, is when he, who desires the honourable, is able to provide it for himself; so the poet says, and I say too
  'Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.'
  --
  MENO: I should say not, Socrates.
   Socrates: But if there is no one who desires to be miserable, there is no one, Meno, who desires evil; for what is misery but the desire and possession of evil?
  MENO: That appears to be the truth, Socrates, and I admit that nobody desires evil.
   Socrates: And yet, were you not saying just now that virtue is the desire and power of attaining good?
  --
  MENO: I entirely approve, Socrates, of the manner in which you now view this matter.
   Socrates: Then let us see whether what you say is true from another point of view; for very likely you may be right:You affirm virtue to be the power of attaining goods?
  --
  MENO: Not virtue, Socrates, but vice.
   Socrates: Then justice or temperance or holiness, or some other part of virtue, as would appear, must accompany the acquisition, and without them the mere acquisition of good will not be virtue.
  --
  MENO: Why do you say that, Socrates?
   Socrates: Why, because I asked you to deliver virtue into my hands whole and unbroken, and I gave you a pattern according to which you were to frame your answer; and you have forgotten already, and tell me that virtue is the power of attaining good justly, or with justice; and justice you acknowledge to be a part of virtue.
  --
  MENO: Yes, Socrates; and we were quite right in doing so.
   Socrates: But then, my friend, do not suppose that we can explain to any one the nature of virtue as a whole through some unexplained portion of virtue, or anything at all in that fashion; we should only have to ask over again the old question, What is virtue? Am I not right?
  --
  MENO: O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits' end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many personsand very good ones they were, as I thoughtat this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.
   Socrates: You are a rogue, Meno, and had all but caught me.
  MENO: What do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: I can tell why you made a simile about me.
  --
  MENO: And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?
   Socrates: I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that a man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire (Compare Aristot. Post. Anal.).
  MENO: Well, Socrates, and is not the argument sound?
   Socrates: I think not.
  --
  MENO: Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can you teach me how this is?
   Socrates: I told you, Meno, just now that you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you, when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection; and thus you imagine that you will involve me in a contradiction.
  MENO: Indeed, Socrates, I protest that I had no such intention. I only asked the question from habit; but if you can prove to me that what you say is true, I wish that you would.
   Socrates: It will be no easy matter, but I will try to please you to the utmost of my power. Suppose that you call one of your numerous attendants, that I may demonstrate on him.
  --
  BOY: Four, Socrates.
   Socrates: And might there not be another square twice as large as this, and having like this the lines equal?
  --
  BOY: Clearly, Socrates, it will be double.
   Socrates: Do you observe, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking him questions; and now he fancies that he knows how long a line is necessary in order to produce a figure of eight square feet; does he not?
  --
  BOY: Indeed, Socrates, I do not know.
   Socrates: Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in his power of recollection? He did not know at first, and he does not know now, what is the side of a figure of eight feet: but then he thought that he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty; now he has a difficulty, and neither knows nor fancies that he knows.
  --
  MENO: I think not, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then he was the better for the torpedo's touch?
  --
  BOY: Certainly, Socrates.
   Socrates: What do you say of him, Meno? Were not all these answers given out of his own head?
  --
  MENO: The fact, Socrates, is undeniable.
   Socrates: But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this life, then he must have had and learned it at some other time?
  --
  MENO: There again, Socrates, your words seem to me excellent.
   Socrates: Then, as we are agreed that a man should enquire about that which he does not know, shall you and I make an effort to enquire together into the nature of virtue?
  MENO: By all means, Socrates. And yet I would much rather return to my original question, Whether in seeking to acquire virtue we should regard it as a thing to be taught, or as a gift of nature, or as coming to men in some other way?
   Socrates: Had I the comm and of you as well as of myself, Meno, I would not have enquired whether virtue is given by instruction or not, until we had first ascertained 'what it is.' But as you think only of controlling me who am your slave, and never of controlling yourself,such being your notion of freedom, I must yield to you, for you are irresistible. And therefore I have now to enquire into the qualities of a thing of which I do not as yet know the nature. At any rate, will you condescend a little, and allow the question 'Whether virtue is given by instruction, or in any other way,' to be argued upon hypothesis? As the geometrician, when he is asked whether a certain triangle is capable being inscribed in a certain circle (Or, whether a certain area is capable of being inscribed as a triangle in a certain circle.), will reply: 'I cannot tell you as yet; but I will offer a hypothesis which may assist us in forming a conclusion: If the figure be such that when you have produced a given side of it (Or, when you apply it to the given line, i.e. the diameter of the circle (autou).), the given area of the triangle falls short by an area corresponding to the part produced (Or, similar to the area so applied.), then one consequence follows, and if this is impossible then some other; and therefore I wish to assume a hypothesis before I tell you whether this triangle is capable of being inscribed in the circle':that is a geometrical hypothesis. And we too, as we know not the nature and qualities of virtue, must ask, whether virtue is or is not taught, under a hypothesis: as thus, if virtue is of such a class of mental goods, will it be taught or not? Let the first hypothesis be that virtue is or is not knowledge,in that case will it be taught or not? or, as we were just now saying, 'remembered'? For there is no use in disputing about the name. But is virtue taught or not? or rather, does not every one see that knowledge alone is taught?
  --
  MENO: I think that what you are saying, Socrates, is very true.
   Socrates: But if this is true, then the good are not by nature good?
  --
  MENO: Yes, Socrates, that would have been the right way.
   Socrates: But if the good are not by nature good, are they made good by instruction?
  MENO: There appears to be no other alternative, Socrates. On the supposition that virtue is knowledge, there can be no doubt that virtue is taught.
   Socrates: Yes, indeed; but what if the supposition is erroneous?
  --
  ANYTUS: Whom do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: You surely know, do you not, Anytus, that these are the people whom mankind call Sophists?
  ANYTUS: By Heracles, Socrates, forbear! I only hope that no friend or kinsman or acquaintance of mine, whether citizen or stranger, will ever be so mad as to allow himself to be corrupted by them; for they are a manifest pest and corrupting influence to those who have to do with them.
   Socrates: What, Anytus? Of all the people who profess that they know how to do men good, do you mean to say that these are the only ones who not only do them no good, but positively corrupt those who are entrusted to them, and in return for this disservice have the face to demand money? Indeed, I cannot believe you; for I know of a single man, Protagoras, who made more out of his craft than the illustrious Pheidias, who created such noble works, or any ten other statuaries. How could that be? A mender of old shoes, or patcher up of clothes, who made the shoes or clothes worse than he received them, could not have remained thirty days undetected, and would very soon have starved; whereas during more than forty years, Protagoras was corrupting all Hellas, and sending his disciples from him worse than he received them, and he was never found out. For, if I am not mistaken, he was about seventy years old at his death, forty of which were spent in the practice of his profession; and during all that time he had a good reputation, which to this day he retains: and not only Protagoras, but many others are well spoken of; some who lived before him, and others who are still living. Now, when you say that they deceived and corrupted the youth, are they to be supposed to have corrupted them consciously or unconsciously? Can those who were deemed by many to be the wisest men of Hellas have been out of their minds?
  ANYTUS: Out of their minds! No, Socrates; the young men who gave their money to them were out of their minds, and their relations and guardians who entrusted their youth to the care of these men were still more out of their minds, and most of all, the cities who allowed them to come in, and did not drive them out, citizen and stranger alike.
   Socrates: Has any of the Sophists wronged you, Anytus? What makes you so angry with them?
  --
  ANYTUS: Socrates, I think that you are too ready to speak evil of men: and, if you will take my advice, I would recommend you to be careful. Perhaps there is no city in which it is not easier to do men harm than to do them good, and this is certainly the case at Athens, as I believe that you know.
   Socrates: O Meno, think that Anytus is in a rage. And he may well be in a rage, for he thinks, in the first place, that I am defaming these gentlemen; and in the second place, he is of opinion that he is one of them himself. But some day he will know what is the meaning of defamation, and if he ever does, he will forgive me. Meanwhile I will return to you, Meno; for I suppose that there are gentlemen in your region too?
  --
  MENO: No indeed, Socrates, they are anything but agreed; you may hear them saying at one time that virtue can be taught, and then again the reverse.
   Socrates: Can we call those teachers who do not acknowledge the possibility of their own vocation?
  MENO: I think not, Socrates.
   Socrates: And what do you think of these Sophists, who are the only professors? Do they seem to you to be teachers of virtue?
  MENO: I often wonder, Socrates, that Gorgias is never heard promising to teach virtue: and when he hears others promising he only laughs at them; but he thinks that men should be taught to speak.
   Socrates: Then do you not think that the Sophists are teachers?
  MENO: I cannot tell you, Socrates; like the rest of the world, I am in doubt, and sometimes I think that they are teachers and sometimes not.
   Socrates: And are you aware that not you only and other politicians have doubts whether virtue can be taught or not, but that Theognis the poet says the very same thing?
  --
  MENO: Not if we are right in our view. But I cannot believe, Socrates, that there are no good men: And if there are, how did they come into existence?
   Socrates: I am afraid, Meno, that you and I are not good for much, and that Gorgias has been as poor an educator of you as Prodicus has been of me. Certainly we shall have to look to ourselves, and try to find some one who will help in some way or other to improve us. This I say, because I observe that in the previous discussion none of us remarked that right and good action is possible to man under other guidance than that of knowledge (episteme);and indeed if this be denied, there is no seeing how there can be any good men at all.
  MENO: How do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: I mean that good men are necessarily useful or profitable. Were we not right in admitting this? It must be so.
  --
  MENO: The difference, Socrates, is only that he who has knowledge will always be right; but he who has right opinion will sometimes be right, and sometimes not.
   Socrates: What do you mean? Can he be wrong who has right opinion, so long as he has right opinion?
  MENO: I admit the cogency of your argument, and therefore, Socrates, I wonder that knowledge should be preferred to right opinionor why they should ever differ.
   Socrates: And shall I explain this wonder to you?
  --
  MENO: What you are saying, Socrates, seems to be very like the truth.
   Socrates: I too speak rather in ignorance; I only conjecture. And yet that knowledge differs from true opinion is no matter of conjecture with me. There are not many things which I profess to know, but this is most certainly one of them.
  MENO: Yes, Socrates; and you are quite right in saying so.
   Socrates: And am I not also right in saying that true opinion leading the way perfects action quite as well as knowledge?
  MENO: There again, Socrates, I think you are right.
   Socrates: Then right opinion is not a whit inferior to knowledge, or less useful in action; nor is the man who has right opinion inferior to him who has knowledge?
  --
  MENO: That is probably true, Socrates.
   Socrates: But if not by knowledge, the only alternative which remains is that statesmen must have guided states by right opinion, which is in politics what divination is in religion; for diviners and also prophets say many things truly, but they know not what they say.
  --
  MENO: And I think, Socrates, that they are right; although very likely our friend Anytus may take offence at the word.
   Socrates: I do not care; as for Anytus, there will be another opportunity of talking with him. To sum up our enquirythe result seems to be, if we are at all right in our view, that virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous. Nor is the instinct accompanied by reason, unless there may be supposed to be among statesmen some one who is capable of educating statesmen. And if there be such an one, he may be said to be among the living what Homer says that Tiresias was among the dead, 'he alone has understanding; but the rest are flitting shades'; and he and his virtue in like manner will be a reality among shadows.
  MENO: That is excellent, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then, Meno, the conclusion is that virtue comes to the virtuous by the gift of God. But we shall never know the certain truth until, before asking how virtue is given, we enquire into the actual nature of virtue. I fear that I must go away, but do you, now that you are persuaded yourself, persuade our friend Anytus. And do not let him be so exasperated; if you can conciliate him, you will have done good service to the Athenian people.

Phaedo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The dialogue is told from the perspective of one of Socrates' students, Phaedo of Elis, who was present at Socrates' death bed. Phaedo relates the dialogue from that day to Echecrates, a Pythagorean philosopher.
   Socrates offers four arguments for the soul's immortality:
  --
    The Theory of Recollection explains that we possess some non-empirical knowledge (e.g. The Form of Equality) at birth, implying the soul existed before birth to carry that knowledge. Another account of the theory is found in Plato's Meno, although in that case Socrates implies anamnesis (previous knowledge of everything) whereas he is not so bold in Phaedo.
    The Affinity Argument explains that invisible, immortal, and incorporeal things are different from visible, mortal, and corporeal things. Our soul is of the former, while our body is of the latter, so when our bodies die and decay, our soul will continue to live.
  --
     The Last Hours Of Socrates
  Author: Plato
  --
  After an interval of some months or years, and at Phlius, a town of Peloponnesus, the tale of the last hours of Socrates is narrated to Echecrates and other Phliasians by Phaedo the 'beloved disciple.' The Dialogue necessarily takes the form of a narrative, because Socrates has to be described acting as well as speaking. The minutest particulars of the event are interesting to distant friends, and the narrator has an equal interest in them.
  During the voyage of the sacred ship to and from Delos, which has occupied thirty days, the execution of Socrates has been deferred. (Compare Xen. Mem.) The time has been passed by him in conversation with a select company of disciples. But now the holy season is over, and the disciples meet earlier than usual in order that they may converse with Socrates for the last time. Those who were present, and those who might have been expected to be present, are mentioned by name. There are Simmias and Cebes (Crito), two disciples of Philolaus whom Socrates 'by his enchantments has attracted from Thebes' (Mem.), Crito the aged friend, the attendant of the prison, who is as good as a friendthese take part in the conversation. There are present also, Hermogenes, from whom Xenophon derived his information about the trial of Socrates (Mem.), the 'madman' Apollodorus (Symp.), Euclid and Terpsion from Megara (compare Theaet.), Ctesippus, Antis thenes, Menexenus, and some other less-known members of the Socratic circle, all of whom are silent auditors. Aristippus, Cleombrotus, and Plato are noted as absent. Almost as soon as the friends of Socrates enter the prison Xanthippe and her children are sent home in the care of one of Crito's servants. Socrates himself has just been released from chains, and is led by this circumstance to make the natural remark that 'pleasure follows pain.' (Observe that Plato is preparing the way for his doctrine of the alternation of opposites.) 'Aesop would have represented them in a fable as a two-headed creature of the gods.' The mention of Aesop reminds Cebes of a question which had been asked by Evenus the poet (compare Apol.): 'Why Socrates, who was not a poet, while in prison had been putting Aesop into verse?''Because several times in his life he had been warned in dreams that he should practise music; and as he was about to die and was not certain of what was meant, he wished to fulfil the admonition in the letter as well as in the spirit, by writing verses as well as by cultivating philosophy. Tell this to Evenus; and say that I would have him follow me in death.' 'He is not at all the sort of man to comply with your request, Socrates.' 'Why, is he not a philosopher?' 'Yes.' 'Then he will be willing to die, although he will not take his own life, for that is held to be unlawful.'
  Cebes asks why suicide is thought not to be right, if death is to be accounted a good? Well, (1) according to one explanation, because man is a prisoner, who must not open the door of his prison and run awaythis is the truth in a 'mystery.' Or (2) rather, because he is not his own property, but a possession of the gods, and has no right to make away with that which does not belong to him. But why, asks Cebes, if he is a possession of the gods, should he wish to die and leave them? For he is under their protection; and surely he cannot take better care of himself than they take of him. Simmias explains that Cebes is really referring to Socrates, whom they think too unmoved at the prospect of leaving the gods and his friends. Socrates answers that he is going to other gods who are wise and good, and perhaps to better friends; and he professes that he is ready to defend himself against the charge of Cebes. The company shall be his judges, and he hopes that he will be more successful in convincing them than he had been in convincing the court.
  The philosopher desires deathwhich the wicked world will insinuate that he also deserves: and perhaps he does, but not in any sense which they are capable of understanding. Enough of them: the real question is, What is the nature of that death which he desires? Death is the separation of soul and bodyand the philosopher desires such a separation. He would like to be freed from the dominion of bodily pleasures and of the senses, which are always perturbing his mental vision. He wants to get rid of eyes and ears, and with the light of the mind only to behold the light of truth. All the evils and impurities and necessities of men come from the body. And death separates him from these corruptions, which in life he cannot wholly lay aside. Why then should he repine when the hour of separation arrives? Why, if he is dead while he lives, should he fear that other death, through which alone he can behold wisdom in her purity?
  Besides, the philosopher has notions of good and evil unlike those of other men. For they are courageous because they are afraid of greater dangers, and temperate because they desire greater pleasures. But he disdains this balancing of pleasures and pains, which is the exchange of commerce and not of virtue. All the virtues, including wisdom, are regarded by him only as purifications of the soul. And this was the meaning of the founders of the mysteries when they said, 'Many are the wand-bearers but few are the mystics.' (Compare Matt. xxii.: 'Many are called but few are chosen.') And in the hope that he is one of these mystics, Socrates is now departing. This is his answer to any one who charges him with indifference at the prospect of leaving the gods and his friends.
  Still, a fear is expressed that the soul upon leaving the body may vanish away like smoke or air. Socrates in answer appeals first of all to the old Orphic tradition that the souls of the dead are in the world below, and that the living come from them. This he attempts to found on a philosophical assumption that all oppositese.g. less, greater; weaker, stronger; sleeping, waking; life, deathare generated out of each other. Nor can the process of generation be only a passage from living to dying, for then all would end in death. The perpetual sleeper (Endymion) would be no longer distinguished from the rest of mankind. The circle of nature is not complete unless the living come from the dead as well as pass to them.
  The Platonic doctrine of reminiscence is then adduced as a confirmation of the pre-existence of the soul. Some proofs of this doctrine are demanded. One proof given is the same as that of the Meno, and is derived from the latent knowledge of mathematics, which may be elicited from an unlearned person when a diagram is presented to him. Again, there is a power of association, which from seeing Simmias may remember Cebes, or from seeing a picture of Simmias may remember Simmias. The lyre may recall the player of the lyre, and equal pieces of wood or stone may be associated with the higher notion of absolute equality. But here observe that material equalities fall short of the conception of absolute equality with which they are compared, and which is the measure of them. And the measure or standard must be prior to that which is measured, the idea of equality prior to the visible equals. And if prior to them, then prior also to the perceptions of the senses which recall them, and therefore either given before birth or at birth. But all men have not this knowledge, nor have any without a process of reminiscence; which is a proof that it is not innate or given at birth, unless indeed it was given and taken away at the same instant. But if not given to men in birth, it must have been given before birththis is the only alternative which remains. And if we had ideas in a former state, then our souls must have existed and must have had intelligence in a former state. The pre-existence of the soul stands or falls with the doctrine of ideas.
  It is objected by Simmias and Cebes that these arguments only prove a former and not a future existence. Socrates answers this objection by recalling the previous argument, in which he had shown that the living come from the dead. But the fear that the soul at departing may vanish into air (especially if there is a wind blowing at the time) has not yet been charmed away. He proceeds: When we fear that the soul will vanish away, let us ask ourselves what is that which we suppose to be liable to dissolution? Is it the simple or the compound, the unchanging or the changing, the invisible idea or the visible object of sense? Clearly the latter and not the former; and therefore not the soul, which in her own pure thought is unchangeable, and only when using the senses descends into the region of change. Again, the soul commands, the body serves: in this respect too the soul is akin to the divine, and the body to the mortal. And in every point of view the soul is the image of divinity and immortality, and the body of the human and mortal. And whereas the body is liable to speedy dissolution, the soul is almost if not quite indissoluble. (Compare Tim.) Yet even the body may be preserved for ages by the embalmer's art: how unlikely, then, that the soul will perish and be dissipated into air while on her way to the good and wise God! She has been gathered into herself, holding aloof from the body, and practising death all her life long, and she is now finally released from the errors and follies and passions of men, and for ever dwells in the company of the gods.
  But the soul which is polluted and engrossed by the corporeal, and has no eye except that of the senses, and is weighed down by the bodily appetites, cannot attain to this abstraction. In her fear of the world below she lingers about the sepulchre, loath to leave the body which she loved, a ghostly apparition, saturated with sense, and therefore visible. At length entering into some animal of a nature congenial to her former life of sensuality or violence, she takes the form of an ass, a wolf or a kite. And of these earthly souls the happiest are those who have practised virtue without philosophy; they are allowed to pass into gentle and social natures, such as bees and ants. (Compare Republic, Meno.) But only the philosopher who departs pure is permitted to enter the company of the gods. (Compare Phaedrus.) This is the reason why he abstains from fleshly lusts, and not because he fears loss or disgrace, which is the motive of other men. He too has been a captive, and the willing agent of his own captivity. But philosophy has spoken to him, and he has heard her voice; she has gently entreated him, and brought him out of the 'miry clay,' and purged away the mists of passion and the illusions of sense which envelope him; his soul has escaped from the influence of pleasures and pains, which are like nails fastening her to the body. To that prison-house she will not return; and therefore she abstains from bodily pleasuresnot from a desire of having more or greater ones, but because she knows that only when calm and free from the dominion of the body can she behold the light of truth.
  Simmias and Cebes remain in doubt; but they are unwilling to raise objections at such a time. Socrates wonders at their reluctance. Let them regard him rather as the swan, who, having sung the praises of Apollo all his life long, sings at his death more lustily than ever. Simmias acknowledges that there is cowardice in not probing truth to the bottom. 'And if truth divine and inspired is not to be had, then let a man take the best of human notions, and upon this frail bark let him sail through life.' He proceeds to state his difficulty: It has been argued that the soul is invisible and incorporeal, and therefore immortal, and prior to the body. But is not the soul acknowledged to be a harmony, and has she not the same relation to the body, as the harmonywhich like her is invisiblehas to the lyre? And yet the harmony does not survive the lyre. Cebes has also an objection, which like Simmias he expresses in a figure. He is willing to admit that the soul is more lasting than the body. But the more lasting nature of the soul does not prove her immortality; for after having worn out many bodies in a single life, and many more in successive births and deaths, she may at last perish, or, as Socrates afterwards restates the objection, the very act of birth may be the beginning of her death, and her last body may survive her, just as the coat of an old weaver is left behind him after he is dead, although a man is more lasting than his coat. And he who would prove the immortality of the soul, must prove not only that the soul outlives one or many bodies, but that she outlives them all.
  The audience, like the chorus in a play, for a moment interpret the feelings of the actors; there is a temporary depression, and then the enquiry is resumed. It is a melancholy reflection that arguments, like men, are apt to be deceivers; and those who have been often deceived become distrustful both of arguments and of friends. But this unfortunate experience should not make us either haters of men or haters of arguments. The want of health and truth is not in the argument, but in ourselves. Socrates, who is about to die, is sensible of his own weakness; he desires to be impartial, but he cannot help feeling that he has too great an interest in the truth of the argument. And therefore he would have his friends examine and refute him, if they think that he is in error.
  At his request Simmias and Cebes repeat their objections. They do not go to the length of denying the pre-existence of ideas. Simmias is of opinion that the soul is a harmony of the body. But the admission of the pre-existence of ideas, and therefore of the soul, is at variance with this. (Compare a parallel difficulty in Theaet.) For a harmony is an effect, whereas the soul is not an effect, but a cause; a harmony follows, but the soul leads; a harmony admits of degrees, and the soul has no degrees. Again, upon the supposition that the soul is a harmony, why is one soul better than another? Are they more or less harmonized, or is there one harmony within another? But the soul does not admit of degrees, and cannot therefore be more or less harmonized. Further, the soul is often engaged in resisting the affections of the body, as Homer describes Odysseus 'rebuking his heart.' Could he have written this under the idea that the soul is a harmony of the body? Nay rather, are we not contradicting Homer and ourselves in affirming anything of the sort?
  The goddess Harmonia, as Socrates playfully terms the argument of Simmias, has been happily disposed of; and now an answer has to be given to the Theban Cadmus. Socrates recapitulates the argument of Cebes, which, as he remarks, involves the whole question of natural growth or causation; about this he proposes to narrate his own mental experience. When he was young he had puzzled himself with physics: he had enquired into the growth and decay of animals, and the origin of thought, until at last he began to doubt the self-evident fact that growth is the result of eating and drinking; and so he arrived at the conclusion that he was not meant for such enquiries. Nor was he less perplexed with notions of comparison and number. At first he had imagined himself to understand differences of greater and less, and to know that ten is two more than eight, and the like. But now those very notions appeared to him to contain a contradiction. For how can one be divided into two? Or two be compounded into one? These are difficulties which Socrates cannot answer. Of generation and destruction he knows nothing. But he has a confused notion of another method in which matters of this sort are to be investigated. (Compare Republic; Charm.)
  Then he heard some one reading out of a book of Anaxagoras, that mind is the cause of all things. And he said to himself: If mind is the cause of all things, surely mind must dispose them all for the best. The new teacher will show me this 'order of the best' in man and nature. How great had been his hopes and how great his disappointment! For he found that his new friend was anything but consistent in his use of mind as a cause, and that he soon introduced winds, waters, and other eccentric notions. (Compare Arist. Metaph.) It was as if a person had said that Socrates is sitting here because he is made up of bones and muscles, instead of telling the true reasonthat he is here because the Athenians have thought good to sentence him to death, and he has thought good to await his sentence. Had his bones and muscles been left by him to their own ideas of right, they would long ago have taken themselves off. But surely there is a great confusion of the cause and condition in all this. And this confusion also leads people into all sorts of erroneous theories about the position and motions of the earth. None of them know how much stronger than any Atlas is the power of the best. But this 'best' is still undiscovered; and in enquiring after the cause, we can only hope to attain the second best.
  Now there is a danger in the contemplation of the nature of things, as there is a danger in looking at the sun during an eclipse, unless the precaution is taken of looking only at the image reflected in the water, or in a glass. (Compare Laws; Republic.) 'I was afraid,' says Socrates, 'that I might injure the eye of the soul. I thought that I had better return to the old and safe method of ideas. Though I do not mean to say that he who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas sees only through a glass darkly, any more than he who contemplates actual effects.'
  If the existence of ideas is granted to him, Socrates is of opinion that he will then have no difficulty in proving the immortality of the soul. He will only ask for a further admission:that beauty is the cause of the beautiful, greatness the cause of the great, smallness of the small, and so on of other things. This is a safe and simple answer, which escapes the contradictions of greater and less (greater by reason of that which is smaller!), of addition and subtraction, and the other difficulties of relation. These subtleties he is for leaving to wiser heads than his own; he prefers to test ideas by the consistency of their consequences, and, if asked to give an account of them, goes back to some higher idea or hypothesis which appears to him to be the best, until at last he arrives at a resting-place. (Republic; Phil.)
  The doctrine of ideas, which has long ago received the assent of the Socratic circle, is now affirmed by the Phliasian auditor to comm and the assent of any man of sense. The narrative is continued; Socrates is desirous of explaining how opposite ideas may appear to co-exist but do not really co-exist in the same thing or person. For example, Simmias may be said to have greatness and also smallness, because he is greater than Socrates and less than Phaedo. And yet Simmias is not really great and also small, but only when compared to Phaedo and Socrates. I use the illustration, says Socrates, because I want to show you not only that ideal opposites exclude one another, but also the opposites in us. I, for example, having the attribute of smallness remain small, and cannot become great: the smallness which is in me drives out greatness.
  One of the company here remarked that this was inconsistent with the old assertion that opposites generated opposites. But that, replies Socrates, was affirmed, not of opposite ideas either in us or in nature, but of opposition in the concretenot of life and death, but of individuals living and dying. When this objection has been removed, Socrates proceeds: This doctrine of the mutual exclusion of opposites is not only true of the opposites themselves, but of things which are inseparable from them. For example, cold and heat are opposed; and fire, which is inseparable from heat, cannot co-exist with cold, or snow, which is inseparable from cold, with heat. Again, the number three excludes the number four, because three is an odd number and four is an even number, and the odd is opposed to the even. Thus we are able to proceed a step beyond 'the safe and simple answer.' We may say, not only that the odd excludes the even, but that the number three, which participates in oddness, excludes the even. And in like manner, not only does life exclude death, but the soul, of which life is the inseparable attri bute, also excludes death. And that of which life is the inseparable attri bute is by the force of the terms imperishable. If the odd principle were imperishable, then the number three would not perish but remove, on the approach of the even principle. But the immortal is imperishable; and therefore the soul on the approach of death does not perish but removes.
  Thus all objections appear to be finally silenced. And now the application has to be made: If the soul is immortal, 'what manner of persons ought we to be?' having regard not only to time but to eternity. For death is not the end of all, and the wicked is not released from his evil by death; but every one carries with him into the world below that which he is or has become, and that only.
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  1. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has sunk deep into the heart of the human race; and men are apt to rebel against any examination of the nature or grounds of their belief. They do not like to acknowledge that this, as well as the other 'eternal ideas; of man, has a history in time, which may be traced in Greek poetry or philosophy, and also in the Hebrew Scriptures. They convert feeling into reasoning, and throw a network of dialectics over that which is really a deeply-rooted instinct. In the same temper which Socrates reproves in himself they are disposed to think that even fallacies will do no harm, for they will die with them, and while they live they will gain by the delusion. And when they consider the numberless bad arguments which have been pressed into the service of theology, they say, like the companions of Socrates, 'What argument can we ever trust again?' But there is a better and higher spirit to be gathered from the Phaedo, as well as from the other writings of Plato, which says that first principles should be most constantly reviewed (Phaedo and Crat.), and that the highest subjects demand of us the greatest accuracy (Republic); also that we must not become misologists because arguments are apt to be deceivers.
  2. In former ages there was a customary rather than a reasoned belief in the immortality of the soul. It was based on the authority of the Church, on the necessity of such a belief to morality and the order of society, on the evidence of an historical fact, and also on analogies and figures of speech which filled up the void or gave an expression in words to a cherished instinct. The mass of mankind went on their way busy with the affairs of this life, hardly stopping to think about another. But in our own day the question has been reopened, and it is doubtful whether the belief which in the first ages of Christianity was the strongest motive of action can survive the conflict with a scientific age in which the rules of evidence are stricter and the mind has become more sensitive to criticism. It has faded into the distance by a natural process as it was removed further and further from the historical fact on which it has been supposed to rest. Arguments derived from material things such as the seed and the ear of corn or transitions in the life of animals from one state of being to another (the chrysalis and the butterfly) are not 'in pari materia' with arguments from the visible to the invisible, and are therefore felt to be no longer applicable. The evidence to the historical fact seems to be weaker than was once supposed: it is not consistent with itself, and is based upon documents which are of unknown origin. The immortality of man must be proved by other arguments than these if it is again to become a living belief. We must ask ourselves afresh why we still maintain it, and seek to discover a foundation for it in the nature of God and in the first principles of morality.
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  5. Again, believing in the immortality of the soul, we must still ask the question of Socrates, 'What is that which we suppose to be immortal?' Is it the personal and individual element in us, or the spiritual and universal? Is it the principle of knowledge or of goodness, or the union of the two? Is it the mere force of life which is determined to be, or the consciousness of self which cannot be got rid of, or the fire of genius which refuses to be extinguished? Or is there a hidden being which is allied to the Author of all existence, who is because he is perfect, and to whom our ideas of perfection give us a title to belong? Whatever answer is given by us to these questions, there still remains the necessity of allowing the permanence of evil, if not for ever, at any rate for a time, in order that the wicked 'may not have too good a bargain.' For the annihilation of evil at death, or the eternal duration of it, seem to involve equal difficulties in the moral government of the universe. Sometimes we are led by our feelings, rather than by our reason, to think of the good and wise only as existing in another life. Why should the mean, the weak, the idiot, the infant, the herd of men who have never in any proper sense the use of reason, reappear with blinking eyes in the light of another world? But our second thought is that the hope of humanity is a common one, and that all or none will be partakers of immortality. Reason does not allow us to suppose that we have any greater claims than others, and experience may often reveal to us unexpected flashes of the higher nature in those whom we had despised. Why should the wicked suffer any more than ourselves? had we been placed in their circumstances should we have been any better than they? The worst of men are objects of pity rather than of anger to the philanthropist; must they not be equally such to divine benevolence? Even more than the good they have need of another life; not that they may be punished, but that they may be educated. These are a few of the reflections which arise in our minds when we attempt to assign any form to our conceptions of a future state.
  There are some other questions which are disturbing to us because we have no answer to them. What is to become of the animals in a future state? Have we not seen dogs more faithful and intelligent than men, and men who are more stupid and brutal than any animals? Does their life cease at death, or is there some 'better thing reserved' also for them? They may be said to have a shadow or imitation of morality, and imperfect moral claims upon the benevolence of man and upon the justice of God. We cannot think of the least or lowest of them, the insect, the bird, the inhabitants of the sea or the desert, as having any place in a future world, and if not all, why should those who are specially attached to man be deemed worthy of any exceptional privilege? When we reason about such a subject, almost at once we degenerate into nonsense. It is a passing thought which has no real hold on the mind. We may argue for the existence of animals in a future state from the attri butes of God, or from texts of Scripture ('Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing?' etc.), but the truth is that we are only filling up the void of another world with our own fancies. Again, we often talk about the origin of evil, that great bugbear of theologians, by which they frighten us into believing any superstition. What answer can be made to the old commonplace, 'Is not God the author of evil, if he knowingly permitted, but could have prevented it?' Even if we assume that the inequalities of this life are rectified by some transposition of human beings in another, still the existence of the very least evil if it could have been avoided, seems to be at variance with the love and justice of God. And so we arrive at the conclusion that we are carrying logic too far, and that the attempt to frame the world according to a rule of divine perfection is opposed to experience and had better be given up. The case of the animals is our own. We must admit that the Divine Being, although perfect himself, has placed us in a state of life in which we may work together with him for good, but we are very far from having attained to it.
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  9. But some one will say: That we cannot reason from the seen to the unseen, and that we are creating another world after the image of this, just as men in former ages have created gods in their own likeness. And we, like the companions of Socrates, may feel discouraged at hearing our favourite 'argument from analogy' thus summarily disposed of. Like himself, too, we may adduce other arguments in which he seems to have anticipated us, though he expresses them in different language. For we feel that the soul partakes of the ideal and invisible; and can never fall into the error of confusing the external circumstances of man with his higher self; or his origin with his nature. It is as repugnant to us as it was to him to imagine that our moral ideas are to be attri buted only to cerebral forces. The value of a human soul, like the value of a man's life to himself, is inestimable, and cannot be reckoned in earthly or material things. The human being alone has the consciousness of truth and justice and love, which is the consciousness of God. And the soul becoming more conscious of these, becomes more conscious of her own immortality.
  10. The last ground of our belief in immortality, and the strongest, is the perfection of the divine nature. The mere fact of the existence of God does not tend to show the continued existence of man. An evil God or an indifferent God might have had the power, but not the will, to preserve us. He might have regarded us as fitted to minister to his service by a succession of existences,like the animals, without attri buting to each soul an incomparable value. But if he is perfect, he must will that all rational beings should partake of that perfection which he himself is. In the words of the Timaeus, he is good, and therefore he desires that all other things should be as like himself as possible. And the manner in which he accomplishes this is by permitting evil, or rather degrees of good, which are otherwise called evil. For all progress is good relatively to the past, and yet may be comparatively evil when regarded in the light of the future. Good and evil are relative terms, and degrees of evil are merely the negative aspect of degrees of good. Of the absolute goodness of any finite nature we can form no conception; we are all of us in process of transition from one degree of good or evil to another. The difficulties which are urged about the origin or existence of evil are mere dialectical puzzles, standing in the same relation to Christian philosophy as the puzzles of the Cynics and Megarians to the philosophy of Plato. They arise out of the tendency of the human mind to regard good and evil both as relative and absolute; just as the riddles about motion are to be explained by the double conception of space or matter, which the human mind has the power of regarding either as continuous or discrete.
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  14. Returning now to the earlier stage of human thought which is represented by the writings of Plato, we find that many of the same questions have already arisen: there is the same tendency to materialism; the same inconsistency in the application of the idea of mind; the same doubt whether the soul is to be regarded as a cause or as an effect; the same falling back on moral convictions. In the Phaedo the soul is conscious of her divine nature, and the separation from the body which has been commenced in this life is perfected in another. Beginning in mystery, Socrates, in the intermediate part of the Dialogue, attempts to bring the doctrine of a future life into connection with his theory of knowledge. In proportion as he succeeds in this, the individual seems to disappear in a more general notion of the soul; the contemplation of ideas 'under the form of eternity' takes the place of past and future states of existence. His language may be compared to that of some modern philosophers, who speak of eternity, not in the sense of perpetual duration of time, but as an ever-present quality of the soul. Yet at the conclusion of the Dialogue, having 'arrived at the end of the intellectual world' (Republic), he replaces the veil of mythology, and describes the soul and her attendant genius in the language of the mysteries or of a disciple of Zoroaster. Nor can we fairly demand of Plato a consistency which is wanting among ourselves, who acknowledge that another world is beyond the range of human thought, and yet are always seeking to represent the mansions of heaven or hell in the colours of the painter, or in the descriptions of the poet or rhetorician.
  15. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul was not new to the Greeks in the age of Socrates, but, like the unity of God, had a foundation in the popular belief. The old Homeric notion of a gibbering ghost flitting away to Hades; or of a few illustrious heroes enjoying the isles of the blest; or of an existence divided between the two; or the Hesiodic, of righteous spirits, who become guardian angels,had given place in the mysteries and the Orphic poets to representations, partly fanciful, of a future state of rewards and punishments. (Laws.) The reticence of the Greeks on public occasions and in some part of their literature respecting this 'underground' religion, is not to be taken as a measure of the diffusion of such beliefs. If Pericles in the funeral oration is silent on the consolations of immortality, the poet Pindar and the tragedians on the other hand constantly assume the continued existence of the dead in an upper or under world. Darius and Laius are still alive; Antigone will be dear to her brethren after death; the way to the palace of Cronos is found by those who 'have thrice departed from evil.' The tragedy of the Greeks is not 'rounded' by this life, but is deeply set in decrees of fate and mysterious workings of powers beneath the earth. In the caricature of Aristophanes there is also a witness to the common sentiment. The Ionian and Pythagorean philosophies arose, and some new elements were added to the popular belief. The individual must find an expression as well as the world. Either the soul was supposed to exist in the form of a magnet, or of a particle of fire, or of light, or air, or water; or of a number or of a harmony of number; or to be or have, like the stars, a principle of motion (Arist. de Anim.). At length Anaxagoras, hardly distinguishing between life and mind, or between mind human and divine, attained the pure abstraction; and this, like the other abstractions of Greek philosophy, sank deep into the human intelligence. The opposition of the intelligible and the sensible, and of God to the world, supplied an analogy which assisted in the separation of soul and body. If ideas were separable from phenomena, mind was also separable from matter; if the ideas were eternal, the mind that conceived them was eternal too. As the unity of God was more distinctly acknowledged, the conception of the human soul became more developed. The succession, or alternation of life and death, had occurred to Heracleitus. The Eleatic Parmenides had stumbled upon the modern thesis, that 'thought and being are the same.' The Eastern belief in transmigration defined the sense of individuality; and some, like Empedocles, fancied that the blood which they had shed in another state of being was crying against them, and that for thirty thousand years they were to be 'fugitives and vagabonds upon the earth.' The desire of recognizing a lost mother or love or friend in the world below (Phaedo) was a natural feeling which, in that age as well as in every other, has given distinctness to the hope of immortality. Nor were ethical considerations wanting, partly derived from the necessity of punishing the greater sort of criminals, whom no avenging power of this world could reach. The voice of conscience, too, was heard reminding the good man that he was not altogether innocent. (Republic.) To these indistinct longings and fears an expression was given in the mysteries and Orphic poets: a 'heap of books' (Republic), passing under the names of Musaeus and Orpheus in Plato's time, were filled with notions of an under-world.
  16. Yet after all the belief in the individuality of the soul after death had but a feeble hold on the Greek mind. Like the personality of God, the personality of man in a future state was not inseparably bound up with the reality of his existence. For the distinction between the personal and impersonal, and also between the divine and human, was far less marked to the Greek than to ourselves. And as Plato readily passes from the notion of the good to that of God, he also passes almost imperceptibly to himself and his reader from the future life of the individual soul to the eternal being of the absolute soul. There has been a clearer statement and a clearer denial of the belief in modern times than is found in early Greek philosophy, and hence the comparative silence on the whole subject which is often remarked in ancient writers, and particularly in Aristotle. For Plato and Aristotle are not further removed in their teaching about the immortality of the soul than they are in their theory of knowledge.
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  18. To deal fairly with such arguments, they should be translated as far as possible into their modern equivalents. 'If the ideas of men are eternal, their souls are eternal, and if not the ideas, then not the souls.' Such an argument stands nearly in the same relation to Plato and his age, as the argument from the existence of God to immortality among ourselves. 'If God exists, then the soul exists after death; and if there is no God, there is no existence of the soul after death.' For the ideas are to his mind the reality, the truth, the principle of permanence, as well as of intelligence and order in the world. When Simmias and Cebes say that they are more strongly persuaded of the existence of ideas than they are of the immortality of the soul, they represent fairly enough the order of thought in Greek philosophy. And we might say in the same way that we are more certain of the existence of God than we are of the immortality of the soul, and are led by the belief in the one to a belief in the other. The parallel, as Socrates would say, is not perfect, but agrees in as far as the mind in either case is regarded as dependent on something above and beyond herself. The analogy may even be pressed a step further: 'We are more certain of our ideas of truth and right than we are of the existence of God, and are led on in the order of thought from one to the other.' Or more correctly: 'The existence of right and truth is the existence of God, and can never for a moment be separated from Him.'
  19. The main argument of the Phaedo is derived from the existence of eternal ideas of which the soul is a partaker; the other argument of the alternation of opposites is replaced by this. And there have not been wanting philosophers of the idealist school who have imagined that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is a theory of knowledge, and that in what has preceded Plato is accommodating himself to the popular belief. Such a view can only be elicited from the Phaedo by what may be termed the transcendental method of interpretation, and is obviously inconsistent with the Gorgias and the Republic. Those who maintain it are immediately compelled to renounce the shadow which they have grasped, as a play of words only. But the truth is, that Plato in his argument for the immortality of the soul has collected many elements of proof or persuasion, ethical and mythological as well as dialectical, which are not easily to be reconciled with one another; and he is as much in earnest about his doctrine of retri bution, which is repeated in all his more ethical writings, as about his theory of knowledge. And while we may fairly translate the dialectical into the language of Hegel, and the religious and mythological into the language of Dante or Bunyan, the ethical speaks to us still in the same voice, and appeals to a common feeling.
  --
  The Dialogue must be read in the light of the situation. And first of all we are struck by the calmness of the scene. Like the spectators at the time, we cannot pity Socrates; his mien and his language are so noble and fearless. He is the same that he ever was, but milder and gentler, and he has in no degree lost his interest in dialectics; he will not forego the delight of an argument in compliance with the jailer's intimation that he should not heat himself with talking. At such a time he naturally expresses the hope of his life, that he has been a true mystic and not a mere retainer or wand-bearer: and he refers to passages of his personal history. To his old enemies the Comic poets, and to the proceedings on the trial, he alludes playfully; but he vividly remembers the disappointment which he felt in reading the books of Anaxagoras. The return of Xanthippe and his children indicates that the philosopher is not 'made of oak or rock.' Some other traits of his character may be noted; for example, the courteous manner in which he inclines his head to the last objector, or the ironical touch, 'Me already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls;' or the depreciation of the arguments with which 'he comforted himself and them;' or his fear of 'misology;' or his references to Homer; or the playful smile with which he 'talks like a book' about greater and less; or the allusion to the possibility of finding another teacher among barbarous races (compare Polit.); or the mysterious reference to another science (mathematics?) of generation and destruction for which he is vainly feeling. There is no change in him; only now he is invested with a sort of sacred character, as the prophet or priest of Apollo the God of the festival, in whose honour he first of all composes a hymn, and then like the swan pours forth his dying lay. Perhaps the extreme elevation of Socrates above his own situation, and the ordinary interests of life (compare his jeu d'esprit about his burial, in which for a moment he puts on the 'Silenus mask'), create in the mind of the reader an impression stronger than could be derived from arguments that such a one has in him 'a principle which does not admit of death.'
  The other persons of the Dialogue may be considered under two heads: (1) private friends; (2) the respondents in the argument.
  First there is Crito, who has been already introduced to us in the Euthydemus and the Crito; he is the equal in years of Socrates, and stands in quite a different relation to him from his younger disciples. He is a man of the world who is rich and prosperous (compare the jest in the Euthydemus), the best friend of Socrates, who wants to know his commands, in whose presence he talks to his family, and who performs the last duty of closing his eyes. It is observable too that, as in the Euthydemus, Crito shows no aptitude for philosophical discussions. Nor among the friends of Socrates must the jailer be forgotten, who seems to have been introduced by Plato in order to show the impression made by the extraordinary man on the common. The gentle nature of the man is indicated by his weeping at the announcement of his errand and then turning away, and also by the words of Socrates to his disciples: 'How charming the man is! since I have been in prison he has been always coming to me, and is as good as could be to me.' We are reminded too that he has retained this gentle nature amid scenes of death and violence by the contrasts which he draws between the behaviour of Socrates and of others when about to die.
  Another person who takes no part in the philosophical discussion is the excitable Apollodorus, the same who, in the Symposium, of which he is the narrator, is called 'the madman,' and who testifies his grief by the most violent emotions. Phaedo is also present, the 'beloved disciple' as he may be termed, who is described, if not 'leaning on his bosom,' as seated next to Socrates, who is playing with his hair. He too, like Apollodorus, takes no part in the discussion, but he loves above all things to hear and speak of Socrates after his death. The calmness of his behaviour, veiling his face when he can no longer restrain his tears, contrasts with the passionate outcries of the other. At a particular point the argument is described as falling before the attack of Simmias. A sort of despair is introduced in the minds of the company. The effect of this is heightened by the description of Phaedo, who has been the eye-witness of the scene, and by the sympathy of his Phliasian auditors who are beginning to think 'that they too can never trust an argument again.' And the intense interest of the company is communicated not only to the first auditors, but to us who in a distant country read the narrative of their emotions after more than two thousand years have passed away.
  The two principal interlocutors are Simmias and Cebes, the disciples of Philolaus the Pythagorean philosopher of Thebes. Simmias is described in the Phaedrus as fonder of an argument than any man living; and Cebes, although finally persuaded by Socrates, is said to be the most incredulous of human beings. It is Cebes who at the commencement of the Dialogue asks why 'suicide is held to be unlawful,' and who first supplies the doctrine of recollection in confirmation of the pre-existence of the soul. It is Cebes who urges that the pre-existence does not necessarily involve the future existence of the soul, as is shown by the illustration of the weaver and his coat. Simmias, on the other hand, raises the question about harmony and the lyre, which is naturally put into the mouth of a Pythagorean disciple. It is Simmias, too, who first remarks on the uncertainty of human knowledge, and only at last concedes to the argument such a qualified approval as is consistent with the feebleness of the human faculties. Cebes is the deeper and more consecutive thinker, Simmias more superficial and rhetorical; they are distinguished in much the same manner as Adeimantus and Glaucon in the Republic.
  Other persons, Menexenus, Ctesippus, Lysis, are old friends; Evenus has been already satirized in the Apology; Aeschines and Epigenes were present at the trial; Euclid and Terpsion will reappear in the Introduction to the Theaetetus, Hermogenes has already appeared in the Cratylus. No inference can fairly be drawn from the absence of Aristippus, nor from the omission of Xenophon, who at the time of Socrates' death was in Asia. The mention of Plato's own absence seems like an expression of sorrow, and may, perhaps, be an indication that the report of the conversation is not to be taken literally.
  The place of the Dialogue in the series is doubtful. The doctrine of ideas is certainly carried beyond the Socratic point of view; in no other of the writings of Plato is the theory of them so completely developed. Whether the belief in immortality can be attri buted to Socrates or not is uncertain; the silence of the Memorabilia, and of the earlier Dialogues of Plato, is an argument to the contrary. Yet in the Cyropaedia Xenophon has put language into the mouth of the dying Cyrus which recalls the Phaedo, and may have been derived from the teaching of Socrates. It may be fairly urged that the greatest religious interest of mankind could not have been wholly ignored by one who passed his life in fulfilling the commands of an oracle, and who recognized a Divine plan in man and nature. (Xen. Mem.) And the language of the Apology and of the Crito confirms this view.
  The Phaedo is not one of the Socratic Dialogues of Plato; nor, on the other hand, can it be assigned to that later stage of the Platonic writings at which the doctrine of ideas appears to be forgotten. It belongs rather to the intermediate period of the Platonic philosophy, which roughly corresponds to the Phaedrus, Gorgias, Republic, Theaetetus. Without pretending to determine the real time of their composition, the Symposium, Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Phaedo may be conveniently read by us in this order as illustrative of the life of Socrates. Another chain may be formed of the Meno, Phaedrus, Phaedo, in which the immortality of the soul is connected with the doctrine of ideas. In the Meno the theory of ideas is based on the ancient belief in transmigration, which reappears again in the Phaedrus as well as in the Republic and Timaeus, and in all of them is connected with a doctrine of retri bution. In the Phaedrus the immortality of the soul is supposed to rest on the conception of the soul as a principle of motion, whereas in the Republic the argument turns on the natural continuance of the soul, which, if not destroyed by her own proper evil, can hardly be destroyed by any other. The soul of man in the Timaeus is derived from the Supreme Creator, and either returns after death to her kindred star, or descends into the lower life of an animal. The Apology expresses the same view as the Phaedo, but with less confidence; there the probability of death being a long sleep is not excluded. The Theaetetus also describes, in a digression, the desire of the soul to fly away and be with God'and to fly to him is to be like him.' The Symposium may be observed to resemble as well as to differ from the Phaedo. While the first notion of immortality is only in the way of natural procreation or of posthumous fame and glory, the higher revelation of beauty, like the good in the Republic, is the vision of the eternal idea. So deeply rooted in Plato's mind is the belief in immortality; so various are the forms of expression which he employs.
  As in several other Dialogues, there is more of system in the Phaedo than appears at first sight. The succession of arguments is based on previous philosophies; beginning with the mysteries and the Heracleitean alternation of opposites, and proceeding to the Pythagorean harmony and transmigration; making a step by the aid of Platonic reminiscence, and a further step by the help of the nous of Anaxagoras; until at last we rest in the conviction that the soul is inseparable from the ideas, and belongs to the world of the invisible and unknown. Then, as in the Gorgias or Republic, the curtain falls, and the veil of mythology descends upon the argument. After the confession of Socrates that he is an interested party, and the acknowledgment that no man of sense will think the details of his narrative true, but that something of the kind is true, we return from speculation to practice. He is himself more confident of immortality than he is of his own arguments; and the confidence which he expresses is less strong than that which his cheerfulness and composure in death inspire in us.
  Difficulties of two kinds occur in the Phaedoone kind to be explained out of contemporary philosophy, the other not admitting of an entire solution. (1) The difficulty which Socrates says that he experienced in explaining generation and corruption; the assumption of hypotheses which proceed from the less general to the more general, and are tested by their consequences; the puzzle about greater and less; the resort to the method of ideas, which to us appear only abstract terms,these are to be explained out of the position of Socrates and Plato in the history of philosophy. They were living in a twilight between the sensible and the intellectual world, and saw no way of connecting them. They could neither explain the relation of ideas to phenomena, nor their correlation to one another. The very idea of relation or comparison was embarrassing to them. Yet in this intellectual uncertainty they had a conception of a proof from results, and of a moral truth, which remained unshaken amid the questionings of philosophy. (2) The other is a difficulty which is touched upon in the Republic as well as in the Phaedo, and is common to modern and ancient philosophy. Plato is not altogether satisfied with his safe and simple method of ideas. He wants to have proved to him by facts that all things are for the best, and that there is one mind or design which pervades them all. But this 'power of the best' he is unable to explain; and therefore takes refuge in universal ideas. And are not we at this day seeking to discover that which Socrates in a glass darkly foresaw?
  Some resemblances to the Greek drama may be noted in all the Dialogues of Plato. The Phaedo is the tragedy of which Socrates is the protagonist and Simmias and Cebes the secondary performers, standing to them in the same relation as to Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic. No Dialogue has a greater unity of subject and feeling. Plato has certainly fulfilled the condition of Greek, or rather of all art, which requires that scenes of death and suffering should be clothed in beauty. The gathering of the friends at the commencement of the Dialogue, the dismissal of Xanthippe, whose presence would have been out of place at a philosophical discussion, but who returns again with her children to take a final farewell, the dejection of the audience at the temporary overthrow of the argument, the picture of Socrates playing with the hair of Phaedo, the final scene in which Socrates alone retains his composureare masterpieces of art. And the chorus at the end might have interpreted the feeling of the play: 'There can no evil happen to a good man in life or death.'
  'The art of concealing art' is nowhere more perfect than in those writings of Plato which describe the trial and death of Socrates. Their charm is their simplicity, which gives them verisimilitude; and yet they touch, as if incidentally, and because they were suitable to the occasion, on some of the deepest truths of philosophy. There is nothing in any tragedy, ancient or modern, nothing in poetry or history (with one exception), like the last hours of Socrates in Plato. The master could not be more fitly occupied at such a time than in discoursing of immortality; nor the disciples more divinely consoled. The arguments, taken in the spirit and not in the letter, are our arguments; and Socrates by anticipation may be even thought to refute some 'eccentric notions; current in our own age. For there are philosophers among ourselves who do not seem to understand how much stronger is the power of intelligence, or of the best, than of Atlas, or mechanical force. How far the words attri buted to Socrates were actually uttered by him we forbear to ask; for no answer can be given to this question. And it is better to resign ourselves to the feeling of a great work, than to linger among critical uncertainties.
  PHAEDO
  --
  Phaedo, who is the narrator of the dialogue to Echecrates of Phlius. Socrates, Apollodorus, Simmias, Cebes, Crito and an Attendant of the Prison.
  SCENE: The Prison of Socrates.
  PLACE OF THE NARRATION: Phlius.
  ECHECRATES: Were you yourself, Phaedo, in the prison with Socrates on the day when he drank the poison?
  PHAEDO: Yes, Echecrates, I was.
  --
  PHAEDO: It is the ship in which, according to Athenian tradition, Theseus went to Crete when he took with him the fourteen youths, and was the saviour of them and of himself. And they were said to have vowed to Apollo at the time, that if they were saved they would send a yearly mission to Delos. Now this custom still continues, and the whole period of the voyage to and from Delos, beginning when the priest of Apollo crowns the stern of the ship, is a holy season, during which the city is not allowed to be polluted by public executions; and when the vessel is detained by contrary winds, the time spent in going and returning is very considerable. As I was saying, the ship was crowned on the day before the trial, and this was the reason why Socrates lay in prison and was not put to death until long after he was condemned.
  ECHECRATES: What was the manner of his death, Phaedo? What was said or done? And which of his friends were with him? Or did the authorities forbid them to be presentso that he had no friends near him when he died?
  --
  PHAEDO: I have nothing at all to do, and will try to gratify your wish. To be reminded of Socrates is always the greatest delight to me, whether I speak myself or hear another speak of him.
  ECHECRATES: You will have listeners who are of the same mind with you, and I hope that you will be as exact as you can.
  --
  PHAEDO: I will begin at the beginning, and endeavour to repeat the entire conversation. On the previous days we had been in the habit of assembling early in the morning at the court in which the trial took place, and which is not far from the prison. There we used to wait talking with one another until the opening of the doors (for they were not opened very early); then we went in and generally passed the day with Socrates. On the last morning we assembled sooner than usual, having heard on the day before when we quitted the prison in the evening that the sacred ship had come from Delos, and so we arranged to meet very early at the accustomed place. On our arrival the jailer who answered the door, instead of admitting us, came out and told us to stay until he called us. 'For the Eleven,' he said, 'are now with Socrates; they are taking off his chains, and giving orders that he is to die to-day.' He soon returned and said that we might come in. On entering we found Socrates just released from chains, and Xanthippe, whom you know, sitting by him, and holding his child in her arms. When she saw us she uttered a cry and said, as women will: 'O Socrates, this is the last time that either you will converse with your friends, or they with you.' Socrates turned to Crito and said: 'Crito, let some one take her home.' Some of Crito's people accordingly led her away, crying out and beating herself. And when she was gone, Socrates, sitting up on the couch, bent and rubbed his leg, saying, as he was rubbing: How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single head. And I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had remembered them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows, as I know by my own experience now, when after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain pleasure appears to succeed.
  Upon this Cebes said: I am glad, Socrates, that you have mentioned the name of Aesop. For it reminds me of a question which has been asked by many, and was asked of me only the day before yesterday by Evenus the poethe will be sure to ask it again, and therefore if you would like me to have an answer ready for him, you may as well tell me what I should say to him:he wanted to know why you, who never before wrote a line of poetry, now that you are in prison are turning Aesop's fables into verse, and also composing that hymn in honour of Apollo.
  Tell him, Cebes, he replied, what is the truththat I had no idea of rivalling him or his poems; to do so, as I knew, would be no easy task. But I wanted to see whether I could purge away a scruple which I felt about the meaning of certain dreams. In the course of my life I have often had intimations in dreams 'that I should compose music.' The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: 'Cultivate and make music,' said the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music. The dream was bidding me do what I was already doing, in the same way that the competitor in a race is bidden by the spectators to run when he is already running. But I was not certain of this, for the dream might have meant music in the popular sense of the word, and being under sentence of death, and the festival giving me a respite, I thought that it would be safer for me to satisfy the scruple, and, in obedience to the dream, to compose a few verses before I departed. And first I made a hymn in honour of the god of the festival, and then considering that a poet, if he is really to be a poet, should not only put together words, but should invent stories, and that I have no invention, I took some fables of Aesop, which I had ready at hand and which I knewthey were the first I came uponand turned them into verse. Tell this to Evenus, Cebes, and bid him be of good cheer; say that I would have him come after me if he be a wise man, and not tarry; and that to-day I am likely to be going, for the Athenians say that I must.
  --
  Why, said Socrates,is not Evenus a philosopher?
  I think that he is, said Simmias.
  --
  Yes, but his language was obscure, Socrates.
  My words, too, are only an echo; but there is no reason why I should not repeat what I have heard: and indeed, as I am going to another place, it is very meet for me to be thinking and talking of the nature of the pilgrimage which I am about to make. What can I do better in the interval between this and the setting of the sun?
  Then tell me, Socrates, why is suicide held to be unlawful? as I have certainly heard Philolaus, about whom you were just now asking, affirm when he was staying with us at Thebes: and there are others who say the same, although I have never understood what was meant by any of them.
  Do not lose heart, replied Socrates, and the day may come when you will understand. I suppose that you wonder why, when other things which are evil may be good at certain times and to certain persons, death is to be the only exception, and why, when a man is better dead, he is not permitted to be his own benefactor, but must wait for the hand of another.
  Very true, said Cebes, laughing gently and speaking in his native Boeotian.
  --
  Yes, Socrates, said Cebes, there seems to be truth in what you say. And yet how can you reconcile this seemingly true belief that God is our guardian and we his possessions, with the willingness to die which we were just now attri buting to the philosopher? That the wisest of men should be willing to leave a service in which they are ruled by the gods who are the best of rulers, is not reasonable; for surely no wise man thinks that when set at liberty he can take better care of himself than the gods take of him. A fool may perhaps think sohe may argue that he had better run away from his master, not considering that his duty is to remain to the end, and not to run away from the good, and that there would be no sense in his running away. The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself. Now this, Socrates, is the reverse of what was just now said; for upon this view the wise man should sorrow and the fool rejoice at passing out of life.
  The earnestness of Cebes seemed to please Socrates. Here, said he, turning to us, is a man who is always inquiring, and is not so easily convinced by the first thing which he hears.
  And certainly, added Simmias, the objection which he is now making does appear to me to have some force. For what can be the meaning of a truly wise man wanting to fly away and lightly leave a master who is better than himself? And I rather imagine that Cebes is referring to you; he thinks that you are too ready to leave us, and too ready to leave the gods whom you acknowledge to be our good masters.
  Yes, replied Socrates; there is reason in what you say. And so you think that I ought to answer your indictment as if I were in a court?
  We should like you to do so, said Simmias.
  --
  But do you mean to take away your thoughts with you, Socrates? said Simmias. Will you not impart them to us?for they are a benefit in which we too are entitled to share. Moreover, if you succeed in convincing us, that will be an answer to the charge against yourself.
  I will do my best, replied Socrates. But you must first let me hear what Crito wants; he has long been wishing to say something to me.
  Only this, Socrates, replied Crito:the attendant who is to give you the poison has been telling me, and he wants me to tell you, that you are not to talk much, talking, he says, increases heat, and this is apt to interfere with the action of the poison; persons who excite themselves are sometimes obliged to take a second or even a third dose.
  Then, said Socrates, let him mind his business and be prepared to give the poison twice or even thrice if necessary; that is all.
  I knew quite well what you would say, replied Crito; but I was obliged to satisfy him.
  --
  Simmias said laughingly: Though not in a laughing humour, you have made me laugh, Socrates; for I cannot help thinking that the many when they hear your words will say how truly you have described philosophers, and our people at home will likewise say that the life which philosophers desire is in reality death, and that they have found them out to be deserving of the death which they desire.
  And they are right, Simmias, in thinking so, with the exception of the words 'they have found them out'; for they have not found out either what is the nature of that death which the true philosopher deserves, or how he deserves or desires death. But enough of them:let us discuss the matter among ourselves: Do we believe that there is such a thing as death?
  --
  What you say has a wonderful truth in it, Socrates, replied Simmias.
  And when real philosophers consider all these things, will they not be led to make a reflection which they will express in words something like the following? 'Have we not found,' they will say, 'a path of thought which seems to bring us and our argument to the conclusion, that while we are in the body, and while the soul is infected with the evils of the body, our desire will not be satisfied? and our desire is of the truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure and betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always breaking in upon us, causing turmoil and confusion in our enquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth. It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the bodythe soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers, not while we live, but after death; for if while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things followseither knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth.' For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure. These are the sort of words, Simmias, which the true lovers of knowledge cannot help saying to one another, and thinking. You would agree; would you not?
  Undoubtedly, Socrates.
  But, O my friend, if this is true, there is great reason to hope that, going whither I go, when I have come to the end of my journey, I shall attain that which has been the pursuit of my life. And therefore I go on my way rejoicing, and not I only, but every other man who believes that his mind has been made ready and that he is in a manner purified.
  --
  Cebes answered: I agree, Socrates, in the greater part of what you say. But in what concerns the soul, men are apt to be incredulous; they fear that when she has left the body her place may be nowhere, and that on the very day of death she may perish and come to an endimmediately on her release from the body, issuing forth dispersed like smoke or air and in her flight vanishing away into nothingness. If she could only be collected into herself after she has obtained release from the evils of which you are speaking, there would be good reason to hope, Socrates, that what you say is true. But surely it requires a great deal of argument and many proofs to show that when the man is dead his soul yet exists, and has any force or intelligence.
  True, Cebes, said Socrates; and shall I suggest that we converse a little of the probabilities of these things?
  I am sure, said Cebes, that I should greatly like to know your opinion about them.
  I reckon, said Socrates, that no one who heard me now, not even if he were one of my old enemies, the Comic poets, could accuse me of idle talking about matters in which I have no concern:If you please, then, we will proceed with the inquiry.
  Suppose we consider the question whether the souls of men after death are or are not in the world below. There comes into my mind an ancient doctrine which affirms that they go from hence into the other world, and returning hither, are born again from the dead. Now if it be true that the living come from the dead, then our souls must exist in the other world, for if not, how could they have been born again? And this would be conclusive, if there were any real evidence that the living are only born from the dead; but if this is not so, then other arguments will have to be adduced.
  --
  Now, said Socrates, I will analyze one of the two pairs of opposites which I have mentioned to you, and also its intermediate processes, and you shall analyze the other to me. One of them I term sleep, the other waking. The state of sleep is opposed to the state of waking, and out of sleeping waking is generated, and out of waking, sleeping; and the process of generation is in the one case falling asleep, and in the other waking up. Do you agree?
  I entirely agree.
  --
  Yes, Socrates, he said; the conclusion seems to flow necessarily out of our previous admissions.
  And that these admissions were not unfair, Cebes, he said, may be shown, I think, as follows: If generation were in a straight line only, and there were no compensation or circle in nature, no turn or return of elements into their opposites, then you know that all things would at last have the same form and pass into the same state, and there would be no more generation of them.
  --
  There is no escape, Socrates, said Cebes; and to me your argument seems to be absolutely true.
  Yes, he said, Cebes, it is and must be so, in my opinion; and we have not been deluded in making these admissions; but I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence, and that the good souls have a better portion than the evil.
  Cebes added: Your favorite doctrine, Socrates, that knowledge is simply recollection, if true, also necessarily implies a previous time in which we have learned that which we now recollect. But this would be impossible unless our soul had been in some place before existing in the form of man; here then is another proof of the soul's immortality.
  But tell me, Cebes, said Simmias, interposing, what arguments are urged in favour of this doctrine of recollection. I am not very sure at the moment that I remember them.
  --
  But if, said Socrates, you are still incredulous, Simmias, I would ask you whether you may not agree with me when you look at the matter in another way;I mean, if you are still incredulous as to whether knowledge is recollection.
  Incredulous, I am not, said Simmias; but I want to have this doctrine of recollection brought to my own recollection, and, from what Cebes has said, I am beginning to recollect and be convinced; but I should still like to hear what you were going to say.
  --
  Impossible, Socrates.
  Then these (so-called) equals are not the same with the idea of equality?
  I should say, clearly not, Socrates.
  And yet from these equals, although differing from the idea of equality, you conceived and attained that idea?
  --
  Yes, Socrates, as far as the argument is concerned, one of them is the same as the other.
  From the senses then is derived the knowledge that all sensible things aim at an absolute equality of which they fall short?
  --
  Quite true, Socrates.
  But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at birth, and if afterwards by the use of the senses we recovered what we previously knew, will not the process which we call learning be a recovering of the knowledge which is natural to us, and may not this be rightly termed recollection?
  --
  Yes, that is quite true, Socrates.
  And which alternative, Simmias, do you prefer? Had we the knowledge at our birth, or did we recollect the things which we knew previously to our birth?
  --
  Would that they could, Socrates, but I rather fear that to-morrow, at this time, there will no longer be any one alive who is able to give an account of them such as ought to be given.
  Then you are not of opinion, Simmias, that all men know these things?
  --
  Unless indeed you suppose, Socrates, that these notions are given us at the very moment of birth; for this is the only time which remains.
  Yes, my friend, but if so, when do we lose them? for they are not in us when we are bornthat is admitted. Do we lose them at the moment of receiving them, or if not at what other time?
  No, Socrates, I perceive that I was unconsciously talking nonsense.
  Then may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them, finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possessionthen our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be no force in the argument? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and if not the ideas, then not the souls.
  Yes, Socrates; I am convinced that there is precisely the same necessity for the one as for the other; and the argument retreats successfully to the position that the existence of the soul before birth cannot be separated from the existence of the essence of which you speak. For there is nothing which to my mind is so patent as that beauty, goodness, and the other notions of which you were just now speaking, have a most real and absolute existence; and I am satisfied with the proof.
  Well, but is Cebes equally satisfied? for I must convince him too.
  --
  But that proof, Simmias and Cebes, has been already given, said Socrates, if you put the two arguments togetherI mean this and the former one, in which we admitted that everything living is born of the dead. For if the soul exists before birth, and in coming to life and being born can be born only from death and dying, must she not after death continue to exist, since she has to be born again?Surely the proof which you desire has been already furnished. Still I suspect that you and Simmias would be glad to probe the argument further. Like children, you are haunted with a fear that when the soul leaves the body, the wind may really blow her away and scatter her; especially if a man should happen to die in a great storm and not when the sky is calm.
  Cebes answered with a smile: Then, Socrates, you must argue us out of our fearsand yet, strictly speaking, they are not our fears, but there is a child within us to whom death is a sort of hobgoblin; him too we must persuade not to be afraid when he is alone in the dark.
   Socrates said: Let the voice of the charmer be applied daily until you have charmed away the fear.
  And where shall we find a good charmer of our fears, Socrates, when you are gone?
  Hellas, he replied, is a large place, Cebes, and has many good men, and there are barbarous races not a few: seek for him among them all, far and wide, sparing neither pains nor money; for there is no better way of spending your money. And you must seek among yourselves too; for you will not find others better able to make the search.
  --
  By all means, replied Socrates; what else should I please?
  Very good.
  Must we not, said Socrates, ask ourselves what that is which, as we imagine, is liable to be scattered, and about which we fear? and what again is that about which we have no fear? And then we may proceed further to enquire whether that which suffers dispersion is or is not of the nature of soulour hopes and fears as to our own souls will turn upon the answers to these questions.
  Very true, he said.
  --
  They must be always the same, Socrates, replied Cebes.
  And what would you say of the many beautifulwhether men or horses or garments or any other things which are named by the same names and may be called equal or beautiful,are they all unchanging and the same always, or quite the reverse? May they not rather be described as almost always changing and hardly ever the same, either with themselves or with one another?
  --
  Well, then, added Socrates, let us suppose that there are two sorts of existencesone seen, the other unseen.
  Let us suppose them.
  --
  Not by man, Socrates.
  And what we mean by 'seen' and 'not seen' is that which is or is not visible to the eye of man?
  --
  That follows necessarily, Socrates.
  And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?
  --
  That is well and truly said, Socrates, he replied.
  And to which class is the soul more nearly alike and akin, as far as may be inferred from this argument, as well as from the preceding one?
  I think, Socrates, that, in the opinion of every one who follows the argument, the soul will be infinitely more like the unchangeableeven the most stupid person will not deny that.
  And the body is more like the changing?
  --
  The soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortalthere can be no doubt of that, Socrates.
  Then reflect, Cebes: of all which has been said is not this the conclusion?that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable; and that the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintellectual, and multiform, and dissoluble, and changeable. Can this, my dear Cebes, be denied?
  --
  That is very likely, Socrates.
  Yes, that is very likely, Cebes; and these must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they continue to wander until through the craving after the corporeal which never leaves them, they are imprisoned finally in another body. And they may be supposed to find their prisons in the same natures which they have had in their former lives.
  What natures do you mean, Socrates?
  What I mean is that men who have followed after gluttony, and wantonness, and drunkenness, and have had no thought of avoiding them, would pass into asses and animals of that sort. What do you think?
  --
  No, Socrates, that would not become them, said Cebes.
  No indeed, he replied; and therefore they who have any care of their own souls, and do not merely live moulding and fashioning the body, say farewell to all this; they will not walk in the ways of the blind: and when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence, and whither she leads they turn and follow.
  What do you mean, Socrates?
  I will tell you, he said. The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the soul was simply fastened and glued to the bodyuntil philosophy received her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of every sort of ignorance; and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity. This was her original state; and then, as I was saying, and as the lovers of knowledge are well aware, philosophy, seeing how terrible was her confinement, of which she was to herself the cause, received and gently comforted her and sought to release her, pointing out that the eye and the ear and the other senses are full of deception, and persuading her to retire from them, and abstain from all but the necessary use of them, and be gathered up and collected into herself, bidding her trust in herself and her own pure apprehension of pure existence, and to mistrust whatever comes to her through other channels and is subject to variation; for such things are visible and tangible, but what she sees in her own nature is intelligible and invisible. And the soul of the true philosopher thinks that she ought not to resist this deliverance, and therefore abstains from pleasures and desires and pains and fears, as far as she is able; reflecting that when a man has great joys or sorrows or fears or desires, he suffers from them, not merely the sort of evil which might be anticipatedas for example, the loss of his health or property which he has sacrificed to his lustsbut an evil greater far, which is the greatest and worst of all evils, and one of which he never thinks.
  What is it, Socrates? said Cebes.
  The evil is that when the feeling of pleasure or pain is most intense, every soul of man imagines the objects of this intense feeling to be then plainest and truest: but this is not so, they are really the things of sight.
  --
  Most true, Socrates, answered Cebes.
  And this, Cebes, is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave; and not for the reason which the world gives.
  --
  When Socrates had done speaking, for a considerable time there was silence; he himself appeared to be meditating, as most of us were, on what had been said; only Cebes and Simmias spoke a few words to one another. And Socrates observing them asked what they thought of the argument, and whether there was anything wanting? For, said he, there are many points still open to suspicion and attack, if any one were disposed to sift the matter thoroughly. Should you be considering some other matter I say no more, but if you are still in doubt do not hesitate to say exactly what you think, and let us have anything better which you can suggest; and if you think that I can be of any use, allow me to help you.
  Simmias said: I must confess, Socrates, that doubts did arise in our minds, and each of us was urging and inciting the other to put the question which we wanted to have answered and which neither of us liked to ask, fearing that our importunity might be troublesome under present at such a time.
   Socrates replied with a smile: O Simmias, what are you saying? I am not very likely to persuade other men that I do not regard my present situation as a misfortune, if I cannot even persuade you that I am no worse off now than at any other time in my life. Will you not allow that I have as much of the spirit of prophecy in me as the swans? For they, when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more lustily than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to the god whose ministers they are. But men, because they are themselves afraid of death, slanderously affirm of the swans that they sing a lament at the last, not considering that no bird sings when cold, or hungry, or in pain, not even the nightingale, nor the swallow, nor yet the hoopoe; which are said indeed to tune a lay of sorrow, although I do not believe this to be true of them any more than of the swans. But because they are sacred to Apollo, they have the gift of prophecy, and anticipate the good things of another world, wherefore they sing and rejoice in that day more than they ever did before. And I too, believing myself to be the consecrated servant of the same God, and the fellow-servant of the swans, and thinking that I have received from my master gifts of prophecy which are not inferior to theirs, would not go out of life less merrily than the swans. Never mind then, if this be your only objection, but speak and ask anything which you like, while the eleven magistrates of Athens allow.
  Very good, Socrates, said Simmias; then I will tell you my difficulty, and Cebes will tell you his. I feel myself, (and I daresay that you have the same feeling), how hard or rather impossible is the attainment of any certainty about questions such as these in the present life. And yet I should deem him a coward who did not prove what is said about them to the uttermost, or whose heart failed him before he had examined them on every side. For he should persevere until he has achieved one of two things: either he should discover, or be taught the truth about them; or, if this be impossible, I would have him take the best and most irrefragable of human theories, and let this be the raft upon which he sails through lifenot without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some word of God which will more surely and safely carry him. And now, as you bid me, I will venture to question you, and then I shall not have to reproach myself hereafter with not having said at the time what I think. For when I consider the matter, either alone or with Cebes, the argument does certainly appear to me, Socrates, to be not sufficient.
   Socrates answered: I dare say, my friend, that you may be right, but I should like to know in what respect the argument is insufficient.
  In this respect, replied Simmias:Suppose a person to use the same argument about harmony and the lyremight he not say that harmony is a thing invisible, incorporeal, perfect, divine, existing in the lyre which is harmonized, but that the lyre and the strings are matter and material, composite, earthy, and akin to mortality? And when some one breaks the lyre, or cuts and rends the strings, then he who takes this view would argue as you do, and on the same analogy, that the harmony survives and has not perishedyou cannot imagine, he would say, that the lyre without the strings, and the broken strings themselves which are mortal remain, and yet that the harmony, which is of heavenly and immortal nature and kindred, has perishedperished before the mortal. The harmony must still be somewhere, and the wood and strings will decay before anything can happen to that. The thought, Socrates, must have occurred to your own mind that such is our conception of the soul; and that when the body is in a manner strung and held together by the elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, then the soul is the harmony or due proportionate admixture of them. But if so, whenever the strings of the body are unduly loosened or overstrained through disease or other injury, then the soul, though most divine, like other harmonies of music or of works of art, of course perishes at once, although the material remains of the body may last for a considerable time, until they are either decayed or burnt. And if any one maintains that the soul, being the harmony of the elements of the body, is first to perish in that which is called death, how shall we answer him?
   Socrates looked fixedly at us as his manner was, and said with a smile: Simmias has reason on his side; and why does not some one of you who is better able than myself answer him? for there is force in his attack upon me. But perhaps, before we answer him, we had better also hear what Cebes has to say that we may gain time for reflection, and when they have both spoken, we may either assent to them, if there is truth in what they say, or if not, we will maintain our position. Please to tell me then, Cebes, he said, what was the difficulty which troubled you?
  --
  ECHECRATES: There I feel with youby heaven I do, Phaedo, and when you were speaking, I was beginning to ask myself the same question: What argument can I ever trust again? For what could be more convincing than the argument of Socrates, which has now fallen into discredit? That the soul is a harmony is a doctrine which has always had a wonderful attraction for me, and, when mentioned, came back to me at once, as my own original conviction. And now I must begin again and find another argument which will assure me that when the man is dead the soul survives. Tell me, I implore you, how did Socrates proceed? Did he appear to share the unpleasant feeling which you mention? or did he calmly meet the attack? And did he answer forcibly or feebly? Narrate what passed as exactly as you can.
  PHAEDO: Often, Echecrates, I have wondered at Socrates, but never more than on that occasion. That he should be able to answer was nothing, but what astonished me was, first, the gentle and pleasant and approving manner in which he received the words of the young men, and then his quick sense of the wound which had been inflicted by the argument, and the readiness with which he healed it. He might be compared to a general rallying his defeated and broken army, urging them to accompany him and return to the field of argument.
  ECHECRATES: What followed?
  --
  Yes, Socrates, I suppose that they will, I replied.
  Not so, if you will take my advice.
  --
  Let us then, in the first place, he said, be careful of allowing or of admitting into our souls the notion that there is no health or soundness in any arguments at all. Rather say that we have not yet attained to soundness in ourselves, and that we must struggle manfully and do our best to gain health of mindyou and all other men having regard to the whole of your future life, and I myself in the prospect of death. For at this moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher; like the vulgar, I am only a partisan. Now the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. And the difference between him and me at the present moment is merely thisthat whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to convince my hearers is a secondary matter with me. And do but see how much I gain by the argument. For if what I say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of the truth, but if there be nothing after death, still, during the short time that remains, I shall not distress my friends with lamentations, and my ignorance will not last, but will die with me, and therefore no harm will be done. This is the state of mind, Simmias and Cebes, in which I approach the argument. And I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of Socrates: agree with me, if I seem to you to be speaking the truth; or if not, withstand me might and main, that I may not deceive you as well as myself in my enthusiasm, and like the bee, leave my sting in you before I die.
  And now let us proceed, he said. And first of all let me be sure that I have in my mind what you were saying. Simmias, if I remember rightly, has fears and misgivings whether the soul, although a fairer and diviner thing than the body, being as she is in the form of harmony, may not perish first. On the other hand, Cebes appeared to grant that the soul was more lasting than the body, but he said that no one could know whether the soul, after having worn out many bodies, might not perish herself and leave her last body behind her; and that this is death, which is the destruction not of the body but of the soul, for in the body the work of destruction is ever going on. Are not these, Simmias and Cebes, the points which we have to consider?
  --
  But, rejoined Socrates, you will have to think differently, my Theban friend, if you still maintain that harmony is a compound, and that the soul is a harmony which is made out of strings set in the frame of the body; for you will surely never allow yourself to say that a harmony is prior to the elements which compose it.
  Never, Socrates.
  But do you not see that this is what you imply when you say that the soul existed before she took the form and body of man, and was made up of elements which as yet had no existence? For harmony is not like the soul, as you suppose; but first the lyre, and the strings, and the sounds exist in a state of discord, and then harmony is made last of all, and perishes first. And how can such a notion of the soul as this agree with the other?
  --
  I think, he replied, that I have a much stronger faith, Socrates, in the first of the two, which has been fully demonstrated to me, than in the latter, which has not been demonstrated at all, but rests only on probable and plausible grounds; and is therefore believed by the many. I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are impostors, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptivein geometry, and in other things too. But the doctrine of knowledge and recollection has been proven to me on trustworthy grounds; and the proof was that the soul must have existed before she came into the body, because to her belongs the essence of which the very name implies existence. Having, as I am convinced, rightly accepted this conclusion, and on sufficient grounds, I must, as I suppose, cease to argue or allow others to argue that the soul is a harmony.
  Let me put the matter, Simmias, he said, in another point of view: Do you imagine that a harmony or any other composition can be in a state other than that of the elements, out of which it is compounded?
  --
  I agree with you, Socrates, he said.
  And can all this be true, think you? he said; for these are the consequences which seem to follow from the assumption that the soul is a harmony?
  --
  Yes, Socrates, I quite think so.
  Then, my friend, we can never be right in saying that the soul is a harmony, for we should contradict the divine Homer, and contradict ourselves.
  --
  Thus much, said Socrates, of Harmonia, your Theban goddess, who has graciously yielded to us; but what shall I say, Cebes, to her husb and Cadmus, and how shall I make peace with him?
  I think that you will discover a way of propitiating him, said Cebes; I am sure that you have put the argument with Harmonia in a manner that I could never have expected. For when Simmias was mentioning his difficulty, I quite imagined that no answer could be given to him, and therefore I was surprised at finding that his argument could not sustain the first onset of yours, and not impossibly the other, whom you call Cadmus, may share a similar fate.
  Nay, my good friend, said Socrates, let us not boast, lest some evil eye should put to flight the word which I am about to speak. That, however, may be left in the hands of those above, while I draw near in Homeric fashion, and try the mettle of your words. Here lies the point:You want to have it proven to you that the soul is imperishable and immortal, and the philosopher who is confident in death appears to you to have but a vain and foolish confidence, if he believes that he will fare better in the world below than one who has led another sort of life, unless he can prove this; and you say that the demonstration of the strength and divinity of the soul, and of her existence prior to our becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality. Admitting the soul to be longlived, and to have known and done much in a former state, still she is not on that account immortal; and her entrance into the human form may be a sort of disease which is the beginning of dissolution, and may at last, after the toils of life are over, end in that which is called death. And whether the soul enters into the body once only or many times, does not, as you say, make any difference in the fears of individuals. For any man, who is not devoid of sense, must fear, if he has no knowledge and can give no account of the soul's immortality. This, or something like this, I suspect to be your notion, Cebes; and I designedly recur to it in order that nothing may escape us, and that you may, if you wish, add or subtract anything.
  But, said Cebes, as far as I see at present, I have nothing to add or subtract: I mean what you say that I mean.
  --
  Then I will tell you, said Socrates. When I was young, Cebes, I had a prodigious desire to know that department of philosophy which is called the investigation of nature; to know the causes of things, and why a thing is and is created or destroyed appeared to me to be a lofty profession; and I was always agitating myself with the consideration of questions such as these:Is the growth of animals the result of some decay which the hot and cold principle contracts, as some have said? Is the blood the element with which we think, or the air, or the fire? or perhaps nothing of the kindbut the brain may be the originating power of the perceptions of hearing and sight and smell, and memory and opinion may come from them, and science may be based on memory and opinion when they have attained fixity. And then I went on to examine the corruption of them, and then to the things of heaven and earth, and at last I concluded myself to be utterly and absolutely incapable of these enquiries, as I will satisfactorily prove to you. For I was fascinated by them to such a degree that my eyes grew blind to things which I had seemed to myself, and also to others, to know quite well; I forgot what I had before thought self-evident truths; e.g. such a fact as that the growth of man is the result of eating and drinking; for when by the digestion of food flesh is added to flesh and bone to bone, and whenever there is an aggregation of congenial elements, the lesser bulk becomes larger and the small man great. Was not that a reasonable notion?
  Yes, said Cebes, I think so.
  --
  What expectations I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavoured to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posturethat is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attri bute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotiaby the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming. And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which in arranging them as they are arranges them for the best never enters into their minds; and instead of finding any superior strength in it, they rather expect to discover another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good;of the obligatory and containing power of the good they think nothing; and yet this is the principle which I would fain learn if any one would teach me. But as I have failed either to discover myself, or to learn of any one else, the nature of the best, I will exhibit to you, if you like, what I have found to be the second best mode of enquiring into the cause.
  I should very much like to hear, he replied.
  --
  ECHECRATES: Yes, Phaedo; and I do not wonder at their assenting. Any one who has the least sense will acknowledge the wonderful clearness of Socrates' reasoning.
  PHAEDO: Certainly, Echecrates; and such was the feeling of the whole company at the time.
  --
  PHAEDO: After all this had been admitted, and they had that ideas exist, and that other things participate in them and derive their names from them, Socrates, if I remember rightly, said:
  This is your way of speaking; and yet when you say that Simmias is greater than Socrates and less than Phaedo, do you not predicate of Simmias both greatness and smallness?
  Yes, I do.
  But still you allow that Simmias does not really exceed Socrates, as the words may seem to imply, because he is Simmias, but by reason of the size which he has; just as Simmias does not exceed Socrates because he is Simmias, any more than because Socrates is Socrates, but because he has smallness when compared with the greatness of Simmias?
  True.
  --
  Then we are agreed after all, said Socrates, that the opposite will never in any case be opposed to itself?
  To that we are quite agreed, he replied.
  --
  Yes, abundantly proven, Socrates, he replied.
  Supposing that the odd were imperishable, must not three be imperishable?
  --
  Yes, replied Socrates, and yet all men will agree that God, and the essential form of life, and the immortal in general, will never perish.
  Yes, all men, he saidthat is true; and what is more, gods, if I am not mistaken, as well as men.
  --
  I am convinced, Socrates, said Cebes, and have nothing more to object; but if my friend Simmias, or any one else, has any further objection to make, he had better speak out, and not keep silence, since I do not know to what other season he can defer the discussion, if there is anything which he wants to say or to have said.
  But I have nothing more to say, replied Simmias; nor can I see any reason for doubt after what has been said. But I still feel and cannot help feeling uncertain in my own mind, when I think of the greatness of the subject and the feebleness of man.
  Yes, Simmias, replied Socrates, that is well said: and I may add that first principles, even if they appear certain, should be carefully considered; and when they are satisfactorily ascertained, then, with a sort of hesitating confidence in human reason, you may, I think, follow the course of the argument; and if that be plain and clear, there will be no need for any further enquiry.
  Very true.
  --
  What do you mean, Socrates? said Simmias. I have myself heard many descriptions of the earth, but I do not know, and I should very much like to know, in which of these you put faith.
  And I, Simmias, replied Socrates, if I had the art of Glaucus would tell you; although I know not that the art of Glaucus could prove the truth of my tale, which I myself should never be able to prove, and even if I could, I fear, Simmias, that my life would come to an end before the argument was completed. I may describe to you, however, the form and regions of the earth according to my conception of them.
  That, said Simmias, will be enough.
  --
  And we, Socrates, replied Simmias, shall be charmed to listen to you.
  The tale, my friend, he said, is as follows:In the first place, the earth, when looked at from above, is in appearance streaked like one of those balls which have leather coverings in twelve pieces, and is decked with various colours, of which the colours used by painters on earth are in a manner samples. But there the whole earth is made up of them, and they are brighter far and clearer than ours; there is a purple of wonderful lustre, also the radiance of gold, and the white which is in the earth is whiter than any chalk or snow. Of these and other colours the earth is made up, and they are more in number and fairer than the eye of man has ever seen; the very hollows (of which I was speaking) filled with air and water have a colour of their own, and are seen like light gleaming amid the diversity of the other colours, so that the whole presents a single and continuous appearance of variety in unity. And in this fair region everything that growstrees, and flowers, and fruitsare in a like degree fairer than any here; and there are hills, having stones in them in a like degree smoother, and more transparent, and fairer in colour than our highly-valued emeralds and sardonyxes and jaspers, and other gems, which are but minute fragments of them: for there all the stones are like our precious stones, and fairer still (compare Republic). The reason is, that they are pure, and not, like our precious stones, infected or corroded by the corrupt briny elements which coagulate among us, and which breed foulness and disease both in earth and stones, as well as in animals and plants. They are the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are set in the light of day and are large and abundant and in all places, making the earth a sight to gladden the beholder's eye. And there are animals and men, some in a middle region, others dwelling about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air flows round, near the continent: and in a word, the air is used by them as the water and the sea are by us, and the ether is to them what the air is to us. Moreover, the temperament of their seasons is such that they have no disease, and live much longer than we do, and have sight and hearing and smell, and all the other senses, in far greater perfection, in the same proportion that air is purer than water or the ether than air. Also they have temples and sacred places in which the gods really dwell, and they hear their voices and receive their answers, and are conscious of them and hold converse with them, and they see the sun, moon, and stars as they truly are, and their other blessedness is of a piece with this.
  --
  When he had done speaking, Crito said: And have you any commands for us, Socratesanything to say about your children, or any other matter in which we can serve you?
  Nothing particular, Crito, he replied: only, as I have always told you, take care of yourselves; that is a service which you may be ever rendering to me and mine and to all of us, whether you promise to do so or not. But if you have no thought for yourselves, and care not to walk according to the rule which I have prescribed for you, not now for the first time, however much you may profess or promise at the moment, it will be of no avail.
  --
  In any way that you like; but you must get hold of me, and take care that I do not run away from you. Then he turned to us, and added with a smile:I cannot make Crito believe that I am the same Socrates who have been talking and conducting the argument; he fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead bodyand he asks, How shall he bury me? And though I have spoken many words in the endeavour to show that when I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed,these words of mine, with which I was comforting you and myself, have had, as I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore I want you to be surety for me to him now, as at the trial he was surety to the judges for me: but let the promise be of another sort; for he was surety for me to the judges that I would remain, and you must be my surety to him that I shall not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned or buried. I would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the burial, Thus we lay out Socrates, or, Thus we follow him to the grave or bury him; for false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer, then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that whatever is usual, and what you think best.
  When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into a chamber to bathe; Crito followed him and told us to wait. So we remained behind, talking and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the greatness of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being bereaved, and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans. When he had taken the bath his children were brought to him(he had two young sons and an elder one); and the women of his family also came, and he talked to them and gave them a few directions in the presence of Crito; then he dismissed them and returned to us.
  Now the hour of sunset was near, for a good deal of time had passed while he was within. When he came out, he sat down with us again after his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer, who was the servant of the Eleven, entered and stood by him, saying:To you, Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of all who ever came to this place, I will not impute the angry feelings of other men, who rage and swear at me, when, in obedience to the authorities, I bid them drink the poisonindeed, I am sure that you will not be angry with me; for others, as you are aware, and not I, are to blame. And so fare you well, and try to bear lightly what must needs beyou know my errand. Then bursting into tears he turned away and went out.
   Socrates looked at him and said: I return your good wishes, and will do as you bid. Then turning to us, he said, How charming the man is: since I have been in prison he has always been coming to see me, and at times he would talk to me, and was as good to me as could be, and now see how generously he sorrows on my account. We must do as he says, Crito; and therefore let the cup be brought, if the poison is prepared: if not, let the attendant prepare some.
  --
  Crito made a sign to the servant, who was standing by; and he went out, and having been absent for some time, returned with the jailer carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said: You, my good friend, who are experienced in these matters, shall give me directions how I am to proceed. The man answered: You have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act. At the same time he handed the cup to Socrates, who in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the least fear or change of colour or feature, looking at the man with all his eyes, Echecrates, as his manner was, took the cup and said: What do you say about making a libation out of this cup to any god? May I, or not? The man answered: We only prepare, Socrates, just so much as we deem enough. I understand, he said: but I may and must ask the gods to prosper my journey from this to the other worldeven soand so be it according to my prayer. Then raising the cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had been able to control our sorrow; but now when we saw him drinking, and saw too that he had finished the draught, we could no longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were flowing fast; so that I covered my face and wept, not for him, but at the thought of my own calamity in having to part from such a friend. Nor was I the first; for Crito, when he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been weeping all the time, broke out in a loud and passionate cry which made cowards of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness: What is this strange outcry? he said. I sent away the women mainly in order that they might not misbehave in this way, for I have been told that a man should die in peace. Be quiet, then, and have patience. When we heard his words we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he lay on his back, according to the directions, and the man who gave him the poison now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a while he pressed his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel; and he said, No; and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and said: When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end. He was beginning to grow cold about the groin, when he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up, and saidthey were his last wordshe said: Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? The debt shall be paid, said Crito; is there anything else? There was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two a movement was heard, and the attendants uncovered him; his eyes were set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth.
  Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

Sophist, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The dramatic power of the dialogues of Plato appears to diminish as the metaphysical interest of them increases (compare Introd. to the Philebus). There are no descriptions of time, place or persons, in the Sophist and Statesman, but we are plunged at once into philosophical discussions; the poetical charm has disappeared, and those who have no taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire of developing the dialectical method. On the other hand, the kindred spirit of Hegel seemed to find in the Sophist the crown and summit of the Platonic philosophyhere is the place at which Plato most nearly approaches to the Hegelian identity of Being and Not-being. Nor will the great importance of the two dialogues be doubted by any one who forms a conception of the state of mind and opinion which they are intended to meet. The sophisms of the day were undermining philosophy; the denial of the existence of Not-being, and of the connexion of ideas, was making truth and falsehood equally impossible. It has been said that Plato would have written differently, if he had been acquainted with the Organon of Aristotle. But could the Organon of Aristotle ever have been written unless the Sophist and Statesman had preceded? The swarm of fallacies which arose in the infancy of mental science, and which was born and bred in the decay of the pre-Socratic philosophies, was not dispelled by Aristotle, but by Socrates and Plato. The summa genera of thought, the nature of the proposition, of definition, of generalization, of synthesis and analysis, of division and cross-division, are clearly described, and the processes of induction and deduction are constantly employed in the dialogues of Plato. The 'slippery' nature of comparison, the danger of putting words in the place of things, the fallacy of arguing 'a dicto secundum,' and in a circle, are frequently indicated by him. To all these processes of truth and error, Aristotle, in the next generation, gave distinctness; he brought them together in a separate science. But he is not to be regarded as the original inventor of any of the great logical forms, with the exception of the syllogism.
  There is little worthy of remark in the characters of the Sophist. The most noticeable point is the final retirement of Socrates from the field of argument, and the substitution for him of an Eleatic stranger, who is described as a pupil of Parmenides and Zeno, and is supposed to have descended from a higher world in order to convict the Socratic circle of error. As in the Timaeus, Plato seems to intimate by the withdrawal of Socrates that he is passing beyond the limits of his teaching; and in the Sophist and Statesman, as well as in the Parmenides, he probably means to imply that he is making a closer approach to the schools of Elea and Megara. He had much in common with them, but he must first submit their ideas to criticism and revision. He had once thought as he says, speaking by the mouth of the Eleatic, that he understood their doctrine of Not-being; but now he does not even comprehend the nature of Being. The friends of ideas (Soph.) are alluded to by him as distant acquaintances, whom he criticizes ab extra; we do not recognize at first sight that he is criticizing himself. The character of the Eleatic stranger is colourless; he is to a certain extent the reflection of his father and master, Parmenides, who is the protagonist in the dialogue which is called by his name. Theaetetus himself is not distinguished by the remarkable traits which are attributed to him in the preceding dialogue. He is no longer under the spell of Socrates, or subject to the operation of his midwifery, though the fiction of question and answer is still maintained, and the necessity of taking Theaetetus along with him is several times insisted upon by his partner in the discussion. There is a reminiscence of the old Theaetetus in his remark that he will not tire of the argument, and in his conviction, which the Eleatic thinks likely to be permanent, that the course of events is governed by the will of God. Throughout the two dialogues Socrates continues a silent auditor, in the Statesman just reminding us of his presence, at the commencement, by a characteristic jest about the statesman and the philosopher, and by an allusion to his namesake, with whom on that ground he claims relationship, as he had already claimed an affinity with Theaetetus, grounded on the likeness of his ugly face. But in neither dialogue, any more than in the Timaeus, does he offer any criticism on the views which are propounded by another.
  The style, though wanting in dramatic power,in this respect resembling the Philebus and the Laws,is very clear and accurate, and has several touches of humour and satire. The language is less fanciful and imaginative than that of the earlier dialogues; and there is more of bitterness, as in the Laws, though traces of a similar temper may also be observed in the description of the 'great brute' in the Republic, and in the contrast of the lawyer and philosopher in the Theaetetus. The following are characteristic passages: 'The ancient philosophers, of whom we may say, without offence, that they went on their way rather regardless of whether we understood them or not;' the picture of the materialists, or earth-born giants, 'who grasped oaks and rocks in their hands,' and who must be improved before they can be reasoned with; and the equally humourous delineation of the friends of ideas, who defend themselves from a fastness in the invisible world; or the comparison of the Sophist to a painter or maker (compare Republic), and the hunt after him in the rich meadow-lands of youth and wealth; or, again, the light and graceful touch with which the older philosophies are painted ('Ionian and Sicilian muses'), the comparison of them to mythological tales, and the fear of the Eleatic that he will be counted a parricide if he ventures to lay hands on his father Parmenides; or, once more, the likening of the Eleatic stranger to a god from heaven.All these passages, notwithstanding the decline of the style, retain the impress of the great master of language. But the equably diffused grace is gone; instead of the endless variety of the early dialogues, traces of the rhythmical monotonous cadence of the Laws begin to appear; and already an approach is made to the technical language of Aristotle, in the frequent use of the words 'essence,' 'power,' 'generation,' 'motion,' 'rest,' 'action,' 'passion,' and the like.
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  I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who is not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded, is the opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost equally ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy of Plato, now boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of philosophy, now more akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing, now questioning, until the final appearance in the Politicus of his departing shadow in the disguise of a statesman. We are not to suppose that Plato intended by such a description to depict Protagoras or Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus, who all turn out to be 'very good sort of people when we know them,' and all of them part on good terms with Socrates. But he is speaking of a being as imaginary as the wise man of the Stoics, and whose character varies in different dialogues. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.
  A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage of the Republic, where they are described as the followers rather than the leaders of the rest of mankind. Plato ridicules the notion that any individuals can corrupt youth to a degree worth speaking of in comparison with the greater influence of public opinion. But there is no real inconsistency between this and other descriptions of the Sophist which occur in the Platonic writings. For Plato is not justifying the Sophists in the passage just quoted, but only representing their power to be contemptible; they are to be despised rather than feared, and are no worse than the rest of mankind. But a teacher or statesman may be justly condemned, who is on a level with mankind when he ought to be above them. There is another point of view in which this passage should also be considered. The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly differentthe world as the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. This creature has many heads: rhetoricians, lawyers, statesmen, poets, sophists. But the Sophist is the Proteus who takes the likeness of all of them; all other deceivers have a piece of him in them. And sometimes he is represented as the corrupter of the world; and sometimes the world as the corrupter of him and of itself.
  Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic defender in the distinguished historian of Greece. He appears to maintain (1) that the term 'Sophist' is not the name of a particular class, and would have been applied indifferently to Socrates and Plato, as well as to Gorgias and Protagoras; (2) that the bad sense was imprinted on the word by the genius of Plato; (3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters of youth (for the Athenian youth were no more corrupted in the age of Demos thenes than in the age of Pericles), but honourable and estimable persons, who supplied a training in literature which was generally wanted at the time. We will briefly consider how far these statements appear to be justified by facts: and, 1, about the meaning of the word there arises an interesting question:
  Many words are used both in a general and a specific sense, and the two senses are not always clearly distinguished. Sometimes the generic meaning has been narrowed to the specific, while in other cases the specific meaning has been enlarged or altered. Examples of the former class are furnished by some ecclesiastical terms: apostles, prophets, bishops, elders, catholics. Examples of the latter class may also be found in a similar field: jesuits, puritans, methodists, and the like. Sometimes the meaning is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or bad sense will subsist side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect is produced on the meaning of a word when the very term which is stigmatized by the world (e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious or derided class; this tends to define the meaning. Or, again, the opposite result is produced, when the world refuses to allow some sect or body of men the possession of an honourable name which they have assumed, or applies it to them only in mockery or irony.
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  But the real question is, not whether the word 'Sophist' has all these senses, but whether there is not also a specific bad sense in which the term is applied to certain contemporaries of Socrates. Would an Athenian, as Mr. Grote supposes, in the fifth century before Christ, have included Socrates and Plato, as well as Gorgias and Protagoras, under the specific class of Sophists? To this question we must answer, No: if ever the term is applied to Socrates and Plato, either the application is made by an enemy out of mere spite, or the sense in which it is used is neutral. Plato, Xenophon, I Socrates, Aristotle, all give a bad import to the word; and the Sophists are regarded as a separate class in all of them. And in later Greek literature, the distinction is quite marked between the succession of philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, and the Sophists of the age of Socrates, who appeared like meteors for a short time in different parts of Greece. For the purposes of comedy, Socrates may have been identified with the Sophists, and he seems to complain of this in the Apology. But there is no reason to suppose that Socrates, differing by so many outward marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of Anytus, or Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid foreigners who from time to time visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic games. The man of genius, the great original thinker, the disinterested seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an 'interval which no geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences, the interpreter and reciter of the poets, the divider of the meanings of words, the teacher of rhetoric, the professor of morals and manners.
  2. The use of the term 'Sophist' in the dialogues of Plato also shows that the bad sense was not affixed by his genius, but already current. When Protagoras says, 'I confess that I am a Sophist,' he implies that the art which he professes has already a bad name; and the words of the young Hippocrates, when with a blush upon his face which is just seen by the light of dawn he admits that he is going to be made 'a Sophist,' would lose their point, unless the term had been discredited. There is nothing surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that, whether deserved or not, was a natural consequence of their vocation. That they were foreigners, that they made fortunes, that they taught novelties, that they excited the minds of youth, are quite sufficient reasons to account for the opprobrium which attached to them. The genius of Plato could not have stamped the word anew, or have imparted the associations which occur in contemporary writers, such as Xenophon and I Socrates. Changes in the meaning of words can only be made with great difficulty, and not unless they are supported by a strong current of popular feeling. There is nothing improbable in supposing that Plato may have extended and envenomed the meaning, or that he may have done the Sophists the same kind of disservice with posterity which Pascal did to the Jesuits. But the bad sense of the word was not and could not have been invented by him, and is found in his earlier dialogues, e.g. the Protagoras, as well as in the later.
  3. There is no ground for disbelieving that the principal Sophists, Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippias, were good and honourable men. The notion that they were corrupters of the Athenian youth has no real foundation, and partly arises out of the use of the term 'Sophist' in modern times. The truth is, that we know little about them; and the witness of Plato in their favour is probably not much more historical than his witness against them. Of that national decline of genius, unity, political force, which has been sometimes described as the corruption of youth, the Sophists were one among many signs;in these respects Athens may have degenerated; but, as Mr. Grote remarks, there is no reason to suspect any greater moral corruption in the age of Demos thenes than in the age of Pericles. The Athenian youth were not corrupted in this sense, and therefore the Sophists could not have corrupted them. It is remarkable, and may be fairly set down to their credit, that Plato nowhere attri butes to them that peculiar Greek sympathy with youth, which he ascribes to Parmenides, and which was evidently common in the Socratic circle. Plato delights to exhibit them in a ludicrous point of view, and to show them always rather at a disadvantage in the company of Socrates. But he has no quarrel with their characters, and does not deny that they are respectable men.
  The Sophist, in the dialogue which is called after him, is exhibited in many different lights, and appears and reappears in a variety of forms. There is some want of the higher Platonic art in the Eleatic Stranger eliciting his true character by a labourious process of enquiry, when he had already admitted that he knew quite well the difference between the Sophist and the Philosopher, and had often heard the question discussed;such an anticipation would hardly have occurred in the earlier dialogues. But Plato could not altogether give up his Socratic method, of which another trace may be thought to be discerned in his adoption of a common instance before he proceeds to the greater matter in hand. Yet the example is also chosen in order to damage the 'hooker of men' as much as possible; each step in the pedigree of the angler suggests some injurious reflection about the Sophist. They are both hunters after a living prey, nearly related to tyrants and thieves, and the Sophist is the cousin of the parasite and flatterer. The effect of this is heightened by the accidental manner in which the discovery is made, as the result of a scientific division. His descent in another branch affords the opportunity of more 'unsavoury comparisons.' For he is a retail trader, and his wares are either imported or home-made, like those of other retail traders; his art is thus deprived of the character of a liberal profession. But the most distinguishing characteristic of him is, that he is a disputant, and higgles over an argument. A feature of the Eristic here seems to blend with Plato's usual description of the Sophists, who in the early dialogues, and in the Republic, are frequently depicted as endeavouring to save themselves from disputing with Socrates by making long orations. In this character he parts company from the vain and impertinent talker in private life, who is a loser of money, while he is a maker of it.
  But there is another general division under which his art may be also supposed to fall, and that is purification; and from purification is descended education, and the new principle of education is to interrogate men after the manner of Socrates, and make them teach themselves. Here again we catch a glimpse rather of a Socratic or Eristic than of a Sophist in the ordinary sense of the term. And Plato does not on this ground reject the claim of the Sophist to be the true philosopher. One more feature of the Eristic rather than of the Sophist is the tendency of the troublesome animal to run away into the darkness of Not-being. Upon the whole, we detect in him a sort of hybrid or double nature, of which, except perhaps in the Euthydemus of Plato, we find no other trace in Greek philosophy; he combines the teacher of virtue with the Eristic; while in his omniscience, in his ignorance of himself, in his arts of deception, and in his lawyer-like habit of writing and speaking about all things, he is still the antithesis of Socrates and of the true teacher.
  II. The question has been asked, whether the method of 'abscissio infinti,' by which the Sophist is taken, is a real and valuable logical process. Modern science feels that this, like other processes of formal logic, presents a very inadequate conception of the actual complex procedure of the mind by which scientific truth is detected and verified. Plato himself seems to be aware that mere division is an unsafe and uncertain weapon, first, in the Statesman, when he says that we should divide in the middle, for in that way we are more likely to attain species; secondly, in the parallel precept of the Philebus, that we should not pass from the most general notions to infinity, but include all the intervening middle principles, until, as he also says in the Statesman, we arrive at the infima species; thirdly, in the Phaedrus, when he says that the dialectician will carve the limbs of truth without mangling them; and once more in the Statesman, if we cannot bisect species, we must carve them as well as we can. No better image of nature or truth, as an organic whole, can be conceived than this. So far is Plato from supposing that mere division and subdivision of general notions will guide men into all truth.
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  1. They pursue verbal oppositions; 2. they make reasoning impossible by their over-accuracy in the use of language; 3. they deny predication; 4. they go from unity to plurality, without passing through the intermediate stages; 5. they refuse to attri bute motion or power to Being; 6. they are the enemies of sense;whether they are the 'friends of ideas,' who carry on the polemic against sense, is uncertain; probably under this remarkable expression Plato designates those who more nearly approached himself, and may be criticizing an earlier form of his own doctrines. We may observe (1) that he professes only to give us a few opinions out of many which were at that time current in Greece; (2) that he nowhere alludes to the ethical teaching of the Cynicsunless the argument in the Protagoras, that the virtues are one and not many, may be supposed to contain a reference to their views, as well as to those of Socrates; and unless they are the school alluded to in the Philebus, which is described as 'being very skilful in physics, and as maintaining pleasure to be the absence of pain.' That Antis thenes wrote a book called 'Physicus,' is hardly a sufficient reason for describing them as skilful in physics, which appear to have been very alien to the tendency of the Cynics.
  The Idealism of the fourth century before Christ in Greece, as in other ages and countries, seems to have provoked a reaction towards Materialism. The maintainers of this doctrine are described in the Theaetetus as obstinate persons who will believe in nothing which they cannot hold in their hands, and in the Sophist as incapable of argument. They are probably the same who are said in the Tenth Book of the Laws to attri bute the course of events to nature, art, and chance. Who they were, we have no means of determining except from Plato's description of them. His silence respecting the Atomists might lead us to suppose that here we have a trace of them. But the Atomists were not Materialists in the grosser sense of the term, nor were they incapable of reasoning; and Plato would hardly have described a great genius like Democritus in the disdainful terms which he uses of the Materialists. Upon the whole, we must infer that the persons here spoken of are unknown to us, like the many other writers and talkers at Athens and elsewhere, of whose endless activity of mind Aristotle in his Metaphysics has preserved an anonymous memorial.
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  True to the appointment of the previous day, Theodorus and Theaetetus meet Socrates at the same spot, bringing with them an Eleatic Stranger, whom Theodorus introduces as a true philosopher. Socrates, half in jest, half in earnest, declares that he must be a god in disguise, who, as Homer would say, has come to earth that he may visit the good and evil among men, and detect the foolishness of Athenian wisdom. At any rate he is a divine person, one of a class who are hardly recognized on earth; who appear in divers formsnow as statesmen, now as sophists, and are often deemed madmen. 'Philosopher, statesman, sophist,' says Socrates, repeating the words'I should like to ask our Eleatic friend what his countrymen think of them; do they regard them as one, or three?'
  The Stranger has been already asked the same question by Theodorus and Theaetetus; and he at once replies that they are thought to be three; but to explain the difference fully would take time. He is pressed to give this fuller explanation, either in the form of a speech or of question and answer. He prefers the latter, and chooses as his respondent Theaetetus, whom he already knows, and who is recommended to him by Socrates.
  We are agreed, he says, about the name Sophist, but we may not be equally agreed about his nature. Great subjects should be approached through familiar examples, and, considering that he is a creature not easily caught, I think that, before approaching him, we should try our hand upon some more obvious animal, who may be made the subject of logical experiment; shall we say an angler? 'Very good.'
  --
  It is difficult within the compass of a few pages to give even a faint outline of the Hegelian dialectic. No philosophy which is worth understanding can be understood in a moment; common sense will not teach us metaphysics any more than mathematics. If all sciences demand of us protracted study and attention, the highest of all can hardly be matter of immediate intuition. Neither can we appreciate a great system without yielding a half assent to itlike flies we are caught in the spider's web; and we can only judge of it truly when we place ourselves at a distance from it. Of all philosophies Hegelianism is the most obscure: and the difficulty inherent in the subject is increased by the use of a technical language. The saying of Socrates respecting the writings of Heracleitus'Noble is that which I understand, and that which I do not understand may be as noble; but the strength of a Delian diver is needed to swim through it'expresses the feeling with which the reader rises from the perusal of Hegel. We may truly apply to him the words in which Plato describes the Pre-Socratic philosophers: 'He went on his way rather regardless of whether we understood him or not'; or, as he is reported himself to have said of his own pupils: 'There is only one of you who understands me, and he does NOT understand me.'
  Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest about it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology, maintains not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by a mere crude substitution of one word for another, but by showing either of them to be the complement of the other. Both are creations of thought, and the difference in kind which seems to divide them may also be regarded as a difference of degree. One is to the other as the real to the ideal, and both may be conceived together under the higher form of the notion. (ii) Under another aspect it views all the forms of sense and knowledge as stages of thought which have always existed implicitly and unconsciously, and to which the mind of the world, gradually disengaged from sense, has become awakened. The present has been the past. The succession in time of human ideas is also the eternal 'now'; it is historical and also a divine ideal. The history of philosophy stripped of personality and of the other accidents of time and place is gathered up into philosophy, and again philosophy clothed in circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether regarded as present or past, under the form of time or of eternity, the spirit of dialectic is always moving onwards from one determination of thought to another, receiving each successive system of philosophy and subordinating it to that which followsimpelled by an irresistible necessity from one idea to another until the cycle of human thought and existence is complete. It follows from this that all previous philosophies which are worthy of the name are not mere opinions or speculations, but stages or moments of thought which have a necessary place in the world of mind. They are no longer the last word of philosophy, for another and another has succeeded them, but they still live and are mighty; in the language of the Greek poet, 'There is a great God in them, and he grows not old.' (iv) This vast ideal system is supposed to be based upon experience. At each step it professes to carry with it the 'witness of eyes and ears' and of common sense, as well as the internal evidence of its own consistency; it has a place for every science, and affirms that no philosophy of a narrower type is capable of comprehending all true facts.
  --
  (b) Hegel's treatment of the early Greek thinkers affords the readiest illustration of his meaning in conceiving all philosophy under the form of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought. Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form which was at first simply a material element, the most equable and colourless and universal which could be found. But soon the human mind became dissatisfied with the emblem, and after ringing the changes on one element after another, demanded a more abstract and perfect conception, such as one or Being, which was absolutely at rest. But the positive had its negative, the conception of Being involved Not-being, the conception of one, many, the conception of a whole, parts. Then the pendulum swung to the other side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes to Heracleitus. The opposition of Being and Not-being projected into space became the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus. Until the Atomists, the abstraction of the individual did not exist; in the philosophy of Anaxagoras the idea of mind, whether human or divine, was beginning to be realized. The pendulum gave another swing, from the individual to the universal, from the object to the subject. The Sophist first uttered the word 'Man is the measure of all things,' which Socrates presented in a new form as the study of ethics. Once more we return from mind to the object of mind, which is knowledge, and out of knowledge the various degrees or kinds of knowledge more or less abstract were gradually developed. The threefold division of logic, physic, and ethics, foreshadowed in Plato, was finally established by Aristotle and the Stoics. Thus, according to Hegel, in the course of about two centuries by a process of antagonism and negation the leading thoughts of philosophy were evolved.
  There is nothing like this progress of opposites in Plato, who in the Symposium denies the possibility of reconciliation until the opposition has passed away. In his own words, there is an absurdity in supposing that 'harmony is discord; for in reality harmony consists of notes of a higher and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music' (Symp.). He does indeed describe objects of sense as regarded by us sometimes from one point of view and sometimes from another. As he says at the end of the Fifth Book of the Republic, 'There is nothing light which is not heavy, or great which is not small.' And he extends this relativity to the conceptions of just and good, as well as to great and small. In like manner he acknowledges that the same number may be more or less in relation to other numbers without any increase or diminution (Theat.). But the perplexity only arises out of the confusion of the human faculties; the art of measuring shows us what is truly great and truly small. Though the just and good in particular instances may vary, the IDEA of good is eternal and unchangeable. And the IDEA of good is the source of knowledge and also of Being, in which all the stages of sense and knowledge are gathered up and from being hypotheses become realities.
  --
  Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not refuted, by those who succeed them. Once they reigned supreme, now they are subordinated to a power or idea greater or more comprehensive than their own. The thoughts of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have certainly sunk deep into the mind of the world, and have exercised an influence which will never pass away; but can we say that they have the same meaning in modern and ancient philosophy? Some of them, as for example the words 'Being,' 'essence,' 'matter,' 'form,' either have become obsolete, or are used in new senses, whereas 'individual,' 'cause,' 'motive,' have acquired an exaggerated importance. Is the manner in which the logical determinations of thought, or 'categories' as they may be termed, have been handed down to us, really different from that in which other words have come down to us? Have they not been equally subject to accident, and are they not often used by Hegel himself in senses which would have been quite unintelligible to their original inventorsas for example, when he speaks of the 'ground' of Leibnitz ('Everything has a sufficient ground') as identical with his own doctrine of the 'notion' (Wallace's Hegel), or the 'Being and Not-being' of Heracleitus as the same with his own 'Becoming'?
  As the historical order of thought has been adapted to the logical, so we have reason for suspecting that the Hegelian logic has been in some degree adapted to the order of thought in history. There is unfortunately no criterion to which either of them can be subjected, and not much forcing was required to bring either into near relations with the other. We may fairly doubt whether the division of the first and second parts of logic in the Hegelian system has not really arisen from a desire to make them accord with the first and second stages of the early Greek philosophy. Is there any reason why the conception of measure in the first part, which is formed by the union of quality and quantity, should not have been equally placed in the second division of mediate or reflected ideas? The more we analyze them the less exact does the coincidence of philosophy and the history of philosophy appear. Many terms which were used absolutely in the beginning of philosophy, such as 'Being,' 'matter,' 'cause,' and the like, became relative in the subsequent history of thought. But Hegel employs some of them absolutely, some relatively, seemingly without any principle and without any regard to their original significance.
  --
  The nomenclature of Hegel has been made by himself out of the language of common life. He uses a few words only which are borrowed from his predecessors, or from the Greek philosophy, and these generally in a sense peculiar to himself. The first stage of his philosophy answers to the word 'is,' the second to the word 'has been,' the third to the words 'has been' and 'is' combined. In other words, the first sphere is immediate, the second mediated by reflection, the third or highest returns into the first, and is both mediate and immediate. As Luther's Bible was written in the language of the common people, so Hegel seems to have thought that he gave his philosophy a truly German character by the use of idiomatic German words. But it may be doubted whether the attempt has been successful. First because such words as 'in sich seyn,' 'an sich seyn,' 'an und fur sich seyn,' though the simplest combinations of nouns and verbs, require a difficult and elaborate explanation. The simplicity of the words contrasts with the hardness of their meaning. Secondly, the use of technical phraseology necessarily separates philosophy from general literature; the student has to learn a new language of uncertain meaning which he with difficulty remembers. No former philosopher had ever carried the use of technical terms to the same extent as Hegel. The language of Plato or even of Aristotle is but slightly removed from that of common life, and was introduced naturally by a series of thinkers: the language of the scholastic logic has become technical to us, but in the Middle Ages was the vernacular Latin of priests and students. The higher spirit of philosophy, the spirit of Plato and Socrates, rebels against the Hegelian use of language as mechanical and technical.
  Hegel is fond of etymologies and often seems to trifle with words. He gives etymologies which are bad, and never considers that the meaning of a word may have nothing to do with its derivation. He lived before the days of Comparative Philology or of Comparative Mythology and Religion, which would have opened a new world to him. He makes no allowance for the element of chance either in language or thought; and perhaps there is no greater defect in his system than the want of a sound theory of language. He speaks as if thought, instead of being identical with language, was wholly independent of it. It is not the actual growth of the mind, but the imaginary growth of the Hegelian system, which is attractive to him.
  --
  In the Hegelian system ideas supersede persons. The world of thought, though sometimes described as Spirit or 'Geist,' is really impersonal. The minds of men are to be regarded as one mind, or more correctly as a succession of ideas. Any comprehensive view of the world must necessarily be general, and there may be a use with a view to comprehensiveness in dropping individuals and their lives and actions. In all things, if we leave out details, a certain degree of order begins to appear; at any rate we can make an order which, with a little exaggeration or disproportion in some of the parts, will cover the whole field of philosophy. But are we therefore justified in saying that ideas are the causes of the great movement of the world rather than the personalities which conceived them? The great man is the expression of his time, and there may be peculiar difficulties in his age which he cannot overcome. He may be out of harmony with his circumstances, too early or too late, and then all his thoughts perish; his genius passes away unknown. But not therefore is he to be regarded as a mere waif or stray in human history, any more than he is the mere creature or expression of the age in which he lives. His ideas are inseparable from himself, and would have been nothing without him. Through a thousand personal influences they have been brought home to the minds of others. He starts from antecedents, but he is great in proportion as he disengages himself from them or absorbs himself in them. Moreover the types of greatness differ; while one man is the expression of the influences of his age, another is in antagonism to them. One man is borne on the surface of the water; another is carried forward by the current which flows beneath. The character of an individual, whether he be independent of circumstances or not, inspires others quite as much as his words. What is the teaching of Socrates apart from his personal history, or the doctrines of Christ apart from the Divine life in which they are embodied? Has not Hegel himself delineated the greatness of the life of Christ as consisting in his 'Schicksalslosigkeit' or independence of the destiny of his race? Do not persons become ideas, and is there any distinction between them? Take away the five greatest legislators, the five greatest warriors, the five greatest poets, the five greatest founders or teachers of a religion, the five greatest philosophers, the five greatest inventors,where would have been all that we most value in knowledge or in life? And can that be a true theory of the history of philosophy which, in Hegel's own language, 'does not allow the individual to have his right'?
  Once more, while we readily admit that the world is relative to the mind, and the mind to the world, and that we must suppose a common or correlative growth in them, we shrink from saying that this complex nature can contain, even in outline, all the endless forms of Being and knowledge. Are we not 'seeking the living among the dead' and dignifying a mere logical skeleton with the name of philosophy and almost of God? When we look far away into the primeval sources of thought and belief, do we suppose that the mere accident of our being the heirs of the Greek philosophers can give us a right to set ourselves up as having the true and only standard of reason in the world? Or when we contemplate the infinite worlds in the expanse of heaven can we imagine that a few meagre categories derived from language and invented by the genius of one or two great thinkers contain the secret of the universe? Or, having regard to the ages during which the human race may yet endure, do we suppose that we can anticipate the proportions human knowledge may attain even within the short space of one or two thousand years?
  --
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Theodorus, Theaetetus, Socrates. An Eleatic Stranger, whom Theodorus and Theaetetus bring with them. The younger Socrates, who is a silent auditor.
  THEODORUS: Here we are, Socrates, true to our agreement of yesterday; and we bring with us a stranger from Elea, who is a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno, and a true philosopher.
   Socrates: Is he not rather a god, Theodorus, who comes to us in the disguise of a stranger? For Homer says that all the gods, and especially the god of strangers, are companions of the meek and just, and visit the good and evil among men. And may not your companion be one of those higher powers, a cross-examining deity, who has come to spy out our weakness in argument, and to cross-examine us?
  THEODORUS: Nay, Socrates, he is not one of the disputatious sorthe is too good for that. And, in my opinion, he is not a god at all; but divine he certainly is, for this is a title which I should give to all philosophers.
   Socrates: Capital, my friend! and I may add that they are almost as hard to be discerned as the gods. For the true philosophers, and such as are not merely made up for the occasion, appear in various forms unrecognized by the ignorance of men, and they 'hover about cities,' as Homer declares, looking from above upon human life; and some think nothing of them, and others can never think enough; and sometimes they appear as statesmen, and sometimes as sophists; and then, again, to many they seem to be no better than madmen. I should like to ask our Eleatic friend, if he would tell us, what is thought about them in Italy, and to whom the terms are applied.
  --
  THEODORUS: You have happened to light, Socrates, almost on the very question which we were asking our friend before we came hither, and he excused himself to us, as he does now to you; although he admitted that the matter had been fully discussed, and that he remembered the answer.
   Socrates: Then do not, Stranger, deny us the first favour which we ask of you: I am sure that you will not, and therefore I shall only beg of you to say whether you like and are accustomed to make a long oration on a subject which you want to explain to another, or to proceed by the method of question and answer. I remember hearing a very noble discussion in which Parmenides employed the latter of the two methods, when I was a young man, and he was far advanced in years. (Compare Parm.)
  --
  STRANGER: I feel ashamed, Socrates, being a new-comer into your society, instead of talking a little and hearing others talk, to be spinning out a long soliloquy or address, as if I wanted to show off. For the true answer will certainly be a very long one, a great deal longer than might be expected from such a short and simple question. At the same time, I fear that I may seem rude and ungracious if I refuse your courteous request, especially after what you have said. For I certainly cannot object to your proposal, that Theaetetus should respond, having already conversed with him myself, and being recommended by you to take him.
  THEAETETUS: But are you sure, Stranger, that this will be quite so acceptable to the rest of the company as Socrates imagines?
  STRANGER: You hear them applauding, Theaetetus; after that, there is nothing more to be said. Well then, I am to argue with you, and if you tire of the argument, you may complain of your friends and not of me.
  THEAETETUS: I do not think that I shall tire, and if I do, I shall get my friend here, young Socrates, the namesake of the elder Socrates, to help; he is about my own age, and my partner at the gymnasium, and is constantly accustomed to work with me.
  STRANGER: Very good; you can decide about that for yourself as we proceed. Meanwhile you and I will begin together and enquire into the nature of the Sophist, first of the three: I should like you to make out what he is and bring him to light in a discussion; for at present we are only agreed about the name, but of the thing to which we both apply the name possibly you have one notion and I another; whereas we ought always to come to an understanding about the thing itself in terms of a definition, and not merely about the name minus the definition. Now the tribe of Sophists which we are investigating is not easily caught or defined; and the world has long ago agreed, that if great subjects are to be adequately treated, they must be studied in the lesser and easier instances of them before we proceed to the greatest of all. And as I know that the tribe of Sophists is troublesome and hard to be caught, I should recommend that we practise beforeh and the method which is to be applied to him on some simple and smaller thing, unless you can suggest a better way.

Symposium translated by B Jowett, #Symposium, #Plato, #Philosophy
    Phaedrus (speech begins 178a):[19] an Athenian aristocrat associated with the inner-circle of the philosopher Socrates, familiar from Phaedrus and other dialogues
    Pausanias (speech begins 180c): the legal expert
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     Socrates (speech begins 201d): the eminent philosopher and Plato's teacher
    Alcibiades (speech begins 214e): a prominent Athenian statesman, orator, and general
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  An unknown person who had heard of the discourses in praise of love spoken by Socrates and others at the banquet of Agathon is desirous of having an au thentic account of them, which he thinks that he can obtain from Apollodorus, the same excitable, or rather 'mad' friend of Socrates, who is afterwards introduced in the Phaedo. He had imagined that the discourses were recent. There he is mistaken: but they are still fresh in the memory of his informant, who had just been repeating them to Glaucon, and is quite prepared to have another rehearsal of them in a walk from the Piraeus to Athens. Although he had not been present himself, he had heard them from the best authority. Aristodemus, who is described as having been in past times a humble but inseparable attendant of Socrates, had reported them to him (compare Xen. Mem.).
  The narrative which he had heard was as follows:
  Aristodemus meeting Socrates in holiday attire, is invited by him to a banquet at the house of Agathon, who had been sacrificing in thanksgiving for his tragic victory on the day previous. But no sooner has he entered the house than he finds that he is alone; Socrates has stayed behind in a fit of abstraction, and does not appear until the banquet is half over. On his appearing he and the host jest a little; the question is then asked by Pausanias, one of the guests, 'What shall they do about drinking? as they had been all well drunk on the day before, and drinking on two successive days is such a bad thing.' This is confirmed by the authority of Eryximachus the physician, who further proposes that instead of listening to the flute-girl and her 'noise' they shall make speeches in honour of love, one after another, going from left to right in the order in which they are reclining at the table. All of them agree to this proposal, and Phaedrus, who is the 'father' of the idea, which he has previously communicated to Eryximachus, begins as follows:
  He descants first of all upon the antiquity of love, which is proved by the authority of the poets; secondly upon the benefits which love gives to man. The greatest of these is the sense of honour and dishonour. The lover is ashamed to be seen by the beloved doing or suffering any cowardly or mean act. And a state or army which was made up only of lovers and their loves would be invincible. For love will convert the veriest coward into an inspired hero.
  --
  Some raillery ensues first between Aristophanes and Eryximachus, and then between Agathon, who fears a few select friends more than any number of spectators at the theatre, and Socrates, who is disposed to begin an argument. This is speedily repressed by Phaedrus, who reminds the disputants of their tri bute to the god. Agathon's speech follows:
  He will speak of the god first and then of his gifts: He is the fairest and blessedest and best of the gods, and also the youngest, having had no existence in the old days of Iapetus and Cronos when the gods were at war. The things that were done then were done of necessity and not of love. For love is young and dwells in soft places,not like Ate in Homer, walking on the skulls of men, but in their hearts and souls, which are soft enough. He is all flexibility and grace, and his habitation is among the flowers, and he cannot do or suffer wrong; for all men serve and obey him of their own free will, and where there is love there is obedience, and where obedience, there is justice; for none can be wronged of his own free will. And he is temperate as well as just, for he is the ruler of the desires, and if he rules them he must be temperate. Also he is courageous, for he is the conqueror of the lord of war. And he is wise too; for he is a poet, and the author of poesy in others. He created the animals; he is the inventor of the arts; all the gods are his subjects; he is the fairest and best himself, and the cause of what is fairest and best in others; he makes men to be of one mind at a banquet, filling them with affection and emptying them of disaffection; the pilot, helper, defender, saviour of men, in whose footsteps let every man follow, chanting a strain of love. Such is the discourse, half playful, half serious, which I dedicate to the god.
  The turn of Socrates comes next. He begins by remarking satirically that he has not understood the terms of the original agreement, for he fancied that they meant to speak the true praises of love, but now he finds that they only say what is good of him, whether true or false. He begs to be absolved from speaking falsely, but he is willing to speak the truth, and proposes to begin by questioning Agathon. The result of his questions may be summed up as follows:
  Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has; for no man desires that which he is or has. And love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the beautiful, love also wants and desires the good. Socrates professes to have asked the same questions and to have obtained the same answers from Diotima, a wise woman of Mantinea, who, like Agathon, had spoken first of love and then of his works. Socrates, like Agathon, had told her that Love is a mighty god and also fair, and she had shown him in return that Love was neither, but in a mean between fair and foul, good and evil, and not a god at all, but only a great demon or intermediate power (compare the speech of Eryximachus) who conveys to the gods the prayers of men, and to men the commands of the gods.
   Socrates asks: Who are his father and mother? To this Diotima replies that he is the son of Plenty and Poverty, and partakes of the nature of both, and is full and starved by turns. Like his mother he is poor and squalid, lying on mats at doors (compare the speech of Pausanias); like his father he is bold and strong, and full of arts and resources. Further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge:in this he resembles the philosopher who is also in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. Such is the nature of Love, who is not to be confused with the beloved.
  --
  The company applaud the speech of Socrates, and Aristophanes is about to say something, when suddenly a band of revellers breaks into the court, and the voice of Alcibiades is heard asking for Agathon. He is led in drunk, and welcomed by Agathon, whom he has come to crown with a garland. He is placed on a couch at his side, but suddenly, on recognizing Socrates, he starts up, and a sort of conflict is carried on between them, which Agathon is requested to appease. Alcibiades then insists that they shall drink, and has a large wine-cooler filled, which he first empties himself, and then fills again and passes on to Socrates. He is informed of the nature of the entertainment; and is ready to join, if only in the character of a drunken and disappointed lover he may be allowed to sing the praises of Socrates:
  He begins by comparing Socrates first to the busts of Silenus, which have images of the gods inside them; and, secondly, to Marsyas the flute-player. For Socrates produces the same effect with the voice which Marsyas did with the flute. He is the great speaker and enchanter who ravishes the souls of men; the convincer of hearts too, as he has convinced Alcibiades, and made him ashamed of his mean and miserable life. Socrates at one time seemed about to fall in love with him; and he thought that he would thereby gain a wonderful opportunity of receiving lessons of wisdom. He narrates the failure of his design. He has suffered agonies from him, and is at his wit's end. He then proceeds to mention some other particulars of the life of Socrates; how they were at Potidaea together, where Socrates showed his superior powers of enduring cold and fatigue; how on one occasion he had stood for an entire day and night absorbed in reflection amid the wonder of the spectators; how on another occasion he had saved Alcibiades' life; how at the battle of Delium, after the defeat, he might be seen stalking about like a pelican, rolling his eyes as Aristophanes had described him in the Clouds. He is the most wonderful of human beings, and absolutely unlike anyone but a satyr. Like the satyr in his language too; for he uses the commonest words as the outward mask of the divinest truths.
  When Alcibiades has done speaking, a dispute begins between him and Agathon and Socrates. Socrates piques Alcibiades by a pretended affection for Agathon. Presently a band of revellers appears, who introduce disorder into the feast; the sober part of the company, Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others, withdraw; and Aristodemus, the follower of Socrates, sleeps during the whole of a long winter's night. When he wakes at cockcrow the revellers are nearly all asleep. Only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon hold out; they are drinking from a large goblet, which they pass round, and Socrates is explaining to the two others, who are half-asleep, that the genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also. And first Aristophanes drops, and then, as the day is dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to rest, takes a bath and goes to his daily avocations until the evening. Aristodemus follows.
  ...
  --
  But Plato seems also to be aware that there is a mystery of love in man as well as in nature, extending beyond the mere immediate relation of the sexes. He is conscious that the highest and noblest things in the world are not easily severed from the sensual desires, or may even be regarded as a spiritualized form of them. We may observe that Socrates himself is not represented as originally unimpassioned, but as one who has overcome his passions; the secret of his power over others partly lies in his passionate but self-controlled nature. In the Phaedrus and Symposium love is not merely the feeling usually so called, but the mystical contemplation of the beautiful and the good. The same passion which may wallow in the mire is capable of rising to the loftiest heightsof penetrating the inmost secret of philosophy. The highest love is the love not of a person, but of the highest and purest abstraction. This abstraction is the far-off heaven on which the eye of the mind is fixed in fond amazement. The unity of truth, the consistency of the warring elements of the world, the enthusiasm for knowledge when first beaming upon mankind, the relativity of ideas to the human mind, and of the human mind to ideas, the faith in the invisible, the adoration of the eternal nature, are all included, consciously or unconsciously, in Plato's doctrine of love.
  The successive speeches in praise of love are characteristic of the speakers, and contri bute in various degrees to the final result; they are all designed to prepare the way for Socrates, who gathers up the threads anew, and skims the highest points of each of them. But they are not to be regarded as the stages of an idea, rising above one another to a climax. They are fanciful, partly facetious performances, 'yet also having a certain measure of seriousness,' which the successive speakers dedicate to the god. All of them are rhetorical and poetical rather than dialectical, but glimpses of truth appear in them. When Eryximachus says that the principles of music are simple in themselves, but confused in their application, he touches lightly upon a difficulty which has troubled the moderns as well as the ancients in music, and may be extended to the other applied sciences. That confusion begins in the concrete, was the natural feeling of a mind dwelling in the world of ideas. When Pausanias remarks that personal attachments are inimical to despots. The experience of Greek history confirms the truth of his remark. When Aristophanes declares that love is the desire of the whole, he expresses a feeling not unlike that of the German philosopher, who says that 'philosophy is home sickness.' When Agathon says that no man 'can be wronged of his own free will,' he is alluding playfully to a serious problem of Greek philosophy (compare Arist. Nic. Ethics). So naturally does Plato mingle jest and earnest, truth and opinion in the same work.
  The charactersof Phaedrus, who has been the cause of more philosophical discussions than any other man, with the exception of Simmias the Theban (Phaedrus); of Aristophanes, who disguises under comic imagery a serious purpose; of Agathon, who in later life is satirized by Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae, for his effeminate manners and the feeble rhythms of his verse; of Alcibiades, who is the same strange contrast of great powers and great vices, which meets us in historyare drawn to the life; and we may suppose the less-known characters of Pausanias and Eryximachus to be also true to the traditional recollection of them (compare Phaedr., Protag.; and compare Sympos. with Phaedr.). We may also remark that Aristodemus is called 'the little' in Xenophon's Memorabilia (compare Symp.).
  The speeches have been said to follow each other in pairs: Phaedrus and Pausanias being the ethical, Eryximachus and Aristophanes the physical speakers, while in Agathon and Socrates poetry and philosophy blend together. The speech of Phaedrus is also described as the mythological, that of Pausanias as the political, that of Eryximachus as the scientific, that of Aristophanes as the artistic (!), that of Socrates as the philosophical. But these and similar distinctions are not found in Plato;they are the points of view of his critics, and seem to impede rather than to assist us in understanding him.
  When the turn of Socrates comes round he cannot be allowed to disturb the arrangement made at first. With the leave of Phaedrus he asks a few questions, and then he throws his argument into the form of a speech (compare Gorg., Protag.). But his speech is really the narrative of a dialogue between himself and Diotima. And as at a banquet good manners would not allow him to win a victory either over his host or any of the guests, the superiority which he gains over Agathon is ingeniously represented as having been already gained over himself by her. The artifice has the further advantage of maintaining his accustomed profession of ignorance (compare Menex.). Even his knowledge of the mysteries of love, to which he lays claim here and elsewhere (Lys.), is given by Diotima.
  The speeches are attested to us by the very best authority. The madman Apollodorus, who for three years past has made a daily study of the actions of Socratesto whom the world is summed up in the words 'Great is Socrates'he has heard them from another 'madman,' Aristodemus, who was the 'shadow' of Socrates in days of old, like him going about barefooted, and who had been present at the time. 'Would you desire better witness?' The extraordinary narrative of Alcibiades is ingeniously represented as admitted by Socrates, whose silence when he is invited to contradict gives consent to the narrator. We may observe, by the way, (1) how the very appearance of Aristodemus by himself is a sufficient indication to Agathon that Socrates has been left behind; also, (2) how the courtesy of Agathon anticipates the excuse which Socrates was to have made on Aristodemus' behalf for coming uninvited; (3) how the story of the fit or trance of Socrates is confirmed by the mention which Alcibiades makes of a similar fit of abstraction occurring when he was serving with the army at Potidaea; like (4) the drinking powers of Socrates and his love of the fair, which receive a similar attestation in the concluding scene; or the attachment of Aristodemus, who is not forgotten when Socrates takes his departure. (5) We may notice the manner in which Socrates himself regards the first five speeches, not as true, but as fanciful and exaggerated encomiums of the god Love; (6) the satirical character of them, shown especially in the appeals to mythology, in the reasons which are given by Zeus for reconstructing the frame of man, or by the Boeotians and Eleans for encouraging male loves; (7) the ruling passion of Socrates for dialectics, who will argue with Agathon instead of making a speech, and will only speak at all upon the condition that he is allowed to speak the truth. We may note also the touch of Socratic irony, (8) which admits of a wide application and reveals a deep insight into the world:that in speaking of holy things and persons there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that you should speak the truth about themthis is the sort of praise which Socrates is unable to give. Lastly, (9) we may remark that the banquet is a real banquet after all, at which love is the theme of discourse, and huge quantities of wine are drunk.
  The discourse of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself, true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the schools of the day, characteristically reasoning about the probability of matters which do not admit of reasoning. He starts from a noble text: 'That without the sense of honour and dishonour neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work.' But he soon passes on to more common-place topics. The antiquity of love, the blessing of having a lover, the incentive which love offers to daring deeds, the examples of Alcestis and Achilles, are the chief themes of his discourse. The love of women is regarded by him as almost on an equality with that of men; and he makes the singular remark that the gods favour the return of love which is made by the beloved more than the original sentiment, because the lover is of a nobler and diviner nature.
  --
  Aristophanes is ready to laugh and make laugh before he opens his mouth, just as Socrates, true to his character, is ready to argue before he begins to speak. He expresses the very genius of the old comedy, its coarse and forcible imagery, and the licence of its language in speaking about the gods. He has no sophistical notions about love, which is brought back by him to its common-sense meaning of love between intelligent beings. His account of the origin of the sexes has the greatest (comic) probability and verisimilitude. Nothing in Aristophanes is more truly Aristophanic than the description of the human monster whirling round on four arms and four legs, eight in all, with incredible rapidity. Yet there is a mixture of earnestness in this jest; three serious principles seem to be insinuated:first, that man cannot exist in isolation; he must be reunited if he is to be perfected: secondly, that love is the mediator and reconciler of poor, divided human nature: thirdly, that the loves of this world are an indistinct anticipation of an ideal union which is not yet realized.
  The speech of Agathon is conceived in a higher strain, and receives the real, if half-ironical, approval of Socrates. It is the speech of the tragic poet and a sort of poem, like tragedy, moving among the gods of Olympus, and not among the elder or Orphic deities. In the idea of the antiquity of love he cannot agree; love is not of the olden time, but present and youthful ever. The speech may be compared with that speech of Socrates in the Phaedrus in which he describes himself as talking dithyrambs. It is at once a preparation for Socrates and a foil to him. The rhetoric of Agathon elevates the soul to 'sunlit heights,' but at the same time contrasts with the natural and necessary eloquence of Socrates. Agathon contri butes the distinction between love and the works of love, and also hints incidentally that love is always of beauty, which Socrates afterwards raises into a principle. While the consciousness of discord is stronger in the comic poet Aristophanes, Agathon, the tragic poet, has a deeper sense of harmony and reconciliation, and speaks of Love as the creator and artist.
  All the earlier speeches embody common opinions coloured with a tinge of philosophy. They furnish the material out of which Socrates proceeds to form his discourse, starting, as in other places, from mythology and the opinions of men. From Phaedrus he takes the thought that love is stronger than death; from Pausanias, that the true love is akin to intellect and political activity; from Eryximachus, that love is a universal phenomenon and the great power of nature; from Aristophanes, that love is the child of want, and is not merely the love of the congenial or of the whole, but (as he adds) of the good; from Agathon, that love is of beauty, not however of beauty only, but of birth in beauty. As it would be out of character for Socrates to make a leng thened harangue, the speech takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and a mysterious woman of foreign extraction. She elicits the final truth from one who knows nothing, and who, speaking by the lips of another, and himself a despiser of rhetoric, is proved also to be the most consummate of rhetoricians (compare Menexenus).
  The last of the six discourses begins with a short argument which overthrows not only Agathon but all the preceding speakers by the help of a distinction which has escaped them. Extravagant praises have been ascribed to Love as the author of every good; no sort of encomium was too high for him, whether deserved and true or not. But Socrates has no talent for speaking anything but the truth, and if he is to speak the truth of Love he must honestly confess that he is not a good at all: for love is of the good, and no man can desire that which he has. This piece of dialectics is ascribed to Diotima, who has already urged upon Socrates the argument which he urges against Agathon. That the distinction is a fallacy is obvious; it is almost acknowledged to be so by Socrates himself. For he who has beauty or good may desire more of them; and he who has beauty or good in himself may desire beauty and good in others. The fallacy seems to arise out of a confusion between the abstract ideas of good and beauty, which do not admit of degrees, and their partial realization in individuals.
  But Diotima, the prophetess of Mantineia, whose sacred and superhuman character raises her above the ordinary proprieties of women, has taught Socrates far more than this about the art and mystery of love. She has taught him that love is another aspect of philosophy. The same want in the human soul which is satisfied in the vulgar by the procreation of children, may become the highest aspiration of intellectual desire. As the Christian might speak of hungering and thirsting after righteousness; or of divine loves under the figure of human (compare Eph. 'This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church'); as the mediaeval saint might speak of the 'fruitio Dei;' as Dante saw all things contained in his love of Beatrice, so Plato would have us absorb all other loves and desires in the love of knowledge. Here is the beginning of Neoplatonism, or rather, perhaps, a proof (of which there are many) that the so-called mysticism of the East was not strange to the Greek of the fifth century before Christ. The first tumult of the affections was not wholly subdued; there were longings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, which no art could satisfy. To most men reason and passion appear to be antagonistic both in idea and fact. The union of the greatest comprehension of knowledge and the burning intensity of love is a contradiction in nature, which may have existed in a far-off primeval age in the mind of some Hebrew prophet or other Eastern sage, but has now become an imagination only. Yet this 'passion of the reason' is the theme of the Symposium of Plato. And as there is no impossibility in supposing that 'one king, or son of a king, may be a philosopher,' so also there is a probability that there may be some fewperhaps one or two in a whole generationin whom the light of truth may not lack the warmth of desire. And if there be such natures, no one will be disposed to deny that 'from them flow most of the benefits of individuals and states;' and even from imperfect combinations of the two elements in teachers or statesmen great good may often arise.
  Yet there is a higher region in which love is not only felt, but satisfied, in the perfect beauty of eternal knowledge, beginning with the beauty of earthly things, and at last reaching a beauty in which all existence is seen to be harmonious and one. The limited affection is enlarged, and enabled to behold the ideal of all things. And here the highest summit which is reached in the Symposium is seen also to be the highest summit which is attained in the Republic, but approached from another side; and there is 'a way upwards and downwards,' which is the same and not the same in both. The ideal beauty of the one is the ideal good of the other; regarded not with the eye of knowledge, but of faith and desire; and they are respectively the source of beauty and the source of good in all other things. And by the steps of a 'ladder reaching to heaven' we pass from images of visible beauty (Greek), and from the hypotheses of the Mathematical sciences, which are not yet based upon the idea of good, through the concrete to the abstract, and, by different paths arriving, behold the vision of the eternal (compare Symp. (Greek) Republic (Greek) also Phaedrus). Under one aspect 'the idea is love'; under another, 'truth.' In both the lover of wisdom is the 'spectator of all time and of all existence.' This is a 'mystery' in which Plato also obscurely intimates the union of the spiritual and fleshly, the interpenetration of the moral and intellectual faculties.
  The divine image of beauty which resides within Socrates has been revealed; the Silenus, or outward man, has now to be exhibited. The description of Socrates follows immediately after the speech of Socrates; one is the complement of the other. At the height of divine inspiration, when the force of nature can no further go, by way of contrast to this extreme idealism, Alcibiades, accompanied by a troop of revellers and a flute-girl, staggers in, and being drunk is able to tell of things which he would have been ashamed to make known if he had been sober. The state of his affections towards Socrates, unintelligible to us and perverted as they appear, affords an illustration of the power ascribed to the loves of man in the speech of Pausanias. He does not suppose his feelings to be peculiar to himself: there are several other persons in the company who have been equally in love with Socrates, and like himself have been deceived by him. The singular part of this confession is the combination of the most degrading passion with the desire of virtue and improvement. Such an union is not wholly untrue to human nature, which is capable of combining good and evil in a degree beyond what we can easily conceive. In imaginative persons, especially, the God and beast in man seem to part asunder more than is natural in a well-regulated mind. The Platonic Socrates (for of the real Socrates this may be doubted: compare his public rebuke of Critias for his shameful love of Euthydemus in Xenophon, Memorabilia) does not regard the greatest evil of Greek life as a thing not to be spoken of; but it has a ridiculous element (Plato's Symp.), and is a subject for irony, no less than for moral reprobation (compare Plato's Symp.). It is also used as a figure of speech which no one interpreted literally (compare Xen. Symp.). Nor does Plato feel any repugnance, such as would be felt in modern times, at bringing his great master and hero into connexion with nameless crimes. He is contented with representing him as a saint, who has won 'the Olympian victory' over the temptations of human nature. The fault of taste, which to us is so glaring and which was recognized by the Greeks of a later age (Athenaeus), was not perceived by Plato himself. We are still more surprised to find that the philosopher is incited to take the first step in his upward progress (Symp.) by the beauty of young men and boys, which was alone capable of inspiring the modern feeling of romance in the Greek mind. The passion of love took the spurious form of an enthusiasm for the ideal of beautya worship as of some godlike image of an Apollo or Antinous. But the love of youth when not depraved was a love of virtue and modesty as well as of beauty, the one being the expression of the other; and in certain Greek states, especially at Sparta and Thebes, the honourable attachment of a youth to an elder man was a part of his education. The 'army of lovers and their beloved who would be invincible if they could be united by such a tie' (Symp.), is not a mere fiction of Plato's, but seems actually to have existed at Thebes in the days of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, if we may believe writers cited anonymously by Plutarch, Pelop. Vit. It is observable that Plato never in the least degree excuses the depraved love of the body (compare Charm.; Rep.; Laws; Symp.; and once more Xenophon, Mem.), nor is there any Greek writer of mark who condones or approves such connexions. But owing partly to the puzzling nature of the subject these friendships are spoken of by Plato in a manner different from that customary among ourselves. To most of them we should hesitate to ascribe, any more than to the attachment of Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, an immoral or licentious character. There were many, doubtless, to whom the love of the fair mind was the noblest form of friendship (Rep.), and who deemed the friendship of man with man to be higher than the love of woman, because altogether separated from the bodily appetites. The existence of such attachments may be reasonably attri buted to the inferiority and seclusion of woman, and the want of a real family or social life and parental influence in Hellenic cities; and they were encouraged by the practice of gymnastic exercises, by the meetings of political clubs, and by the tie of military companionship. They were also an educational institution: a young person was specially entrusted by his parents to some elder friend who was expected by them to train their son in manly exercises and in virtue. It is not likely that a Greek parent committed him to a lover, any more than we should to a schoolmaster, in the expectation that he would be corrupted by him, but rather in the hope that his morals would be better cared for than was possible in a great household of slaves.
  It is difficult to adduce the authority of Plato either for or against such practices or customs, because it is not always easy to determine whether he is speaking of 'the heavenly and philosophical love, or of the coarse Polyhymnia:' and he often refers to this (e.g. in the Symposium) half in jest, yet 'with a certain degree of seriousness.' We observe that they entered into one part of Greek literature, but not into another, and that the larger part is free from such associations. Indecency was an element of the ludicrous in the old Greek Comedy, as it has been in other ages and countries. But effeminate love was always condemned as well as ridiculed by the Comic poets; and in the New Comedy the allusions to such topics have disappeared. They seem to have been no longer tolerated by the greater refinement of the age. False sentiment is found in the Lyric and Elegiac poets; and in mythology 'the greatest of the Gods' (Rep.) is not exempt from evil imputations. But the morals of a nation are not to be judged of wholly by its literature. Hellas was not necessarily more corrupted in the days of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, or of Plato and the Orators, than England in the time of Fielding and Smollett, or France in the nineteenth century. No one supposes certain French novels to be a representation of ordinary French life. And the greater part of Greek literature, beginning with Homer and including the tragedians, philosophers, and, with the exception of the Comic poets (whose business was to raise a laugh by whatever means), all the greater writers of Hellas who have been preserved to us, are free from the taint of indecency.
  --
  The character of Alcibiades in the Symposium is hardly less remarkable than that of Socrates, and agrees with the picture given of him in the first of the two Dialogues which are called by his name, and also with the slight sketch of him in the Protagoras. He is the impersonation of lawlessness'the lion's whelp, who ought not to be reared in the city,' yet not without a certain generosity which gained the hearts of men,strangely fascinated by Socrates, and possessed of a genius which might have been either the destruction or salvation of Athens. The dramatic interest of the character is heightened by the recollection of his after history. He seems to have been present to the mind of Plato in the description of the democratic man of the Republic (compare also Alcibiades 1).
  There is no criterion of the date of the Symposium, except that which is furnished by the allusion to the division of Arcadia after the destruction of Mantinea. This took place in the year B.C. 384, which is the forty-fourth year of Plato's life. The Symposium cannot therefore be regarded as a youthful work. As Mantinea was restored in the year 369, the composition of the Dialogue will probably fall between 384 and 369. Whether the recollection of the event is more likely to have been renewed at the destruction or restoration of the city, rather than at some intermediate period, is a consideration not worth raising.
  The Symposium is connected with the Phaedrus both in style and subject; they are the only Dialogues of Plato in which the theme of love is discussed at length. In both of them philosophy is regarded as a sort of enthusiasm or madness; Socrates is himself 'a prophet new inspired' with Bacchanalian revelry, which, like his philosophy, he characteristically pretends to have derived not from himself but from others. The Phaedo also presents some points of comparison with the Symposium. For there, too, philosophy might be described as 'dying for love;' and there are not wanting many touches of humour and fancy, which remind us of the Symposium. But while the Phaedo and Phaedrus look backwards and forwards to past and future states of existence, in the Symposium there is no break between this world and another; and we rise from one to the other by a regular series of steps or stages, proceeding from the particulars of sense to the universal of reason, and from one universal to many, which are finally reunited in a single science (compare Rep.). At first immortality means only the succession of existences; even knowledge comes and goes. Then follows, in the language of the mysteries, a higher and a higher degree of initiation; at last we arrive at the perfect vision of beauty, not relative or changing, but eternal and absolute; not bounded by this world, or in or out of this world, but an aspect of the divine, extending over all things, and having no limit of space or time: this is the highest knowledge of which the human mind is capable. Plato does not go on to ask whether the individual is absorbed in the sea of light and beauty or retains his personality. Enough for him to have attained the true beauty or good, without enquiring precisely into the relation in which human beings stood to it. That the soul has such a reach of thought, and is capable of partaking of the eternal nature, seems to imply that she too is eternal (compare Phaedrus). But Plato does not distinguish the eternal in man from the eternal in the world or in God. He is willing to rest in the contemplation of the idea, which to him is the cause of all things (Rep.), and has no strength to go further.
  The Symposium of Xenophon, in which Socrates describes himself as a pander, and also discourses of the difference between sensual and sentimental love, likewise offers several interesting points of comparison. But the suspicion which hangs over other writings of Xenophon, and the numerous minute references to the Phaedrus and Symposium, as well as to some of the other writings of Plato, throw a doubt on the genuineness of the work. The Symposium of Xenophon, if written by him at all, would certainly show that he wrote against Plato, and was acquainted with his works. Of this hostility there is no trace in the Memorabilia. Such a rivalry is more characteristic of an imitator than of an original writer. The (so-called) Symposium of Xenophon may therefore have no more title to be regarded as genuine than the confessedly spurious Apology.
  There are no means of determining the relative order in time of the Phaedrus, Symposium, Phaedo. The order which has been adopted in this translation rests on no other principle than the desire to bring together in a series the memorials of the life of Socrates.
  SYMPOSIUM
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Apollodorus, who repeats to his companion the dialogue which he had heard from Aristodemus, and had already once narrated to Glaucon. Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, Alcibiades, A Troop of Revellers.
  SCENE: The House of Agathon.
  Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed I believe that I am not ill-prepared with an answer. For the day before yesterday I was coming from my own home at Phalerum to the city, and one of my acquaintance, who had caught a sight of me from behind, calling out playfully in the distance, said: Apollodorus, O thou Phalerian (Probably a play of words on (Greek), 'bald-headed.') man, halt! So I did as I was bid; and then he said, I was looking for you, Apollodorus, only just now, that I might ask you about the speeches in praise of love, which were delivered by Socrates, Alcibiades, and others, at Agathon's supper. Phoenix, the son of Philip, told another person who told me of them; his narrative was very indistinct, but he said that you knew, and I wish that you would give me an account of them. Who, if not you, should be the reporter of the words of your friend? And first tell me, he said, were you present at this meeting?
  Your informant, Glaucon, I said, must have been very indistinct indeed, if you imagine that the occasion was recent; or that I could have been of the party.
  --
  Impossible: I said. Are you ignorant that for many years Agathon has not resided at Athens; and not three have elapsed since I became acquainted with Socrates, and have made it my daily business to know all that he says and does. There was a time when I was running about the world, fancying myself to be well employed, but I was really a most wretched being, no better than you are now. I thought that I ought to do anything rather than be a philosopher.
  Well, he said, jesting apart, tell me when the meeting occurred.
  --
  Then it must have been a long while ago, he said; and who told youdid Socrates?
  No indeed, I replied, but the same person who told Phoenix;he was a little fellow, who never wore any shoes, Aristodemus, of the deme of Cyda thenaeum. He had been at Agathon's feast; and I think that in those days there was no one who was a more devoted admirer of Socrates. Moreover, I have asked Socrates about the truth of some parts of his narrative, and he confirmed them. Then, said Glaucon, let us have the tale over again; is not the road to Athens just made for conversation? And so we walked, and talked of the discourses on love; and therefore, as I said at first, I am not ill-prepared to comply with your request, and will have another rehearsal of them if you like. For to speak or to hear others speak of philosophy always gives me the greatest pleasure, to say nothing of the profit. But when I hear another strain, especially that of you rich men and traders, such conversation displeases me; and I pity you who are my companions, because you think that you are doing something when in reality you are doing nothing. And I dare say that you pity me in return, whom you regard as an unhappy creature, and very probably you are right. But I certainly know of you what you only think of methere is the difference.
  COMPANION: I see, Apollodorus, that you are just the samealways speaking evil of yourself, and of others; and I do believe that you pity all mankind, with the exception of Socrates, yourself first of all, true in this to your old name, which, however deserved, I know not how you acquired, of Apollodorus the madman; for you are always raging against yourself and everybody but Socrates.
  APOLLODORUS: Yes, friend, and the reason why I am said to be mad, and out of my wits, is just because I have these notions of myself and you; no other evidence is required.
  --
  He said that he met Socrates fresh from the bath and sandalled; and as the sight of the sandals was unusual, he asked him whither he was going that he had been converted into such a beau:
  To a banquet at Agathon's, he replied, whose invitation to his sacrifice of victory I refused yesterday, fearing a crowd, but promising that I would come to-day instead; and so I have put on my finery, because he is such a fine man. What say you to going with me unasked?
  --
  I rather fear, Socrates, said Aristodemus, lest this may still be my case; and that, like Menelaus in Homer, I shall be the inferior person, who
  'To the feasts of the wise unbidden goes.'
  --
  This was the style of their conversation as they went along. Socrates dropped behind in a fit of abstraction, and desired Aristodemus, who was waiting, to go on before him. When he reached the house of Agathon he found the doors wide open, and a comical thing happened. A servant coming out met him, and led him at once into the banqueting-hall in which the guests were reclining, for the banquet was about to begin. Welcome, Aristodemus, said Agathon, as soon as he appearedyou are just in time to sup with us; if you come on any other matter put it off, and make one of us, as I was looking for you yesterday and meant to have asked you, if I could have found you. But what have you done with Socrates?
  I turned round, but Socrates was nowhere to be seen; and I had to explain that he had been with me a moment before, and that I came by his invitation to the supper.
  You were quite right in coming, said Agathon; but where is he himself?
  --
  The servant then assisted him to wash, and he lay down, and presently another servant came in and reported that our friend Socrates had retired into the portico of the neighbouring house. 'There he is fixed,' said he, 'and when I call to him he will not stir.'
  How strange, said Agathon; then you must call him again, and keep calling him.
  --
  Well, if you think so, I will leave him, said Agathon. And then, turning to the servants, he added, 'Let us have supper without waiting for him. Serve up whatever you please, for there is no one to give you orders; hitherto I have never left you to yourselves. But on this occasion imagine that you are our hosts, and that I and the company are your guests; treat us well, and then we shall commend you.' After this, supper was served, but still no Socrates; and during the meal Agathon several times expressed a wish to send for him, but Aristodemus objected; and at last when the feast was about half overfor the fit, as usual, was not of long duration Socrates entered. Agathon, who was reclining alone at the end of the table, begged that he would take the place next to him; that 'I may touch you,' he said, 'and have the benefit of that wise thought which came into your mind in the portico, and is now in your possession; for I am certain that you would not have come away until you had found what you sought.'
  How I wish, said Socrates, taking his place as he was desired, that wisdom could be infused by touch, out of the fuller into the emptier man, as water runs through wool out of a fuller cup into an emptier one; if that were so, how greatly should I value the privilege of reclining at your side! For you would have filled me full with a stream of wisdom plenteous and fair; whereas my own is of a very mean and questionable sort, no better than a dream. But yours is bright and full of promise, and was manifested forth in all the splendour of youth the day before yesterday, in the presence of more than thirty thousand Hellenes.
  You are mocking, Socrates, said Agathon, and ere long you and I will have to determine who bears off the palm of wisdomof this Dionysus shall be the judge; but at present you are better occupied with supper.
   Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanias said, And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday's potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday. Consider then: How can the drinking be made easiest?
  --
  Then, said Eryximachus, the weak heads like myself, Aristodemus, Phaedrus, and others who never can drink, are fortunate in finding that the stronger ones are not in a drinking mood. (I do not include Socrates, who is able either to drink or to abstain, and will not mind, whichever we do.) Well, as of none of the company seem disposed to drink much, I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I never follow, if I can help, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any one who still feels the effects of yesterday's carouse.
  I always do what you advise, and especially what you prescribe as a physician, rejoined Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and the rest of the company, if they are wise, will do the same.
  --
  No one will vote against you, Eryximachus, said Socrates. How can I oppose your motion, who profess to understand nothing but matters of love; nor, I presume, will Agathon and Pausanias; and there can be no doubt of Aristophanes, whose whole concern is with Dionysus and Aphrodite; nor will any one disagree of those whom I see around me. The proposal, as I am aware, may seem rather hard upon us whose place is last; but we shall be contented if we hear some good speeches first. Let Phaedrus begin the praise of Love, and good luck to him. All the company expressed their assent, and desired him to do as Socrates bade him.
  Aristodemus did not recollect all that was said, nor do I recollect all that he related to me; but I will tell you what I thought most worthy of remembrance, and what the chief speakers said.
  --
  Aristophanes professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise Love in another way, unlike that either of Pausanias or Eryximachus. Mankind, he said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word 'Androgynous' is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.' He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,being the sections of entire men or women,and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you people want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of twoI ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need (compare Arist. Pol.). And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians (compare Arist. Pol.). And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies. Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and obtain the good, of which Love is to us the lord and minister; and let no one oppose himhe is the enemy of the gods who opposes him. For if we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present. I am serious, and therefore I must beg Eryximachus not to make fun or to find any allusion in what I am saying to Pausanias and Agathon, who, as I suspect, are both of the manly nature, and belong to the class which I have been describing. But my words have a wider applicationthey include men and women everywhere; and I believe that if our loves were perfectly accomplished, and each one returning to his primeval nature had his original true love, then our race would be happy. And if this would be best of all, the best in the next degree and under present circumstances must be the nearest approach to such an union; and that will be the attainment of a congenial love. Wherefore, if we would praise him who has given to us the benefit, we must praise the god Love, who is our greatest benefactor, both leading us in this life back to our own nature, and giving us high hopes for the future, for he promises that if we are pious, he will restore us to our original state, and heal us and make us happy and blessed. This, Eryximachus, is my discourse of love, which, although different to yours, I must beg you to leave unassailed by the shafts of your ridicule, in order that each may have his turn; each, or rather either, for Agathon and Socrates are the only ones left.
  Indeed, I am not going to attack you, said Eryximachus, for I thought your speech charming, and did I not know that Agathon and Socrates are masters in the art of love, I should be really afraid that they would have nothing to say, after the world of things which have been said already. But, for all that, I am not without hopes.
   Socrates said: You played your part well, Eryximachus; but if you were as I am now, or rather as I shall be when Agathon has spoken, you would, indeed, be in a great strait.
  You want to cast a spell over me, Socrates, said Agathon, in the hope that I may be disconcerted at the expectation raised among the audience that I shall speak well.
  I should be strangely forgetful, Agathon replied Socrates, of the courage and magnanimity which you showed when your own compositions were about to be exhibited, and you came upon the stage with the actors and faced the vast theatre altogether undismayed, if I thought that your nerves could be fluttered at a small party of friends.
  Do you think, Socrates, said Agathon, that my head is so full of the theatre as not to know how much more formidable to a man of sense a few good judges are than many fools?
  Nay, replied Socrates, I should be very wrong in attri buting to you, Agathon, that or any other want of refinement. And I am quite aware that if you happened to meet with any whom you thought wise, you would care for their opinion much more than for that of the many. But then we, having been a part of the foolish many in the theatre, cannot be regarded as the select wise; though I know that if you chanced to be in the presence, not of one of ourselves, but of some really wise man, you would be ashamed of disgracing yourself before himwould you not?
  Yes, said Agathon.
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  Very good, Phaedrus, said Agathon; I see no reason why I should not proceed with my speech, as I shall have many other opportunities of conversing with Socrates. Let me say first how I ought to speak, and then speak:
  The previous speakers, instead of praising the god Love, or unfolding his nature, appear to have congratulated mankind on the benefits which he confers upon them. But I would rather praise the god first, and then speak of his gifts; this is always the right way of praising everything. May I say without impiety or offence, that of all the blessed gods he is the most blessed because he is the fairest and best? And he is the fairest: for, in the first place, he is the youngest, and of his youth he is himself the witness, fleeing out of the way of age, who is swift enough, swifter truly than most of us like:Love hates him and will not come near him; but youth and love live and move togetherlike to like, as the proverb says. Many things were said by Phaedrus about Love in which I agree with him; but I cannot agree that he is older than Iapetus and Kronos:not so; I maintain him to be the youngest of the gods, and youthful ever. The ancient doings among the gods of which Hesiod and Parmenides spoke, if the tradition of them be true, were done of Necessity and not of Love; had Love been in those days, there would have been no chaining or mutilation of the gods, or other violence, but peace and sweetness, as there is now in heaven, since the rule of Love began. Love is young and also tender; he ought to have a poet like Homer to describe his tenderness, as Homer says of Ate, that she is a goddess and tender:
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  When Agathon had done speaking, Aristodemus said that there was a general cheer; the young man was thought to have spoken in a manner worthy of himself, and of the god. And Socrates, looking at Eryximachus, said: Tell me, son of Acumenus, was there not reason in my fears? and was I not a true prophet when I said that Agathon would make a wonderful oration, and that I should be in a strait?
  The part of the prophecy which concerns Agathon, replied Eryximachus, appears to me to be true; but not the other partthat you will be in a strait.
  Why, my dear friend, said Socrates, must not I or any one be in a strait who has to speak after he has heard such a rich and varied discourse? I am especially struck with the beauty of the concluding wordswho could listen to them without amazement? When I reflected on the immeasurable inferiority of my own powers, I was ready to run away for shame, if there had been a possibility of escape. For I was reminded of Gorgias, and at the end of his speech I fancied that Agathon was shaking at me the Gorginian or Gorgonian head of the great master of rhetoric, which was simply to turn me and my speech into stone, as Homer says (Odyssey), and strike me dumb. And then I perceived how foolish I had been in consenting to take my turn with you in praising love, and saying that I too was a master of the art, when I really had no conception how anything ought to be praised. For in my simplicity I imagined that the topics of praise should be true, and that this being presupposed, out of the true the speaker was to choose the best and set them forth in the best manner. And I felt quite proud, thinking that I knew the nature of true praise, and should speak well. Whereas I now see that the intention was to attri bute to Love every species of greatness and glory, whether really belonging to him or not, without regard to truth or falsehoodthat was no matter; for the original proposal seems to have been not that each of you should really praise Love, but only that you should appear to praise him. And so you attri bute to Love every imaginable form of praise which can be gathered anywhere; and you say that 'he is all this,' and 'the cause of all that,' making him appear the fairest and best of all to those who know him not, for you cannot impose upon those who know him. And a noble and solemn hymn of praise have you rehearsed. But as I misunderstood the nature of the praise when I said that I would take my turn, I must beg to be absolved from the promise which I made in ignorance, and which (as Euripides would say (Eurip. Hyppolytus)) was a promise of the lips and not of the mind. Farewell then to such a strain: for I do not praise in that way; no, indeed, I cannot. But if you like to hear the truth about love, I am ready to speak in my own manner, though I will not make myself ridiculous by entering into any rivalry with you. Say then, Phaedrus, whether you would like to have the truth about love, spoken in any words and in any order which may happen to come into my mind at the time. Will that be agreeable to you?
  Aristodemus said that Phaedrus and the company bid him speak in any manner which he thought best. Then, he added, let me have your permission first to ask Agathon a few more questions, in order that I may take his admissions as the premisses of my discourse.
  I grant the permission, said Phaedrus: put your questions. Socrates then proceeded as follows:
  In the magnificent oration which you have just uttered, I think that you were right, my dear Agathon, in proposing to speak of the nature of Love first and afterwards of his worksthat is a way of beginning which I very much approve. And as you have spoken so eloquently of his nature, may I ask you further, Whether love is the love of something or of nothing? And here I must explain myself: I do not want you to say that love is the love of a father or the love of a motherthat would be ridiculous; but to answer as you would, if I asked is a father a father of something? to which you would find no difficulty in replying, of a son or daughter: and the answer would be right.
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  And now, said Socrates, I will ask about Love:Is Love of something or of nothing?
  Of something, surely, he replied.
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  Nay, replied Socrates, I would have you consider whether 'necessarily' is not rather the word. The inference that he who desires something is in want of something, and that he who desires nothing is in want of nothing, is in my judgment, Agathon, absolutely and necessarily true. What do you think?
  I agree with you, said Agathon.
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  And yet, added Socrates, if a man being strong desired to be strong, or being swift desired to be swift, or being healthy desired to be healthy, in that case he might be thought to desire something which he already has or is. I give the example in order that we may avoid misconception. For the possessors of these qualities, Agathon, must be supposed to have their respective advantages at the time, whether they choose or not; and who can desire that which he has? Therefore, when a person says, I am well and wish to be well, or I am rich and wish to be rich, and I desire simply to have what I haveto him we shall reply: 'You, my friend, having wealth and health and strength, want to have the continuance of them; for at this moment, whether you choose or no, you have them. And when you say, I desire that which I have and nothing else, is not your meaning that you want to have what you now have in the future?' He must agree with usmust he not?
  He must, replied Agathon.
  Then, said Socrates, he desires that what he has at present may be preserved to him in the future, which is equivalent to saying that he desires something which is non-existent to him, and which as yet he has not got:
  Very true, he said.
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  Then now, said Socrates, let us recapitulate the argument. First, is not love of something, and of something too which is wanting to a man?
  Yes, he replied.
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  You made a very good speech, Agathon, replied Socrates; but there is yet one small question which I would fain ask:Is not the good also the beautiful?
  Yes.
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  I cannot refute you, Socrates, said Agathon:Let us assume that what you say is true.
  Say rather, beloved Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth; for Socrates is easily refuted.
  And now, taking my leave of you, I would rehearse a tale of love which I heard from Diotima of Mantineia (compare 1 Alcibiades), a woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge, who in the days of old, when the Athenians offered sacrifice before the coming of the plague, delayed the disease ten years. She was my instructress in the art of love, and I shall repeat to you what she said to me, beginning with the admissions made by Agathon, which are nearly if not quite the same which I made to the wise woman when she questioned me: I think that this will be the easiest way, and I shall take both parts myself as well as I can (compare Gorgias). As you, Agathon, suggested (supra), I must speak first of the being and nature of Love, and then of his works. First I said to her in nearly the same words which he used to me, that Love was a mighty god, and likewise fair; and she proved to me as I proved to him that, by my own showing, Love was neither fair nor good. 'What do you mean, Diotima,' I said, 'is love then evil and foul?' 'Hush,' she cried; 'must that be foul which is not fair?' 'Certainly,' I said. 'And is that which is not wise, ignorant? do you not see that there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance?' 'And what may that be?' I said. 'Right opinion,' she replied; 'which, as you know, being incapable of giving a reason, is not knowledge (for how can knowledge be devoid of reason? nor again, ignorance, for neither can ignorance attain the truth), but is clearly something which is a mean between ignorance and wisdom.' 'Quite true,' I replied. 'Do not then insist,' she said, 'that what is not fair is of necessity foul, or what is not good evil; or infer that because love is not fair and good he is therefore foul and evil; for he is in a mean between them.' 'Well,' I said, 'Love is surely admitted by all to be a great god.' 'By those who know or by those who do not know?' 'By all.' 'And how, Socrates,' she said with a smile, 'can Love be acknowledged to be a great god by those who say that he is not a god at all?' 'And who are they?' I said. 'You and I are two of them,' she replied. 'How can that be?' I said. 'It is quite intelligible,' she replied; 'for you yourself would acknowledge that the gods are happy and fairof course you wouldwould you dare to say that any god was not?' 'Certainly not,' I replied. 'And you mean by the happy, those who are the possessors of things good or fair?' 'Yes.' 'And you admitted that Love, because he was in want, desires those good and fair things of which he is in want?' 'Yes, I did.' 'But how can he be a god who has no portion in what is either good or fair?' 'Impossible.' 'Then you see that you also deny the divinity of Love.'
  'What then is Love?' I asked; 'Is he mortal?' 'No.' 'What then?' 'As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two.' 'What is he, Diotima?' 'He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.' 'And what,' I said, 'is his power?' 'He interprets,' she replied, 'between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love.' 'And who,' I said, 'was his father, and who his mother?' 'The tale,' she said, 'will take time; nevertheless I will tell you. On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, came about the doors to beg. Now Plenty who was the worse for nectar (there was no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep, and Poverty considering her own straitened circumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of the beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also because he was born on her birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father's nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.' 'But who then, Diotima,' I said, 'are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?' 'A child may answer that question,' she replied; 'they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish. Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit Love. The error in your conception of him was very natural, and as I imagine from what you say, has arisen out of a confusion of love and the beloved, which made you think that love was all beautiful. For the beloved is the truly beautiful, and delicate, and perfect, and blessed; but the principle of love is of another nature, and is such as I have described.'
  I said, 'O thou stranger woman, thou sayest well; but, assuming Love to be such as you say, what is the use of him to men?' 'That, Socrates,' she replied, 'I will attempt to unfold: of his nature and birth I have already spoken; and you acknowledge that love is of the beautiful. But some one will say: Of the beautiful in what, Socrates and Diotima?or rather let me put the question more clearly, and ask: When a man loves the beautiful, what does he desire?' I answered her 'That the beautiful may be his.' 'Still,' she said, 'the answer suggests a further question: What is given by the possession of beauty?' 'To what you have asked,' I replied, 'I have no answer ready.' 'Then,' she said, 'let me put the word "good" in the place of the beautiful, and repeat the question once more: If he who loves loves the good, what is it then that he loves?' 'The possession of the good,' I said. 'And what does he gain who possesses the good?' 'Happiness,' I replied; 'there is less difficulty in answering that question.' 'Yes,' she said, 'the happy are made happy by the acquisition of good things. Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires happiness; the answer is already final.' 'You are right.' I said. 'And is this wish and this desire common to all? and do all men always desire their own good, or only some men?what say you?' 'All men,' I replied; 'the desire is common to all.' 'Why, then,' she rejoined, 'are not all men, Socrates, said to love, but only some of them? whereas you say that all men are always loving the same things.' 'I myself wonder,' I said, 'why this is.' 'There is nothing to wonder at,' she replied; 'the reason is that one part of love is separated off and receives the name of the whole, but the other parts have other names.' 'Give an illustration,' I said. She answered me as follows: 'There is poetry, which, as you know, is complex and manifold. All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers.' 'Very true.' 'Still,' she said, 'you know that they are not called poets, but have other names; only that portion of the art which is separated off from the rest, and is concerned with music and metre, is termed poetry, and they who possess poetry in this sense of the word are called poets.' 'Very true,' I said. 'And the same holds of love. For you may say generally that all desire of good and happiness is only the great and subtle power of love; but they who are drawn towards him by any other path, whether the path of money-making or gymnastics or philosophy, are not called loversthe name of the whole is appropriated to those whose affection takes one form onlythey alone are said to love, or to be lovers.' 'I dare say,' I replied, 'that you are right.' 'Yes,' she added, 'and you hear people say that lovers are seeking for their other half; but I say that they are seeking neither for the half of themselves, nor for the whole, unless the half or the whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands and feet and cast them away, if they are evil; for they love not what is their own, unless perchance there be some one who calls what belongs to him the good, and what belongs to another the evil. For there is nothing which men love but the good. Is there anything?' 'Certainly, I should say, that there is nothing.' 'Then,' she said, 'the simple truth is, that men love the good.' 'Yes,' I said. 'To which must be added that they love the possession of the good?' 'Yes, that must be added.' 'And not only the possession, but the everlasting possession of the good?' 'That must be added too.' 'Then love,' she said, 'may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good?' 'That is most true.'
  'Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell me further,' she said, 'what is the manner of the pursuit? what are they doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? and what is the object which they have in view? Answer me.' 'Nay, Diotima,' I replied, 'if I had known, I should not have wondered at your wisdom, neither should I have come to learn from you about this very matter.' 'Well,' she said, 'I will teach you:The object which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.' 'I do not understand you,' I said; 'the oracle requires an explanation.' 'I will make my meaning clearer,' she replied. 'I mean to say, that all men are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreationprocreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only.' 'What then?' 'The love of generation and of birth in beauty.' 'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, indeed,' she replied. 'But why of generation?' 'Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,' she replied; 'and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good: Wherefore love is of immortality.'
  All this she taught me at various times when she spoke of love. And I remember her once saying to me, 'What is the cause, Socrates, of love, and the attendant desire? See you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost, and to die for them, and will let themselves be tormented with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their young. Man may be supposed to act thus from reason; but why should animals have these passionate feelings? Can you tell me why?' Again I replied that I did not know. She said to me: 'And do you expect ever to become a master in the art of love, if you do not know this?' 'But I have told you already, Diotima, that my ignorance is the reason why I come to you; for I am conscious that I want a teacher; tell me then the cause of this and of the other mysteries of love.' 'Marvel not,' she said, 'if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparationhair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the word "recollection," but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behindunlike the divine, which is always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.'
  I was astonished at her words, and said: 'Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?' And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,' she said, 'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.
  'Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget childrenthis is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and giving them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. But souls which are pregnantfor there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodiesconceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions?wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who in youth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He wanders about seeking beauty that he may beget offspringfor in deformity he will beget nothingand naturally embraces the beautiful rather than the deformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such an one he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man; and he tries to educate him; and at the touch of the beautiful which is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in company with him tends that which he brings forth; and they are married by a far nearer tie and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are their common offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? Or who would not have such children as Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours, not only of Lacedaemon, but of Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is the revered father of Athenian laws; and many others there are in many other places, both among Hellenes and barbarians, who have given to the world many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every kind; and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake of children such as theirs; which were never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of his mortal children.
  'These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form onlyout of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed; please to give me your very best attention:
  'He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates,' said the stranger of Mantineia, 'is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possibleyou only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beautythe divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human lifethither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?'
  Such, Phaedrusand I speak not only to you, but to all of youwere the words of Diotima; and I am persuaded of their truth. And being persuaded of them, I try to persuade others, that in the attainment of this end human nature will not easily find a helper better than love: And therefore, also, I say that every man ought to honour him as I myself honour him, and walk in his ways, and exhort others to do the same, and praise the power and spirit of love according to the measure of my ability now and ever.
  --
  When Socrates had done speaking, the company applauded, and Aristophanes was beginning to say something in answer to the allusion which Socrates had made to his own speech, when suddenly there was a great knocking at the door of the house, as of revellers, and the sound of a flute-girl was heard. Agathon told the attendants to go and see who were the intruders. 'If they are friends of ours,' he said, 'invite them in, but if not, say that the drinking is over.' A little while afterwards they heard the voice of Alcibiades resounding in the court; he was in a great state of intoxication, and kept roaring and shouting 'Where is Agathon? Lead me to Agathon,' and at length, supported by the flute-girl and some of his attendants, he found his way to them. 'Hail, friends,' he said, appearing at the door crowned with a massive garl and of ivy and violets, his head flowing with ribands. 'Will you have a very drunken man as a companion of your revels? Or shall I crown Agathon, which was my intention in coming, and go away? For I was unable to come yesterday, and therefore I am here to-day, carrying on my head these ribands, that taking them from my own head, I may crown the head of this fairest and wisest of men, as I may be allowed to call him. Will you laugh at me because I am drunk? Yet I know very well that I am speaking the truth, although you may laugh. But first tell me; if I come in shall we have the understanding of which I spoke (supra Will you have a very drunken man? etc.)? Will you drink with me or not?'
  The company were vociferous in begging that he would take his place among them, and Agathon specially invited him. Thereupon he was led in by the people who were with him; and as he was being led, intending to crown Agathon, he took the ribands from his own head and held them in front of his eyes; he was thus prevented from seeing Socrates, who made way for him, and Alcibiades took the vacant place between Agathon and Socrates, and in taking the place he embraced Agathon and crowned him. Take off his sandals, said Agathon, and let him make a third on the same couch.
  By all means; but who makes the third partner in our revels? said Alcibiades, turning round and starting up as he caught sight of Socrates. By Heracles, he said, what is this? here is Socrates always lying in wait for me, and always, as his way is, coming out at all sorts of unsuspected places: and now, what have you to say for yourself, and why are you lying here, where I perceive that you have contrived to find a place, not by a joker or lover of jokes, like Aristophanes, but by the fairest of the company?
   Socrates turned to Agathon and said: I must ask you to protect me, Agathon; for the passion of this man has grown quite a serious matter to me. Since I became his admirer I have never been allowed to speak to any other fair one, or so much as to look at them. If I do, he goes wild with envy and jealousy, and not only abuses me but can hardly keep his hands off me, and at this moment he may do me some harm. Please to see to this, and either reconcile me to him, or, if he attempts violence, protect me, as I am in bodily fear of his mad and passionate attempts.
  There can never be reconciliation between you and me, said Alcibiades; but for the present I will defer your chastisement. And I must beg you, Agathon, to give me back some of the ribands that I may crown the marvellous head of this universal despotI would not have him complain of me for crowning you, and neglecting him, who in conversation is the conqueror of all mankind; and this not only once, as you were the day before yesterday, but always. Whereupon, taking some of the ribands, he crowned Socrates, and again reclined.
  Then he said: You seem, my friends, to be sober, which is a thing not to be endured; you must drinkfor that was the agreement under which I was admittedand I elect myself master of the feast until you are well drunk. Let us have a large goblet, Agathon, or rather, he said, addressing the attendant, bring me that wine-cooler. The wine-cooler which had caught his eye was a vessel holding more than two quartsthis he filled and emptied, and bade the attendant fill it again for Socrates. Observe, my friends, said Alcibiades, that this ingenious trick of mine will have no effect on Socrates, for he can drink any quantity of wine and not be at all nearer being drunk. Socrates drank the cup which the attendant filled for him.
  Eryximachus said: What is this, Alcibiades? Are we to have neither conversation nor singing over our cups; but simply to drink as if we were thirsty?
  --
  Well, said Eryximachus, before you appeared we had passed a resolution that each one of us in turn should make a speech in praise of love, and as good a one as he could: the turn was passed round from left to right; and as all of us have spoken, and you have not spoken but have well drunken, you ought to speak, and then impose upon Socrates any task which you please, and he on his right hand neighbour, and so on.
  That is good, Eryximachus, said Alcibiades; and yet the comparison of a drunken man's speech with those of sober men is hardly fair; and I should like to know, sweet friend, whether you really believe what Socrates was just now saying; for I can assure you that the very reverse is the fact, and that if I praise any one but himself in his presence, whether God or man, he will hardly keep his hands off me.
  For shame, said Socrates.
  Hold your tongue, said Alcibiades, for by Poseidon, there is no one else whom I will praise when you are of the company.
  Well then, said Eryximachus, if you like praise Socrates.
  What do you think, Eryximachus? said Alcibiades: shall I attack him and inflict the punishment before you all?
  What are you about? said Socrates; are you going to raise a laugh at my expense? Is that the meaning of your praise?
  I am going to speak the truth, if you will permit me.
  --
  And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates in a figure which will appear to him to be a caricature, and yet I speak, not to make fun of him, but only for the truth's sake. I say, that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries' shops, holding pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them. I say also that he is like Marsyas the satyr. You yourself will not deny, Socrates, that your face is like that of a satyr. Aye, and there is a resemblance in other points too. For example, you are a bully, as I can prove by witnesses, if you will not confess. And are you not a flute-player? That you are, and a performer far more wonderful than Marsyas. He indeed with instruments used to charm the souls of men by the power of his breath, and the players of his music do so still: for the melodies of Olympus (compare Arist. Pol.) are derived from Marsyas who taught them, and these, whether they are played by a great master or by a miserable flute-girl, have a power which no others have; they alone possess the soul and reveal the wants of those who have need of gods and mysteries, because they are divine. But you produce the same effect with your words only, and do not require the flute: that is the difference between you and him. When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he produces absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments of you and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly repeated, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman, and child who comes within hearing of them. And if I were not afraid that you would think me hopelessly drunk, I would have sworn as well as spoken to the influence which they have always had and still have over me. For my heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear them. And I observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me to such a pass, that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit); and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him, and fly as from the voice of the siren, my fate would be like that of others,he would transfix me, and I should grow old sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same. For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad, if he were to die: so that I am at my wit's end.
  And this is what I and many others have suffered from the flute-playing of this satyr. Yet hear me once more while I show you how exact the image is, and how marvellous his power. For let me tell you; none of you know him; but I will reveal him to you; having begun, I must go on. See you how fond he is of the fair? He is always with them and is always being smitten by them, and then again he knows nothing and is ignorant of all thingssuch is the appearance which he puts on. Is he not like a Silenus in this? To be sure he is: his outer mask is the carved head of the Silenus; but, O my companions in drink, when he is opened, what temperance there is residing within! Know you that beauty and wealth and honour, at which the many wonder, are of no account with him, and are utterly despised by him: he regards not at all the persons who are gifted with them; mankind are nothing to him; all his life is spent in mocking and flouting at them. But when I opened him, and looked within at his serious purpose, I saw in him divine and golden images of such fascinating beauty that I was ready to do in a moment whatever Socrates commanded: they may have escaped the observation of others, but I saw them. Now I fancied that he was seriously enamoured of my beauty, and I thought that I should therefore have a grand opportunity of hearing him tell what he knew, for I had a wonderful opinion of the attractions of my youth. In the prosecution of this design, when I next went to him, I sent away the attendant who usually accompanied me (I will confess the whole truth, and beg you to listen; and if I speak falsely, do you, Socrates, expose the falsehood). Well, he and I were alone together, and I thought that when there was nobody with us, I should hear him speak the language which lovers use to their loves when they are by themselves, and I was delighted. Nothing of the sort; he conversed as usual, and spent the day with me and then went away. Afterwards I challenged him to the palaestra; and he wrestled and closed with me several times when there was no one present; I fancied that I might succeed in this manner. Not a bit; I made no way with him. Lastly, as I had failed hitherto, I thought that I must take stronger measures and attack him boldly, and, as I had begun, not give him up, but see how matters stood between him and me. So I invited him to sup with me, just as if he were a fair youth, and I a designing lover. He was not easily persuaded to come; he did, however, after a while accept the invitation, and when he came the first time, he wanted to go away at once as soon as supper was over, and I had not the face to detain him. The second time, still in pursuance of my design, after we had supped, I went on conversing far into the night, and when he wanted to go away, I pretended that the hour was late and that he had much better remain. So he lay down on the couch next to me, the same on which he had supped, and there was no one but ourselves sleeping in the apartment. All this may be told without shame to any one. But what follows I could hardly tell you if I were sober. Yet as the proverb says, 'In vino veritas,' whether with boys, or without them (In allusion to two proverbs.); and therefore I must speak. Nor, again, should I be justified in concealing the lofty actions of Socrates when I come to praise him. Moreover I have felt the serpent's sting; and he who has suffered, as they say, is willing to tell his fellow-sufferers only, as they alone will be likely to understand him, and will not be extreme in judging of the sayings or doings which have been wrung from his agony. For I have been bitten by a more than viper's tooth; I have known in my soul, or in my heart, or in some other part, that worst of pangs, more violent in ingenuous youth than any serpent's tooth, the pang of philosophy, which will make a man say or do anything. And you whom I see around me, Phaedrus and Agathon and Eryximachus and Pausanias and Aristodemus and Aristophanes, all of you, and I need not say Socrates himself, have had experience of the same madness and passion in your longing after wisdom. Therefore listen and excuse my doings then and my sayings now. But let the attendants and other profane and unmannered persons close up the doors of their ears.
  When the lamp was put out and the servants had gone away, I thought that I must be plain with him and have no more ambiguity. So I gave him a shake, and I said: ' Socrates, are you asleep?' 'No,' he said. 'Do you know what I am meditating? 'What are you meditating?' he said. 'I think,' I replied, 'that of all the lovers whom I have ever had you are the only one who is worthy of me, and you appear to be too modest to speak. Now I feel that I should be a fool to refuse you this or any other favour, and therefore I come to lay at your feet all that I have and all that my friends have, in the hope that you will assist me in the way of virtue, which I desire above all things, and in which I believe that you can help me better than any one else. And I should certainly have more reason to be ashamed of what wise men would say if I were to refuse a favour to such as you, than of what the world, who are mostly fools, would say of me if I granted it.' To these words he replied in the ironical manner which is so characteristic of him:'Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearancelike Diomede, gold in exchange for brass. But look again, sweet friend, and see whether you are not deceived in me. The mind begins to grow critical when the bodily eye fails, and it will be a long time before you get old.' Hearing this, I said: 'I have told you my purpose, which is quite serious, and do you consider what you think best for you and me.' 'That is good,' he said; 'at some other time then we will consider and act as seems best about this and about other matters.' Whereupon, I fancied that he was smitten, and that the words which I had uttered like arrows had wounded him, and so without waiting to hear more I got up, and throwing my coat about him crept under his threadbare cloak, as the time of year was winter, and there I lay during the whole night having this wonderful monster in my arms. This again, Socrates, will not be denied by you. And yet, notwithstanding all, he was so superior to my solicitations, so contemptuous and derisive and disdainful of my beautywhich really, as I fancied, had some attractionshear, O judges; for judges you shall be of the haughty virtue of Socratesnothing more happened, but in the morning when I awoke (let all the gods and goddesses be my witnesses) I arose as from the couch of a father or an elder brother.
  What do you suppose must have been my feelings, after this rejection, at the thought of my own dishonour? And yet I could not help wondering at his natural temperance and self-restraint and manliness. I never imagined that I could have met with a man such as he is in wisdom and endurance. And therefore I could not be angry with him or renounce his company, any more than I could hope to win him. For I well knew that if Ajax could not be wounded by steel, much less he by money; and my only chance of captivating him by my personal attractions had failed. So I was at my wit's end; no one was ever more hopelessly enslaved by another. All this happened before he and I went on the expedition to Potidaea; there we messed together, and I had the opportunity of observing his extraordinary power of sustaining fatigue. His endurance was simply marvellous when, being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without foodon such occasions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only to me but to everybody; there was no one to be compared to him. Yet at a festival he was the only person who had any real powers of enjoyment; though not willing to drink, he could if compelled beat us all at that,wonderful to relate! no human being had ever seen Socrates drunk; and his powers, if I am not mistaken, will be tested before long. His fortitude in enduring cold was also surprising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or if they went out had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and fleeces: in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them.
  I have told you one tale, and now I must tell you another, which is worth hearing,
  --
  while he was on the expedition. One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noonthere he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this was not in winter but in summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way (compare supra). I will also tell, if you pleaseand indeed I am bound to tellof his courage in battle; for who but he saved my life? Now this was the engagement in which I received the prize of valour: for I was wounded and he would not leave me, but he rescued me and my arms; and he ought to have received the prize of valour which the generals wanted to confer on me partly on account of my rank, and I told them so, (this, again, Socrates will not impeach or deny), but he was more eager than the generals that I and not he should have the prize. There was another occasion on which his behaviour was very remarkablein the flight of the army after the battle of Delium, where he served among the heavy-armed,I had a better opportunity of seeing him than at Potidaea, for I was myself on horseback, and therefore comparatively out of danger. He and Laches were retreating, for the troops were in flight, and I met them and told them not to be discouraged, and promised to remain with them; and there you might see him, Aristophanes, as you describe (Aristoph. Clouds), just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalking like a pelican, and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as well as friends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stout resistance; and in this way he and his companion escapedfor this is the sort of man who is never touched in war; those only are pursued who are running away headlong. I particularly observed how superior he was to Laches in presence of mind. Many are the marvels which I might narrate in praise of Socrates; most of his ways might perhaps be paralleled in another man, but his absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been is perfectly astonishing. You may imagine Brasidas and others to have been like Achilles; or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men, but of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either among men who now are or who ever have beenother than that which I have already suggested of Silenus and the satyrs; and they represent in a figure not only himself, but his words. For, although I forgot to mention this to you before, his words are like the images of Silenus which open; they are ridiculous when you first hear them; he clothes himself in language that is like the skin of the wanton satyrfor his talk is of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and curriers, and he is always repeating the same things in the same words (compare Gorg.), so that any ignorant or inexperienced person might feel disposed to laugh at him; but he who opens the bust and sees what is within will find that they are the only words which have a meaning in them, and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honourable man.
  This, friends, is my praise of Socrates. I have added my blame of him for his ill-treatment of me; and he has ill-treated not only me, but Charmides the son of Glaucon, and Euthydemus the son of Diocles, and many others in the same waybeginning as their lover he has ended by making them pay their addresses to him. Wherefore I say to you, Agathon, 'Be not deceived by him; learn from me and take warning, and do not be a fool and learn by experience, as the proverb says.'
  When Alcibiades had finished, there was a laugh at his outspokenness; for he seemed to be still in love with Socrates. You are sober, Alcibiades, said Socrates, or you would never have gone so far about to hide the purpose of your satyr's praises, for all this long story is only an ingenious circumlocution, of which the point comes in by the way at the end; you want to get up a quarrel between me and Agathon, and your notion is that I ought to love you and nobody else, and that you and you only ought to love Agathon. But the plot of this Satyric or Silenic drama has been detected, and you must not allow him, Agathon, to set us at variance.
  I believe you are right, said Agathon, and I am disposed to think that his intention in placing himself between you and me was only to divide us; but he shall gain nothing by that move; for I will go and lie on the couch next to you.
  Yes, yes, replied Socrates, by all means come here and lie on the couch below me.
  Alas, said Alcibiades, how I am fooled by this man; he is determined to get the better of me at every turn. I do beseech you, allow Agathon to lie between us.
  Certainly not, said Socrates, as you praised me, and I in turn ought to praise my neighbour on the right, he will be out of order in praising me again when he ought rather to be praised by me, and I must entreat you to consent to this, and not be jealous, for I have a great desire to praise the youth.
  Hurrah! cried Agathon, I will rise instantly, that I may be praised by Socrates.
  The usual way, said Alcibiades; where Socrates is, no one else has any chance with the fair; and now how readily has he invented a specious reason for attracting Agathon to himself.
  Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the couch by Socrates, when suddenly a band of revellers entered, and spoiled the order of the banquet. Some one who was going out having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and every one was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went awayhe himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long took a good rest: he was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home.

Tablets of Baha u llah text, #Tablets of Baha u llah, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
  Consider Hippocrates, the physician. He was one of the eminent philosophers who believed in God and acknowledged His sovereignty. After him came Socrates who was indeed wise, accomplished and righteous. He practiced self-denial, repressed his appetites for selfish desires and turned away from material pleasures. He withdrew to the mountains where he dwelt in a cave. He dissuaded men from worshipping idols and taught them the way of God, the Lord of Mercy, until the ignorant rose up against him. They arrested him and put him to death in prison. Thus relateth to thee this swift-moving Pen. What a penetrating vision into philosophy this eminent man had! He is the most distinguished of all philosophers and was highly versed in wisdom. We testify that he is one of the heroes in this field and an outstanding champion dedicated unto it. He had a profound knowledge of such sciences as were current amongst men as well as of those which were veiled from their minds. Methinks he drank one draught when the Most Great Ocean overflowed with gleaming and life-giving waters. He it is who perceived a unique, a tempered, and a pervasive nature in things, bearing the closest likeness to the human spirit, and he discovered this nature to be distinct from the substance of things in their refined form. He hath a special pronouncement on this weighty theme. Wert thou to ask from the worldly wise of this generation about this exposition, thou wouldst witness their incapacity to grasp it. Verily, thy Lord speaketh the truth but most people comprehend not.
  147
  After Socrates came the divine Plato who was a pupil of the former and occupied the chair of philosophy as his successor. He acknowledged his belief in God and in His signs which pervade all that hath been and shall be. Then came Aristotle, the well-known man of knowledge. He it is who discovered the power of gaseous matter. These men who stand out as leaders of the people and are preeminent among them, one and all acknowledged their belief in the immortal Being Who holdeth in His grasp the reins of all sciences.
  I will also mention for thee the invocation voiced by Balínús who was familiar with the theories put forward by the Father of Philosophy regarding the mysteries of creation as given in his chrysolite tablets, that everyone may be fully assured of the things We have elucidated for thee in this manifest Tablet, which, if pressed with the hand of fairness and knowledge, will yield the spirit of life for the quickening of all created things. Great is the blessedness of him who swimmeth in this ocean and celebrateth the praise of his Lord, the Gracious, the Best-Beloved. Indeed the breezes of divine revelation are diffused from the verses of thy Lord in such wise that no one can dispute its truth, except those who are bereft of hearing, of vision, of understanding and of every human faculty. Verily thy Lord beareth witness unto this, yet the people understand not.

Talks 600-652, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  M.: This ignorance must go. Again, who says 'I am ignorant'? He must be the witness of ignorance. That is what you are. Socrates said, "I know that I do not know." Can it be ignorance? It is wisdom.
  D.: Why then do I feel unhappy when I am in Vellore and feel peace in Your Presence?

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  some higher force greater than themselves moving them. Socrates used to
  call this force his Daemon. Demon means divine being. It is curious how
  sometimes even in small things one depends on the voice. Once Socrates
  was walking with a disciple. When they were about to take a turn, the disciple said, "Let us go along this route." Socrates replied, "No, my Daemon
  asks me to take that other." The disciple didn't agree and pursued his own
  --
  PURANI: He also argues, rather queerly, that the poisoning of Socrates, the
  banishment of Themistocles and the killing of other great men, were an expression of unrestrained passion.

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
  SRI AUROBINDO: In Plato's Symposium, Socrates, Aristophanes, Agathon
  and others meet and discuss the nature of love, and drink wine. Everybody
  gets drunk except Socrates. Even after heavy drinking he keeps on discussing philosophy with some friends, while the rest fall asleep. You can't
  call him a drunkard!

Theaetetus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  Some dialogues of Plato are of so various a character that their relation to the other dialogues cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. The Theaetetus, like the Parmenides, has points of similarity both with his earlier and his later writings. The perfection of style, the humour, the dramatic interest, the complexity of structure, the fertility of illustration, the shifting of the points of view, are characteristic of his best period of authorship. The vain search, the negative conclusion, the figure of the midwives, the constant profession of ignorance on the part of Socrates, also bear the stamp of the early dialogues, in which the original Socrates is not yet Platonized. Had we no other indications, we should be disposed to range the Theaetetus with the Apology and the Phaedrus, and perhaps even with the Protagoras and the Laches.
  But when we pass from the style to an examination of the subject, we trace a connection with the later rather than with the earlier dialogues. In the first place there is the connexion, indicated by Plato himself at the end of the dialogue, with the Sophist, to which in many respects the Theaetetus is so little akin. (1) The same persons reappear, including the younger Socrates, whose name is just mentioned in the Theaetetus; (2) the theory of rest, which Socrates has declined to consider, is resumed by the Eleatic Stranger; (3) there is a similar allusion in both dialogues to the meeting of Parmenides and Socrates (Theaet., Soph.); and (4) the inquiry into not-being in the Sophist supplements the question of false opinion which is raised in the Theaetetus. (Compare also Theaet. and Soph. for parallel turns of thought.) Secondly, the later date of the dialogue is confirmed by the absence of the doctrine of recollection and of any doctrine of ideas except that which derives them from generalization and from reflection of the mind upon itself. The general character of the Theaetetus is dialectical, and there are traces of the same Megarian influences which appear in the Parmenides, and which later writers, in their matter of fact way, have explained by the residence of Plato at Megara. Socrates disclaims the character of a professional eristic, and also, with a sort of ironical admiration, expresses his inability to attain the Megarian precision in the use of terms. Yet he too employs a similar sophistical skill in overturning every conceivable theory of knowledge.
  The direct indications of a date amount to no more than this: the conversation is said to have taken place when Theaetetus was a youth, and shortly before the death of Socrates. At the time of his own death he is supposed to be a full-grown man. Allowing nine or ten years for the interval between youth and manhood, the dialogue could not have been written earlier than 390, when Plato was about thirty-nine years of age. No more definite date is indicated by the engagement in which Theaetetus is said to have fallen or to have been wounded, and which may have taken place any time during the Corinthian war, between the years 390-387. The later date which has been suggested, 369, when the Athenians and Lacedaemonians disputed the Isthmus with Epaminondas, would make the age of Theaetetus at his death forty-five or forty-six. This a little impairs the beauty of Socrates' remark, that 'he would be a great man if he lived.'
  In this uncertainty about the place of the Theaetetus, it seemed better, as in the case of the Republic, Timaeus, Critias, to retain the order in which Plato himself has arranged this and the two companion dialogues. We cannot exclude the possibility which has been already noticed in reference to other works of Plato, that the Theaetetus may not have been all written continuously; or the probability that the Sophist and Politicus, which differ greatly in style, were only appended after a long interval of time. The allusion to Parmenides compared with the Sophist, would probably imply that the dialogue which is called by his name was already in existence; unless, indeed, we suppose the passage in which the allusion occurs to have been inserted afterwards. Again, the Theaetetus may be connected with the Gorgias, either dialogue from different points of view containing an analysis of the real and apparent (Schleiermacher); and both may be brought into relation with the Apology as illustrating the personal life of Socrates. The Philebus, too, may with equal reason be placed either after or before what, in the language of Thrasyllus, may be called the Second Platonic Trilogy. Both the Parmenides and the Sophist, and still more the Theaetetus, have points of affinity with the Cratylus, in which the principles of rest and motion are again contrasted, and the Sophistical or Protagorean theory of language is opposed to that which is attributed to the disciple of Heracleitus, not to speak of lesser resemblances in thought and language. The Parmenides, again, has been thought by some to hold an intermediate position between the Theaetetus and the Sophist; upon this view, the Sophist may be regarded as the answer to the problems about One and Being which have been raised in the Parmenides. Any of these arrangements may suggest new views to the student of Plato; none of them can lay claim to an exclusive probability in its favour.
  The Theaetetus is one of the narrated dialogues of Plato, and is the only one which is supposed to have been written down. In a short introductory scene, Euclides and Terpsion are described as meeting before the door of Euclides' house in Megara. This may have been a spot familiar to Plato (for Megara was within a walk of Athens), but no importance can be attached to the accidental introduction of the founder of the Megarian philosophy. The real intention of the preface is to create an interest about the person of Theaetetus, who has just been carried up from the army at Corinth in a dying state. The expectation of his death recalls the promise of his youth, and especially the famous conversation which Socrates had with him when he was quite young, a few days before his own trial and death, as we are once more reminded at the end of the dialogue. Yet we may observe that Plato has himself forgotten this, when he represents Euclides as from time to time coming to Athens and correcting the copy from Socrates' own mouth. The narrative, having introduced Theaetetus, and having guaranteed the au thenticity of the dialogue (compare Symposium, Phaedo, Parmenides), is then dropped. No further use is made of the device. As Plato himself remarks, who in this as in some other minute points is imitated by Cicero (De Amicitia), the interlocutory words are omitted.
  Theaetetus, the hero of the battle of Corinth and of the dialogue, is a disciple of Theodorus, the great geometrician, whose science is thus indicated to be the propaedeutic to philosophy. An interest has been already excited about him by his approaching death, and now he is introduced to us anew by the praises of his master Theodorus. He is a youthful Socrates, and exhibits the same contrast of the fair soul and the ungainly face and frame, the Silenus mask and the god within, which are described in the Symposium. The picture which Theodorus gives of his courage and patience and intelligence and modesty is verified in the course of the dialogue. His courage is shown by his behaviour in the battle, and his other qualities shine forth as the argument proceeds. Socrates takes an evident delight in 'the wise Theaetetus,' who has more in him than 'many bearded men'; he is quite inspired by his answers. At first the youth is lost in wonder, and is almost too modest to speak, but, encouraged by Socrates, he rises to the occasion, and grows full of interest and enthusiasm about the great question. Like a youth, he has not finally made up his mind, and is very ready to follow the lead of Socrates, and to enter into each successive phase of the discussion which turns up. His great dialectical talent is shown in his power of drawing distinctions, and of foreseeing the consequences of his own answers. The enquiry about the nature of knowledge is not new to him; long ago he has felt the 'pang of philosophy,' and has experienced the youthful intoxication which is depicted in the Philebus. But he has hitherto been unable to make the transition from mathematics to metaphysics. He can form a general conception of square and oblong numbers, but he is unable to attain a similar expression of knowledge in the abstract. Yet at length he begins to recognize that there are universal conceptions of being, likeness, sameness, number, which the mind contemplates in herself, and with the help of Socrates is conducted from a theory of sense to a theory of ideas.
  There is no reason to doubt that Theaetetus was a real person, whose name survived in the next generation. But neither can any importance be attached to the notices of him in Suidas and Proclus, which are probably based on the mention of him in Plato. According to a confused statement in Suidas, who mentions him twice over, first, as a pupil of Socrates, and then of Plato, he is said to have written the first work on the Five Solids. But no early authority cites the work, the invention of which may have been easily suggested by the division of roots, which Plato attri butes to him, and the allusion to the backward state of solid geometry in the Republic. At any rate, there is no occasion to recall him to life again after the battle of Corinth, in order that we may allow time for the completion of such a work (Muller). We may also remark that such a supposition entirely destroys the pathetic interest of the introduction.
  Theodorus, the geometrician, had once been the friend and disciple of Protagoras, but he is very reluctant to leave his retirement and defend his old master. He is too old to learn Socrates' game of question and answer, and prefers the digressions to the main argument, because he finds them easier to follow. The mathematician, as Socrates says in the Republic, is not capable of giving a reason in the same manner as the dialectician, and Theodorus could not therefore have been appropriately introduced as the chief respondent. But he may be fairly appealed to, when the honour of his master is at stake. He is the 'guardian of his orphans,' although this is a responsibility which he wishes to throw upon Callias, the friend and patron of all Sophists, declaring that he himself had early 'run away' from philosophy, and was absorbed in mathematics. His extreme dislike to the Heraclitean fanatics, which may be compared with the dislike of Theaetetus to the materialists, and his ready acceptance of the noble words of Socrates, are noticeable traits of character.
  The Socrates of the Theaetetus is the same as the Socrates of the earlier dialogues. He is the invincible disputant, now advanced in years, of the Protagoras and Symposium; he is still pursuing his divine mission, his 'Herculean labours,' of which he has described the origin in the Apology; and he still hears the voice of his oracle, bidding him receive or not receive the truant souls. There he is supposed to have a mission to convict men of self-conceit; in the Theaetetus he has assigned to him by God the functions of a man-midwife, who delivers men of their thoughts, and under this character he is present throughout the dialogue. He is the true prophet who has an insight into the natures of men, and can divine their future; and he knows that sympathy is the secret power which unlocks their thoughts. The hit at Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, who was specially committed to his charge in the Laches, may be remarked by the way. The attempt to discover the definition of knowledge is in accordance with the character of Socrates as he is described in the Memorabilia, asking What is justice? what is temperance? and the like. But there is no reason to suppose that he would have analyzed the nature of perception, or traced the connexion of Protagoras and Heracleitus, or have raised the difficulty respecting false opinion. The humorous illustrations, as well as the serious thoughts, run through the dialogue. The snubnosedness of Theaetetus, a characteristic which he shares with Socrates, and the man-midwifery of Socrates, are not forgotten in the closing words. At the end of the dialogue, as in the Euthyphro, he is expecting to meet Meletus at the porch of the king Archon; but with the same indifference to the result which is everywhere displayed by him, he proposes that they shall reassemble on the following day at the same spot. The day comes, and in the Sophist the three friends again meet, but no further allusion is made to the trial, and the principal share in the argument is assigned, not to Socrates, but to an Eleatic stranger; the youthful Theaetetus also plays a different and less independent part. And there is no allusion in the Introduction to the second and third dialogues, which are afterwards appended. There seems, therefore, reason to think that there is a real change, both in the characters and in the design.
  The dialogue is an enquiry into the nature of knowledge, which is interrupted by two digressions. The first is the digression about the midwives, which is also a leading thought or continuous image, like the wave in the Republic, appearing and reappearing at intervals. Again and again we are reminded that the successive conceptions of knowledge are extracted from Theaetetus, who in his turn truly declares that Socrates has got a great deal more out of him than ever was in him. Socrates is never weary of working out the image in humorous details,discerning the symptoms of labour, carrying the child round the hearth, fearing that Theaetetus will bite him, comparing his conceptions to wind-eggs, asserting an hereditary right to the occupation. There is also a serious side to the image, which is an apt similitude of the Socratic theory of education (compare Republic, Sophist), and accords with the ironical spirit in which the wisest of men delights to speak of himself.
  The other digression is the famous contrast of the lawyer and philosopher. This is a sort of landing-place or break in the middle of the dialogue. At the commencement of a great discussion, the reflection naturally arises, How happy are they who, like the philosopher, have time for such discussions (compare Republic)! There is no reason for the introduction of such a digression; nor is a reason always needed, any more than for the introduction of an episode in a poem, or of a topic in conversation. That which is given by Socrates is quite sufficient, viz. that the philosopher may talk and write as he pleases. But though not very closely connected, neither is the digression out of keeping with the rest of the dialogue. The philosopher naturally desires to pour forth the thoughts which are always present to him, and to discourse of the higher life. The idea of knowledge, although hard to be defined, is realised in the life of philosophy. And the contrast is the favourite antithesis between the world, in the various characters of sophist, lawyer, statesman, speaker, and the philosopher,between opinion and knowledge,between the conventional and the true.
  The greater part of the dialogue is devoted to setting up and throwing down definitions of science and knowledge. Proceeding from the lower to the higher by three stages, in which perception, opinion, reasoning are successively examined, we first get rid of the confusion of the idea of knowledge and specific kinds of knowledge,a confusion which has been already noticed in the Lysis, Laches, Meno, and other dialogues. In the infancy of logic, a form of thought has to be invented before the content can be filled up. We cannot define knowledge until the nature of definition has been ascertained. Having succeeded in making his meaning plain, Socrates proceeds to analyze (1) the first definition which Theaetetus proposes: 'Knowledge is sensible perception.' This is speedily identified with the Protagorean saying, 'Man is the measure of all things;' and of this again the foundation is discovered in the perpetual flux of Heracleitus. The relativeness of sensation is then developed at length, and for a moment the definition appears to be accepted. But soon the Protagorean thesis is pronounced to be suicidal; for the adversaries of Protagoras are as good a measure as he is, and they deny his doctrine. He is then supposed to reply that the perception may be true at any given instant. But the reply is in the end shown to be inconsistent with the Heraclitean foundation, on which the doctrine has been affirmed to rest. For if the Heraclitean flux is extended to every sort of change in every instant of time, how can any thought or word be detained even for an instant? Sensible perception, like everything else, is tumbling to pieces. Nor can Protagoras himself maintain that one man is as good as another in his knowledge of the future; and 'the expedient,' if not 'the just and true,' belongs to the sphere of the future.
  And so we must ask again, What is knowledge? The comparison of sensations with one another implies a principle which is above sensation, and which resides in the mind itself. We are thus led to look for knowledge in a higher sphere, and accordingly Theaetetus, when again interrogated, replies (2) that 'knowledge is true opinion.' But how is false opinion possible? The Megarian or Eristic spirit within us revives the question, which has been already asked and indirectly answered in the Meno: 'How can a man be ignorant of that which he knows?' No answer is given to this not unanswerable question. The comparison of the mind to a block of wax, or to a decoy of birds, is found wanting.
  --
  1. In reply to the first, we have only probabilities to offer. Three main points have to be decided: (a) Would Protagoras have identified his own thesis, 'Man is the measure of all things,' with the other, 'All knowledge is sensible perception'? (b) Would he have based the relativity of knowledge on the Heraclitean flux? (c) Would he have asserted the absoluteness of sensation at each instant? Of the work of Protagoras on 'Truth' we know nothing, with the exception of the two famous fragments, which are cited in this dialogue, 'Man is the measure of all things,' and, 'Whether there are gods or not, I cannot tell.' Nor have we any other trustworthy evidence of the tenets of Protagoras, or of the sense in which his words are used. For later writers, including Aristotle in his Metaphysics, have mixed up the Protagoras of Plato, as they have the Socrates of Plato, with the real person.
  Returning then to the Theaetetus, as the only possible source from which an answer to these questions can be obtained, we may remark, that Plato had 'The Truth' of Protagoras before him, and frequently refers to the book. He seems to say expressly, that in this work the doctrine of the Heraclitean flux was not to be found; 'he told the real truth' (not in the book, which is so entitled, but) 'privately to his disciples,'words which imply that the connexion between the doctrines of Protagoras and Heracleitus was not generally recognized in Greece, but was really discovered or invented by Plato. On the other hand, the doctrine that 'Man is the measure of all things,' is expressly identified by Socrates with the other statement, that 'What appears to each man is to him;' and a reference is made to the books in which the statement occurs;this Theaetetus, who has 'often read the books,' is supposed to acknowledge (so Cratylus). And Protagoras, in the speech attri buted to him, never says that he has been misunderstood: he rather seems to imply that the absoluteness of sensation at each instant was to be found in his words. He is only indignant at the 'reductio ad absurdum' devised by Socrates for his 'homo mensura,' which Theodorus also considers to be 'really too bad.'
  The question may be raised, how far Plato in the Theaetetus could have misrepresented Protagoras without violating the laws of dramatic probability. Could he have pretended to cite from a well-known writing what was not to be found there? But such a shadowy enquiry is not worth pursuing further. We need only remember that in the criticism which follows of the thesis of Protagoras, we are criticizing the Protagoras of Plato, and not attempting to draw a precise line between his real sentiments and those which Plato has attri buted to him.
  2. The other difficulty is a more subtle, and also a more important one, because bearing on the general character of the Platonic dialogues. On a first reading of them, we are apt to imagine that the truth is only spoken by Socrates, who is never guilty of a fallacy himself, and is the great detector of the errors and fallacies of others. But this natural presumption is disturbed by the discovery that the Sophists are sometimes in the right and Socrates in the wrong. Like the hero of a novel, he is not to be supposed always to represent the sentiments of the author. There are few modern readers who do not side with Protagoras, rather than with Socrates, in the dialogue which is called by his name. The Cratylus presents a similar difficulty: in his etymologies, as in the number of the State, we cannot tell how far Socrates is serious; for the Socratic irony will not allow him to distinguish between his real and his assumed wisdom. No one is the superior of the invincible Socrates in argument (except in the first part of the Parmenides, where he is introduced as a youth); but he is by no means supposed to be in possession of the whole truth. Arguments are often put into his mouth (compare Introduction to the Gorgias) which must have seemed quite as untenable to Plato as to a modern writer. In this dialogue a great part of the answer of Protagoras is just and sound; remarks are made by him on verbal criticism, and on the importance of understanding an opponent's meaning, which are conceived in the true spirit of philosophy. And the distinction which he is supposed to draw between Eristic and Dialectic, is really a criticism of Plato on himself and his own criticism of Protagoras.
  The difficulty seems to arise from not attending to the dramatic character of the writings of Plato. There are two, or more, sides to questions; and these are parted among the different speakers. Sometimes one view or aspect of a question is made to predominate over the rest, as in the Gorgias or Sophist; but in other dialogues truth is divided, as in the Laches and Protagoras, and the interest of the piece consists in the contrast of opinions. The confusion caused by the irony of Socrates, who, if he is true to his character, cannot say anything of his own knowledge, is increased by the circumstance that in the Theaetetus and some other dialogues he is occasionally playing both parts himself, and even charging his own arguments with unfairness. In the Theaetetus he is designedly held back from arriving at a conclusion. For we cannot suppose that Plato conceived a definition of knowledge to be impossible. But this is his manner of approaching and surrounding a question. The lights which he throws on his subject are indirect, but they are not the less real for that. He has no intention of proving a thesis by a cut-and-dried argument; nor does he imagine that a great philosophical problem can be tied up within the limits of a definition. If he has analyzed a proposition or notion, even with the severity of an impossible logic, if half-truths have been compared by him with other half-truths, if he has cleared up or advanced popular ideas, or illustrated a new method, his aim has been sufficiently accomplished.
  The writings of Plato belong to an age in which the power of analysis had outrun the means of knowledge; and through a spurious use of dialectic, the distinctions which had been already 'won from the void and formless infinite,' seemed to be rapidly returning to their original chaos. The two great speculative philosophies, which a century earlier had so deeply impressed the mind of Hellas, were now degenerating into Eristic. The contemporaries of Plato and Socrates were vainly trying to find new combinations of them, or to transfer them from the object to the subject. The Megarians, in their first attempts to attain a severer logic, were making knowledge impossible (compare Theaet.). They were asserting 'the one good under many names,' and, like the Cynics, seem to have denied predication, while the Cynics themselves were depriving virtue of all which made virtue desirable in the eyes of Socrates and Plato. And besides these, we find mention in the later writings of Plato, especially in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Laws, of certain impenetrable godless persons, who will not believe what they 'cannot hold in their hands'; and cannot be approached in argument, because they cannot argue (Theat; Soph.). No school of Greek philosophers exactly answers to these persons, in whom Plato may perhaps have blended some features of the Atomists with the vulgar materialistic tendencies of mankind in general (compare Introduction to the Sophist).
  And not only was there a conflict of opinions, but the stage which the mind had reached presented other difficulties hardly intelligible to us, who live in a different cycle of human thought. All times of mental progress are times of confusion; we only see, or rather seem to see things clearly, when they have been long fixed and defined. In the age of Plato, the limits of the world of imagination and of pure abstraction, of the old world and the new, were not yet fixed. The Greeks, in the fourth century before Christ, had no words for 'subject' and 'object,' and no distinct conception of them; yet they were always hovering about the question involved in them. The analysis of sense, and the analysis of thought, were equally difficult to them; and hopelessly confused by the attempt to solve them, not through an appeal to facts, but by the help of general theories respecting the nature of the universe.
  --
  Terpsion, who has come to Megara from the country, is described as having looked in vain for Euclides in the Agora; the latter explains that he has been down to the harbour, and on his way thither had met Theaetetus, who was being carried up from the army to Athens. He was scarcely alive, for he had been badly wounded at the battle of Corinth, and had taken the dysentery which prevailed in the camp. The mention of his condition suggests the reflection, 'What a loss he will be!' 'Yes, indeed,' replies Euclid; 'only just now I was hearing of his noble conduct in the battle.' 'That I should expect; but why did he not remain at Megara?' 'I wanted him to remain, but he would not; so I went with him as far as Erineum; and as I parted from him, I remembered that Socrates had seen him when he was a youth, and had a remarkable conversation with him, not long before his own death; and he then prophesied of him that he would be a great man if he lived.' 'How true that has been; how like all that Socrates said! And could you repeat the conversation?' 'Not from memory; but I took notes when I returned home, which I afterwards filled up at leisure, and got Socrates to correct them from time to time, when I came to Athens'...Terpsion had long intended to ask for a sight of this writing, of which he had already heard. They are both tired, and agree to rest and have the conversation read to them by a servant...'Here is the roll, Terpsion; I need only observe that I have omitted, for the sake of convenience, the interlocutory words, "said I," "said he"; and that Theaetetus, and Theodorus, the geometrician of Cyrene, are the persons with whom Socrates is conversing.'
   Socrates begins by asking Theodorus whether, in his visit to Athens, he has found any Athenian youth likely to attain distinction in science. 'Yes, Socrates, there is one very remarkable youth, with whom I have become acquainted. He is no beauty, and therefore you need not imagine that I am in love with him; and, to say the truth, he is very like you, for he has a snub nose, and projecting eyes, although these features are not so marked in him as in you. He combines the most various qualities, quickness, patience, courage; and he is gentle as well as wise, always silently flowing on, like a river of oil. Look! he is the middle one of those who are entering the palaestra.'
   Socrates, who does not know his name, recognizes him as the son of Euphronius, who was himself a good man and a rich. He is informed by Theodorus that the youth is named Theaetetus, but the property of his father has disappeared in the hands of trustees; this does not, however, prevent him from adding liberality to his other virtues. At the desire of Socrates he invites Theaetetus to sit by them.
  'Yes,' says Socrates, 'that I may see in you, Theaetetus, the image of my ugly self, as Theodorus declares. Not that his remark is of any importance; for though he is a philosopher, he is not a painter, and therefore he is no judge of our faces; but, as he is a man of science, he may be a judge of our intellects. And if he were to praise the mental endowments of either of us, in that case the hearer of the eulogy ought to examine into what he says, and the subject should not refuse to be examined.' Theaetetus consents, and is caught in a trap (compare the similar trap which is laid for Theodorus). 'Then, Theaetetus, you will have to be examined, for Theodorus has been praising you in a style of which I never heard the like.' 'He was only jesting.' 'Nay, that is not his way; and I cannot allow you, on that pretence, to retract the assent which you have already given, or I shall make Theodorus repeat your praises, and swear to them.' Theaetetus, in reply, professes that he is willing to be examined, and Socrates begins by asking him what he learns of Theodorus. He is himself anxious to learn anything of anybody; and now he has a little question to which he wants Theaetetus or Theodorus (or whichever of the company would not be 'donkey' to the rest) to find an answer. Without further preface, but at the same time apologizing for his eagerness, he asks, 'What is knowledge?' Theodorus is too old to answer questions, and begs him to interrogate Theaetetus, who has the advantage of youth.
  Theaetetus replies, that knowledge is what he learns of Theodorus, i.e. geometry and arithmetic; and that there are other kinds of knowledgeshoemaking, carpentering, and the like. But Socrates rejoins, that this answer contains too much and also too little. For although Theaetetus has enumerated several kinds of knowledge, he has not explained the common nature of them; as if he had been asked, 'What is clay?' and instead of saying 'Clay is moistened earth,' he had answered, 'There is one clay of image-makers, another of potters, another of oven-makers.' Theaetetus at once divines that Socrates means him to extend to all kinds of knowledge the same process of generalization which he has already learned to apply to arithmetic. For he has discovered a division of numbers into square numbers, 4, 9, 16, etc., which are composed of equal factors, and represent figures which have equal sides, and oblong numbers, 3, 5, 6, 7, etc., which are composed of unequal factors, and represent figures which have unequal sides. But he has never succeeded in attaining a similar conception of knowledge, though he has often tried; and, when this and similar questions were brought to him from Socrates, has been sorely distressed by them. Socrates explains to him that he is in labour. For men as well as women have pangs of labour; and both at times require the assistance of midwives. And he, Socrates, is a midwife, although this is a secret; he has inherited the art from his mother bold and bluff, and he ushers into light, not children, but the thoughts of men. Like the midwives, who are 'past bearing children,' he too can have no offspringthe God will not allow him to bring anything into the world of his own. He also reminds Theaetetus that the midwives are or ought to be the only matchmakers (this is the preparation for a biting jest); for those who reap the fruit are most likely to know on what soil the plants will grow. But respectable midwives avoid this department of practicethey do not want to be called procuresses. There are some other differences between the two sorts of pregnancy. For women do not bring into the world at one time real children and at another time idols which are with difficulty distinguished from them. 'At first,' says Socrates in his character of the man-midwife, 'my patients are barren and stolid, but after a while they "round apace," if the gods are propitious to them; and this is due not to me but to themselves; I and the god only assist in bringing their ideas to the birth. Many of them have left me too soon, and the result has been that they have produced abortions; or when I have delivered them of children they have lost them by an ill bringing up, and have ended by seeing themselves, as others see them, to be great fools. Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, is one of these, and there have been others. The truants often return to me and beg to be taken back; and then, if my familiar allows me, which is not always the case, I receive them, and they begin to grow again. There come to me also those who have nothing in them, and have no need of my art; and I am their matchmaker (see above), and marry them to Prodicus or some other inspired sage who is likely to suit them. I tell you this long story because I suspect that you are in labour. Come then to me, who am a midwife, and the son of a midwife, and I will deliver you. And do not bite me, as the women do, if I abstract your first-born; for I am acting out of good-will towards you; the God who is within me is the friend of man, though he will not allow me to dissemble the truth. Once more then, Theaetetus, I repeat my old question"What is knowledge?" Take courage, and by the help of God you will discover an answer.' 'My answer is, that knowledge is perception.' 'That is the theory of Protagoras, who has another way of expressing the same thing when he says, "Man is the measure of all things." He was a very wise man, and we should try to understand him. In order to illustrate his meaning let me suppose that there is the same wind blowing in our faces, and one of us may be hot and the other cold. How is this? Protagoras will reply that the wind is hot to him who is cold, cold to him who is hot. And "is" means "appears," and when you say "appears to him," that means "he feels." Thus feeling, appearance, perception, coincide with being. I suspect, however, that this was only a "facon de parler," by which he imposed on the common herd like you and me; he told "the truth" (in allusion to the title of his book, which was called "The Truth") in secret to his disciples. For he was really a votary of that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be relative; nothing is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all is in motion and mixture and transition and flux and generation, not "being," as we ignorantly affirm, but "becoming." This has been the doctrine, not of Protagoras only, but of all philosophers, with the single exception of Parmenides; Empedocles, Heracleitus, and others, and all the poets, with Epicharmus, the king of Comedy, and Homer, the king of Tragedy, at their head, have said the same; the latter has these words
  "Ocean, whence the gods sprang, and mother Tethys."
  --
  'And if you say "Yes," the tongue will escape conviction but not the mind, as Euripides would say?' 'True.' 'The thoroughbred Sophists, who know all that can be known, would have a sparring match over this, but you and I, who have no professional pride, want only to discover whether our ideas are clear and consistent. And we cannot be wrong in saying, first, that nothing can be greater or less while remaining equal; secondly, that there can be no becoming greater or less without addition or subtraction; thirdly, that what is and was not, cannot be without having become. But then how is this reconcilable with the case of the dice, and with similar examples?that is the question.' 'I am often perplexed and amazed, Socrates, by these difficulties.' 'That is because you are a philosopher, for philosophy begins in wonder, and Iris is the child of Thaumas. Do you know the original principle on which the doctrine of Protagoras is based?' 'No.' 'Then I will tell you; but we must not let the uninitiated hear, and by the uninitiated I mean the obstinate people who believe in nothing which they cannot hold in their hands. The brethren whose mysteries I am about to unfold to you are far more ingenious. They maintain that all is motion; and that motion has two forms, action and passion, out of which endless phenomena are created, also in two formssense and the object of sensewhich come to the birth together. There are two kinds of motions, a slow and a fast; the motions of the agent and the patient are slower, because they move and create in and about themselves, but the things which are born of them have a swifter motion, and pass rapidly from place to place. The eye and the appropriate object come together, and give birth to whiteness and the sensation of whiteness; the eye is filled with seeing, and becomes not sight but a seeing eye, and the object is filled with whiteness, and becomes not whiteness but white; and no other compound of either with another would have produced the same effect. All sensation is to be resolved into a similar combination of an agent and patient. Of either, taken separately, no idea can be formed; and the agent may become a patient, and the patient an agent. Hence there arises a general reflection that nothing is, but all things become; no name can detain or fix them. Are not these speculations charming, Theaetetus, and very good for a person in your interesting situation? I am offering you specimens of other men's wisdom, because I have no wisdom of my own, and I want to deliver you of something; and presently we will see whether you have brought forth wind or not. Tell me, then, what do you think of the notion that "All things are becoming"?'
  'When I hear your arguments, I am marvellously ready to assent.'
  'But I ought not to conceal from you that there is a serious objection which may be urged against this doctrine of Protagoras. For there are states, such as madness and dreaming, in which perception is false; and half our life is spent in dreaming; and who can say that at this instant we are not dreaming? Even the fancies of madmen are real at the time. But if knowledge is perception, how can we distinguish between the true and the false in such cases? Having stated the objection, I will now state the answer. Protagoras would deny the continuity of phenomena; he would say that what is different is entirely different, and whether active or passive has a different power. There are infinite agents and patients in the world, and these produce in every combination of them a different perception. Take myself as an instance: Socrates may be ill or he may be well,and remember that Socrates, with all his accidents, is spoken of. The wine which I drink when I am well is pleasant to me, but the same wine is unpleasant to me when I am ill. And there is nothing else from which I can receive the same impression, nor can another receive the same impression from the wine. Neither can I and the object of sense become separately what we become together. For the one in becoming is relative to the other, but they have no other relation; and the combination of them is absolute at each moment. (In modern language, the act of sensation is really indivisible, though capable of a mental analysis into subject and object.) My sensation alone is true, and true to me only. And therefore, as Protagoras says, "To myself I am the judge of what is and what is not." Thus the flux of Homer and Heracleitus, the great Protagorean saying that "Man is the measure of all things," the doctrine of Theaetetus that "Knowledge is perception," have all the same meaning. And this is thy new-born child, which by my art I have brought to light; and you must not be angry if instead of rearing your infant we expose him.'
  'Theaetetus will not be angry,' says Theodorus; 'he is very good-natured. But I should like to know, Socrates, whether you mean to say that all this is untrue?'
  'First reminding you that I am not the bag which contains the arguments, but that I extract them from Theaetetus, shall I tell you what amazes me in your friend Protagoras?'
  --
  Theodorus thinks that Socrates is unjust to his master, Protagoras; but he is too old and stiff to try a fall with him, and therefore refers him to Theaetetus, who is already driven out of his former opinion by the arguments of Socrates.
   Socrates then takes up the defence of Protagoras, who is supposed to reply in his own person'Good people, you sit and declaim about the gods, of whose existence or non-existence I have nothing to say, or you discourse about man being reduced to the level of the brutes; but what proof have you of your statements? And yet surely you and Theodorus had better reflect whether probability is a safe guide. Theodorus would be a bad geometrician if he had nothing better to offer.'...Theaetetus is affected by the appeal to geometry, and Socrates is induced by him to put the question in a new form. He proceeds as follows:'Should we say that we know what we see and hear,e.g. the sound of words or the sight of letters in a foreign tongue?'
  'We should say that the figures of the letters, and the pitch of the voice in uttering them, were known to us, but not the meaning of them.'
  --
  Theodorus objects that Callias is the true guardian, but he hopes that Socrates will come to the rescue. Socrates prefaces his defence by resuming the attack. He asks whether a man can know and not know at the same time? 'Impossible.' Quite possible, if you maintain that seeing is knowing. The confident adversary, suiting the action to the word, shuts one of your eyes; and now, says he, you see and do not see, but do you know and not know? And a fresh opponent darts from his ambush, and transfers to knowledge the terms which are commonly applied to sight. He asks whether you can know near and not at a distance; whether you can have a sharp and also a dull knowledge. While you are wondering at his incomparable wisdom, he gets you into his power, and you will not escape until you have come to an understanding with him about the money which is to be paid for your release.
  But Protagoras has not yet made his defence; and already he may be heard contemptuously replying that he is not responsible for the admissions which were made by a boy, who could not foresee the coming move, and therefore had answered in a manner which enabled Socrates to raise a laugh against himself. 'But I cannot be fairly charged,' he will say, 'with an answer which I should not have given; for I never maintained that the memory of a feeling is the same as a feeling, or denied that a man might know and not know the same thing at the same time. Or, if you will have extreme precision, I say that man in different relations is many or rather infinite in number. And I challenge you, either to show that his perceptions are not individual, or that if they are, what appears to him is not what is. As to your pigs and baboons, you are yourself a pig, and you make my writings a sport of other swine. But I still affirm that man is the measure of all things, although I admit that one man may be a thousand times better than another, in proportion as he has better impressions. Neither do I deny the existence of wisdom or of the wise man. But I maintain that wisdom is a practical remedial power of turning evil into good, the bitterness of disease into the sweetness of health, and does not consist in any greater truth or superior knowledge. For the impressions of the sick are as true as the impressions of the healthy; and the sick are as wise as the healthy. Nor can any man be cured of a false opinion, for there is no such thing; but he may be cured of the evil habit which generates in him an evil opinion. This is effected in the body by the drugs of the physician, and in the soul by the words of the Sophist; and the new state or opinion is not truer, but only better than the old. And philosophers are not tadpoles, but physicians and husbandmen, who till the soil and infuse health into animals and plants, and make the good take the place of the evil, both in individuals and states. Wise and good rhetoricians make the good to appear just in states (for that is just which appears just to a state), and in return, they deserve to be well paid. And you, Socrates, whether you please or not, must continue to be a measure. This is my defence, and I must request you to meet me fairly. We are professing to reason, and not merely to dispute; and there is a great difference between reasoning and disputation. For the disputer is always seeking to trip up his opponent; and this is a mode of argument which disgusts men with philosophy as they grow older. But the reasoner is trying to understand him and to point out his errors to him, whether arising from his own or from his companion's fault; he does not argue from the customary use of names, which the vulgar pervert in all manner of ways. If you are gentle to an adversary he will follow and love you; and if defeated he will lay the blame on himself, and seek to escape from his own prejudices into philosophy. I would recommend you, Socrates, to adopt this humaner method, and to avoid captious and verbal criticisms.'
  Such, Theodorus, is the very slight help which I am able to afford to your friend; had he been alive, he would have helped himself in far better style.
  --
   Socrates now resumes the argument. As he is very desirous of doing justice to Protagoras, he insists on citing his own words,'What appears to each man is to him.' And how, asks Socrates, are these words reconcileable with the fact that all mankind are agreed in thinking themselves wiser than others in some respects, and inferior to them in others? In the hour of danger they are ready to fall down and worship any one who is their superior in wisdom as if he were a god. And the world is full of men who are asking to be taught and willing to be ruled, and of other men who are willing to rule and teach them. All which implies that men do judge of one another's impressions, and think some wise and others foolish. How will Protagoras answer this argument? For he cannot say that no one deems another ignorant or mistaken. If you form a judgment, thousands and tens of thousands are ready to maintain the opposite. The multitude may not and do not agree in Protagoras' own thesis that 'Man is the measure of all things;' and then who is to decide? Upon his own showing must not his 'truth' depend on the number of suffrages, and be more or less true in proportion as he has more or fewer of them? And he must acknowledge further, that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, which is a famous jest. And if he admits that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, he must admit that he himself does not speak truly. But his opponents will refuse to admit this of themselves, and he must allow that they are right in their refusal. The conclusion is, that all mankind, including Protagoras himself, will deny that he speaks truly; and his truth will be true neither to himself nor to anybody else.
  Theodorus is inclined to think that this is going too far. Socrates ironically replies, that he is not going beyond the truth. But if the old Protagoras could only pop his head out of the world below, he would doubtless give them both a sound castigation and be off to the shades in an instant. Seeing that he is not within call, we must examine the question for ourselves. It is clear that there are great differences in the understandings of men. Admitting, with Protagoras, that immediate sensations of hot, cold, and the like, are to each one such as they appear, yet this hypothesis cannot be extended to judgments or opinions. And even if we were to admit further,and this is the view of some who are not thorough-going followers of Protagoras,that right and wrong, holy and unholy, are to each state or individual such as they appear, still Protagoras will not venture to maintain that every man is equally the measure of expediency, or that the thing which seems is expedient to every one. But this begins a new question. 'Well, Socrates, we have plenty of leisure. Yes, we have, and, after the manner of philosophers, we are digressing; I have often observed how ridiculous this habit of theirs makes them when they appear in court. 'What do you mean?' I mean to say that a philosopher is a gentleman, but a lawyer is a servant. The one can have his talk out, and wander at will from one subject to another, as the fancy takes him; like ourselves, he may be long or short, as he pleases. But the lawyer is always in a hurry; there is the clepsydra limiting his time, and the brief limiting his topics, and his adversary is standing over him and exacting his rights. He is a servant disputing about a fellow-servant before his master, who holds the cause in his hands; the path never diverges, and often the race is for his life. Such experiences render him keen and shrewd; he learns the arts of flattery, and is perfect in the practice of crooked ways; dangers have come upon him too soon, when the tenderness of youth was unable to meet them with truth and honesty, and he has resorted to counter-acts of dishonesty and falsehood, and become warped and distorted; without any health or freedom or sincerity in him he has grown up to manhood, and is or esteems himself to be a master of cunning. Such are the lawyers; will you have the companion picture of philosophers? or will this be too much of a digression?
  'Nay, Socrates, the argument is our servant, and not our master. Who is the judge or where is the spectator, having a right to control us?'
  I will describe the leaders, then: for the inferior sort are not worth the trouble. The lords of philosophy have not learned the way to the dicastery or ecclesia; they neither see nor hear the laws and votes of the state, written or recited; societies, whether political or festive, clubs, and singing maidens do not enter even into their dreams. And the scandals of persons or their ancestors, male and female, they know no more than they can tell the number of pints in the ocean. Neither are they conscious of their own ignorance; for they do not practise singularity in order to gain reputation, but the truth is, that the outer form of them only is residing in the city; the inner man, as Pindar says, is going on a voyage of discovery, measuring as with line and rule the things which are under and in the earth, interrogating the whole of nature, only not condescending to notice what is near them.
  'What do you mean, Socrates?'
  I will illustrate my meaning by the jest of the witty maid-servant, who saw Thales tumbling into a well, and said of him, that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was before his feet. This is applicable to all philosophers. The philosopher is unacquainted with the world; he hardly knows whether his neighbour is a man or an animal. For he is always searching into the essence of man, and enquiring what such a nature ought to do or suffer different from any other. Hence, on every occasion in private life and public, as I was saying, when he appears in a law-court or anywhere, he is the joke, not only of maid-servants, but of the general herd, falling into wells and every sort of disaster; he looks such an awkward, inexperienced creature, unable to say anything personal, when he is abused, in answer to his adversaries (for he knows no evil of any one); and when he hears the praises of others, he cannot help laughing from the bottom of his soul at their pretensions; and this also gives him a ridiculous appearance. A king or tyrant appears to him to be a kind of swine-herd or cow-herd, milking away at an animal who is much more troublesome and dangerous than cows or sheep; like the cow-herd, he has no time to be educated, and the pen in which he keeps his flock in the mountains is surrounded by a wall. When he hears of large landed properties of ten thousand acres or more, he thinks of the whole earth; or if he is told of the antiquity of a family, he remembers that every one has had myriads of progenitors, rich and poor, Greeks and barbarians, kings and slaves. And he who boasts of his descent from Amphitryon in the twenty-fifth generation, may, if he pleases, add as many more, and double that again, and our philosopher only laughs at his inability to do a larger sum. Such is the man at whom the vulgar scoff; he seems to them as if he could not mind his feet. 'That is very true, Socrates.' But when he tries to draw the quick-witted lawyer out of his pleas and rejoinders to the contemplation of absolute justice or injustice in their own nature, or from the popular praises of wealthy kings to the view of happiness and misery in themselves, or to the reasons why a man should seek after the one and avoid the other, then the situation is reversed; the little wretch turns giddy, and is ready to fall over the precipice; his utterance becomes thick, and he makes himself ridiculous, not to servant-maids, but to every man of liberal education. Such are the two pictures: the one of the philosopher and gentleman, who may be excused for not having learned how to make a bed, or cook up flatteries; the other, a serviceable knave, who hardly knows how to wear his cloak,still less can he awaken harmonious thoughts or hymn virtue's praises.
  'If the world, Socrates, were as ready to receive your words as I am, there would be greater peace and less evil among mankind.'
  Evil, Theodorus, must ever remain in this world to be the antagonist of good, out of the way of the gods in heaven. Wherefore also we should fly away from ourselves to them; and to fly to them is to become like them; and to become like them is to become holy, just and true. But many live in the old wives' fable of appearances; they think that you should follow virtue in order that you may seem to be good. And yet the truth is, that God is righteous; and of men, he is most like him who is most righteous. To know this is wisdom; and in comparison of this the wisdom of the arts or the seeming wisdom of politicians is mean and common. The unrighteous man is apt to pride himself on his cunning; when others call him rogue, he says to himself: 'They only mean that I am one who deserves to live, and not a mere burden of the earth.' But he should reflect that his ignorance makes his condition worse than if he knew. For the penalty of injustice is not death or stripes, but the fatal necessity of becoming more and more unjust. Two patterns of life are set before him; the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched; and he is growing more and more like the one and unlike the other. He does not see that if he continues in his cunning, the place of innocence will not receive him after death. And yet if such a man has the courage to hear the argument out, he often becomes dissatisfied with himself, and has no more strength in him than a child.But we have digressed enough.
  'For my part, Socrates, I like the digressions better than the argument, because I understand them better.'
  To return. When we left off, the Protagoreans and Heracliteans were maintaining that the ordinances of the State were just, while they lasted. But no one would maintain that the laws of the State were always good or expedient, although this may be the intention of them. For the expedient has to do with the future, about which we are liable to mistake. Now, would Protagoras maintain that man is the measure not only of the present and past, but of the future; and that there is no difference in the judgments of men about the future? Would an untrained man, for example, be as likely to know when he is going to have a fever, as the physician who attended him? And if they differ in opinion, which of them is likely to be right; or are they both right? Is not a vine-grower a better judge of a vintage which is not yet gathered, or a cook of a dinner which is in preparation, or Protagoras of the probable effect of a speech than an ordinary person? The last example speaks 'ad hominen.' For Protagoras would never have amassed a fortune if every man could judge of the future for himself. He is, therefore, compelled to admit that he is a measure; but I, who know nothing, am not equally convinced that I am. This is one way of refuting him; and he is refuted also by the authority which he attri butes to the opinions of others, who deny his opinions. I am not equally sure that we can disprove the truth of immediate states of feeling. But this leads us to the doctrine of the universal flux, about which a battle-royal is always going on in the cities of Ionia. 'Yes; the Ephesians are downright mad about the flux; they cannot stop to argue with you, but are in perpetual motion, obedient to their text-books. Their restlessness is beyond expression, and if you ask any of them a question, they will not answer, but dart at you some unintelligible saying, and another and another, making no way either with themselves or with others; for nothing is fixed in them or their ideas,they are at war with fixed principles.' I suppose, Theodorus, that you have never seen them in time of peace, when they discourse at leisure to their disciples? 'Disciples! they have none; they are a set of uneducated fanatics, and each of them says of the other that they have no knowledge. We must trust to ourselves, and not to them for the solution of the problem.' Well, the doctrine is old, being derived from the poets, who speak in a figure of Oceanus and Tethys; the truth was once concealed, but is now revealed by the superior wisdom of a later generation, and made intelligible to the cobbler, who, on hearing that all is in motion, and not some things only, as he ignorantly fancied, may be expected to fall down and worship his teachers. And the opposite doctrine must not be forgotten:
  --
  At the close of the discussion, Theodorus claims to be released from the argument, according to his agreement. But Theaetetus insists that they shall proceed to consider the doctrine of rest. This is declined by Socrates, who has too much reverence for the great Parmenides lightly to attack him. (We shall find that he returns to the doctrine of rest in the Sophist; but at present he does not wish to be diverted from his main purpose, which is, to deliver Theaetetus of his conception of knowledge.) He proceeds to interrogate him further. When he says that 'knowledge is in perception,' with what does he perceive? The first answer is, that he perceives sights with the eye, and sounds with the ear. This leads Socrates to make the reflection that nice distinctions of words are sometimes pedantic, but sometimes necessary; and he proposes in this case to substitute the word 'through' for 'with.' For the senses are not like the Trojan warriors in the horse, but have a common centre of perception, in which they all meet. This common principle is able to compare them with one another, and must therefore be distinct from them (compare Republic). And as there are facts of sense which are perceived through the organs of the body, there are also mathematical and other abstractions, such as sameness and difference, likeness and unlikeness, which the soul perceives by herself. Being is the most universal of these abstractions. The good and the beautiful are abstractions of another kind, which exist in relation and which above all others the mind perceives in herself, comparing within her past, present, and future. For example; we know a thing to be hard or soft by the touch, of which the perception is given at birth to men and animals. But the essence of hardness or softness, or the fact that this hardness is, and is the opposite of softness, is slowly learned by reflection and experience. Mere perception does not reach being, and therefore fails of truth; and therefore has no share in knowledge. But if so, knowledge is not perception. What then is knowledge? The mind, when occupied by herself with being, is said to have opinionshall we say that 'Knowledge is true opinion'? But still an old difficulty recurs; we ask ourselves, 'How is false opinion possible?' This difficulty may be stated as follows:
  Either we know or do not know a thing (for the intermediate processes of learning and forgetting need not at present be considered); and in thinking or having an opinion, we must either know or not know that which we think, and we cannot know and be ignorant at the same time; we cannot confuse one thing which we do not know, with another thing which we do not know; nor can we think that which we do not know to be that which we know, or that which we know to be that which we do not know. And what other case is conceivable, upon the supposition that we either know or do not know all things? Let us try another answer in the sphere of being: 'When a man thinks, and thinks that which is not.' But would this hold in any parallel case? Can a man see and see nothing? or hear and hear nothing? or touch and touch nothing? Must he not see, hear, or touch some one existing thing? For if he thinks about nothing he does not think, and not thinking he cannot think falsely. And so the path of being is closed against us, as well as the path of knowledge. But may there not be 'heterodoxy,' or transference of opinion;I mean, may not one thing be supposed to be another? Theaetetus is confident that this must be 'the true falsehood,' when a man puts good for evil or evil for good. Socrates will not discourage him by attacking the paradoxical expression 'true falsehood,' but passes on. The new notion involves a process of thinking about two things, either together or alternately. And thinking is the conversing of the mind with herself, which is carried on in question and answer, until she no longer doubts, but determines and forms an opinion. And false opinion consists in saying to yourself, that one thing is another. But did you ever say to yourself, that good is evil, or evil good? Even in sleep, did you ever imagine that odd was even? Or did any man in his senses ever fancy that an ox was a horse, or that two are one? So that we can never think one thing to be another; for you must not meet me with the verbal quibble that oneeteronis othereteron (both 'one' and 'other' in Greek are called 'other'eteron). He who has both the two things in his mind, cannot misplace them; and he who has only one of them in his mind, cannot misplace themon either supposition transplacement is inconceivable.
  But perhaps there may still be a sense in which we can think that which we do not know to be that which we know: e.g. Theaetetus may know Socrates, but at a distance he may mistake another person for him. This process may be conceived by the help of an image. Let us suppose that every man has in his mind a block of wax of various qualities, the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses; and on this he receives the seal or stamp of those sensations and perceptions which he wishes to remember. That which he succeeds in stamping is remembered and known by him as long as the impression lasts; but that, of which the impression is rubbed out or imperfectly made, is forgotten, and not known. No one can think one thing to be another, when he has the memorial or seal of both of these in his soul, and a sensible impression of neither; or when he knows one and does not know the other, and has no memorial or seal of the other; or when he knows neither; or when he perceives both, or one and not the other, or neither; or when he perceives and knows both, and identifies what he perceives with what he knows (this is still more impossible); or when he does not know one, and does not know and does not perceive the other; or does not perceive one, and does not know and does not perceive the other; or has no perception or knowledge of eitherall these cases must be excluded. But he may err when he confuses what he knows or perceives, or what he perceives and does not know, with what he knows, or what he knows and perceives with what he knows and perceives.
  Theaetetus is unable to follow these distinctions; which Socrates proceeds to illustrate by examples, first of all remarking, that knowledge may exist without perception, and perception without knowledge. I may know Theodorus and Theaetetus and not see them; I may see them, and not know them. 'That I understand.' But I could not mistake one for the other if I knew you both, and had no perception of either; or if I knew one only, and perceived neither; or if I knew and perceived neither, or in any other of the excluded cases. The only possibility of error is: 1st, when knowing you and Theodorus, and having the impression of both of you on the waxen block, I, seeing you both imperfectly and at a distance, put the foot in the wrong shoethat is to say, put the seal or stamp on the wrong object: or 2ndly, when knowing both of you I only see one; or when, seeing and knowing you both, I fail to identify the impression and the object. But there could be no error when perception and knowledge correspond.
  The waxen block in the heart of a man's soul, as I may say in the words of Homer, who played upon the words ker and keros, may be smooth and deep, and large enough, and then the signs are clearly marked and lasting, and do not get confused. But in the 'hairy heart,' as the all-wise poet sings, when the wax is muddy or hard or moist, there is a corresponding confusion and want of retentiveness; in the muddy and impure there is indistinctness, and still more in the hard, for there the impressions have no depth of wax, and in the moist they are too soon effaced. Yet greater is the indistinctness when they are all jolted together in a little soul, which is narrow and has no room. These are the sort of natures which have false opinion; from stupidity they see and hear and think amiss; and this is falsehood and ignorance. Error, then, is a confusion of thought and sense.
  Theaetetus is delighted with this explanation. But Socrates has no sooner found the new solution than he sinks into a fit of despondency. For an objection occurs to him:May there not be errors where there is no confusion of mind and sense? e.g. in numbers. No one can confuse the man whom he has in his thoughts with the horse which he has in his thoughts, but he may err in the addition of five and seven. And observe that these are purely mental conceptions. Thus we are involved once more in the dilemma of saying, either that there is no such thing as false opinion, or that a man knows what he does not know.
  We are at our wit's end, and may therefore be excused for making a bold diversion. All this time we have been repeating the words 'know,' 'understand,' yet we do not know what knowledge is. 'Why, Socrates, how can you argue at all without using them?' Nay, but the true hero of dialectic would have forbidden me to use them until I had explained them. And I must explain them now. The verb 'to know' has two senses, to have and to possess knowledge, and I distinguish 'having' from 'possessing.' A man may possess a garment which he does not wear; or he may have wild birds in an aviary; these in one sense he possesses, and in another he has none of them. Let this aviary be an image of the mind, as the waxen block was; when we are young, the aviary is empty; after a time the birds are put in; for under this figure we may describe different forms of knowledge;there are some of them in groups, and some single, which are flying about everywhere; and let us suppose a hunt after the science of odd and even, or some other science. The possession of the birds is clearly not the same as the having them in the hand. And the original chase of them is not the same as taking them in the hand when they are already caged.
  This distinction between use and possession saves us from the absurdity of supposing that we do not know what we know, because we may know in one sense, i.e. possess, what we do not know in another, i.e. use. But have we not escaped one difficulty only to encounter a greater? For how can the exchange of two kinds of knowledge ever become false opinion? As well might we suppose that ignorance could make a man know, or that blindness could make him see. Theaetetus suggests that in the aviary there may be flying about mock birds, or forms of ignorance, and we put forth our hands and grasp ignorance, when we are intending to grasp knowledge. But how can he who knows the forms of knowledge and the forms of ignorance imagine one to be the other? Is there some other form of knowledge which distinguishes them? and another, and another? Thus we go round and round in a circle and make no progress.
  --
  Once more. Theaetetus offers a definition which he has heard: Knowledge is true opinion accompanied by definition or explanation. Socrates has had a similar dream, and has further heard that the first elements are names only, and that definition or explanation begins when they are combined; the letters are unknown, the syllables or combinations are known. But this new hypothesis when tested by the letters of the alphabet is found to break down. The first syllable of Socrates' name is SO. But what is SO? Two letters, S and O, a sibilant and a vowel, of which no further explanation can be given. And how can any one be ignorant of either of them, and yet know both of them? There is, however, another alternative:We may suppose that the syllable has a separate form or idea distinct from the letters or parts. The all of the parts may not be the whole. Theaetetus is very much inclined to adopt this suggestion, but when interrogated by Socrates he is unable to draw any distinction between the whole and all the parts. And if the syllables have no parts, then they are those original elements of which there is no explanation. But how can the syllable be known if the letter remains unknown? In learning to read as children, we are first taught the letters and then the syllables. And in music, the notes, which are the letters, have a much more distinct meaning to us than the combination of them.
  Once more, then, we must ask the meaning of the statement, that 'Knowledge is right opinion, accompanied by explanation or definition.' Explanation may mean, (1) the reflection or expression of a man's thoughtsbut every man who is not deaf and dumb is able to express his thoughtsor (2) the enumeration of the elements of which anything is composed. A man may have a true opinion about a waggon, but then, and then only, has he knowledge of a waggon when he is able to enumerate the hundred planks of Hesiod. Or he may know the syllables of the name Theaetetus, but not the letters; yet not until he knows both can he be said to have knowledge as well as opinion. But on the other hand he may know the syllable 'The' in the name Theaetetus, yet he may be mistaken about the same syllable in the name Theodorus, and in learning to read we often make such mistakes. And even if he could write out all the letters and syllables of your name in order, still he would only have right opinion. Yet there may be a third meaning of the definition, besides the image or expression of the mind, and the enumeration of the elements, viz. (3) perception of difference.
  --
  (a) In the age of Socrates the mind was passing from the object to the subject. The same impulse which a century before had led men to form conceptions of the world, now led them to frame general notions of the human faculties and feelings, such as memory, opinion, and the like. The simplest of these is sensation, or sensible perception, by which Plato seems to mean the generalized notion of feelings and impressions of sense, without determining whether they are conscious or not.
  The theory that 'Knowledge is sensible perception' is the antithesis of that which derives knowledge from the mind (Theaet.), or which assumes the existence of ideas independent of the mind (Parm.). Yet from their extreme abstraction these theories do not represent the opposite poles of thought in the same way that the corresponding differences would in modern philosophy. The most ideal and the most sensational have a tendency to pass into one another; Heracleitus, like his great successor Hegel, has both aspects. The Eleatic isolation of Being and the Megarian or Cynic isolation of individuals are placed in the same class by Plato (Soph.); and the same principle which is the symbol of motion to one mind is the symbol of rest to another. The Atomists, who are sometimes regarded as the Materialists of Plato, denied the reality of sensation. And in the ancient as well as the modern world there were reactions from theory to experience, from ideas to sense. This is a point of view from which the philosophy of sensation presented great attraction to the ancient thinker. Amid the conflict of ideas and the variety of opinions, the impression of sense remained certain and uniform. Hardness, softness, cold, heat, etc. are not absolutely the same to different persons, but the art of measuring could at any rate reduce them all to definite natures (Republic). Thus the doctrine that knowledge is perception supplies or seems to supply a firm standing ground. Like the other notions of the earlier Greek philosophy, it was held in a very simple way, without much basis of reasoning, and without suggesting the questions which naturally arise in our own minds on the same subject.
  --
  The relativity of knowledge is a truism to us, but was a great psychological discovery in the fifth century before Christ. Of this discovery, the first distinct assertion is contained in the thesis of Protagoras. Probably he had no intention either of denying or affirming an objective standard of truth. He did not consider whether man in the higher or man in the lower sense was a 'measure of all things.' Like other great thinkers, he was absorbed with one idea, and that idea was the absoluteness of perception. Like Socrates, he seemed to see that philosophy must be brought back from 'nature' to 'truth,' from the world to man. But he did not stop to analyze whether he meant 'man' in the concrete or man in the abstract, any man or some men, 'quod semper quod ubique' or individual private judgment. Such an analysis lay beyond his sphere of thought; the age before Socrates had not arrived at these distinctions. Like the Cynics, again, he discarded knowledge in any higher sense than perception. For 'truer' or 'wiser' he substituted the word 'better,' and is not unwilling to admit that both states and individuals are capable of practical improvement. But this improvement does not arise from intellectual enlightenment, nor yet from the exertion of the will, but from a change of circumstances and impressions; and he who can effect this change in himself or others may be deemed a philosopher. In the mode of effecting it, while agreeing with Socrates and the Cynics in the importance which he attaches to practical life, he is at variance with both of them. To suppose that practice can be divorced from speculation, or that we may do good without caring about truth, is by no means singular, either in philosophy or life. The singularity of this, as of some other (so-called) sophistical doctrines, is the frankness with which they are avowed, instead of being veiled, as in modern times, under ambiguous and convenient phrases.
  Plato appears to treat Protagoras much as he himself is treated by Aristotle; that is to say, he does not attempt to understand him from his own point of view. But he entangles him in the meshes of a more advanced logic. To which Protagoras is supposed to reply by Megarian quibbles, which destroy logic, 'Not only man, but each man, and each man at each moment.' In the arguments about sight and memory there is a palpable unfairness which is worthy of the great 'brainless brothers,' Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, and may be compared with the egkekalummenos ('obvelatus') of Eubulides. For he who sees with one eye only cannot be truly said both to see and not to see; nor is memory, which is liable to forget, the immediate knowledge to which Protagoras applies the term. Theodorus justly charges Socrates with going beyond the truth; and Protagoras has equally right on his side when he protests against Socrates arguing from the common use of words, which 'the vulgar pervert in all manner of ways.'
  III. The theory of Protagoras is connected by Aristotle as well as Plato with the flux of Heracleitus. But Aristotle is only following Plato, and Plato, as we have already seen, did not mean to imply that such a connexion was admitted by Protagoras himself. His metaphysical genius saw or seemed to see a common tendency in them, just as the modern historian of ancient philosophy might perceive a parallelism between two thinkers of which they were probably unconscious themselves. We must remember throughout that Plato is not speaking of Heracleitus, but of the Heracliteans, who succeeded him; nor of the great original ideas of the master, but of the Eristic into which they had degenerated a hundred years later. There is nothing in the fragments of Heracleitus which at all justifies Plato's account of him. His philosophy may be resolved into two elementsfirst, change, secondly, law or measure pervading the change: these he saw everywhere, and often expressed in strange mythological symbols. But he has no analysis of sensible perception such as Plato attri butes to him; nor is there any reason to suppose that he pushed his philosophy into that absolute negation in which Heracliteanism was sunk in the age of Plato. He never said that 'change means every sort of change;' and he expressly distinguished between 'the general and particular understanding.' Like a poet, he surveyed the elements of mythology, nature, thought, which lay before him, and sometimes by the light of genius he saw or seemed to see a mysterious principle working behind them. But as has been the case with other great philosophers, and with Plato and Aristotle themselves, what was really permanent and original could not be understood by the next generation, while a perverted logic carried out his chance expressions with an illogical consistency. His simple and noble thoughts, like those of the great Eleatic, soon degenerated into a mere strife of words. And when thus reduced to mere words, they seem to have exercised a far wider influence in the cities of Ionia (where the people 'were mad about them') than in the life-time of Heracleitusa phenomenon which, though at first sight singular, is not without a parallel in the history of philosophy and theology.
  It is this perverted form of the Heraclitean philosophy which is supposed to effect the final overthrow of Protagorean sensationalism. For if all things are changing at every moment, in all sorts of ways, then there is nothing fixed or defined at all, and therefore no sensible perception, nor any true word by which that or anything else can be described. Of course Protagoras would not have admitted the justice of this argument any more than Heracleitus would have acknowledged the 'uneducated fanatics' who appealed to his writings. He might have said, 'The excellent Socrates has first confused me with Heracleitus, and Heracleitus with his Ephesian successors, and has then disproved the existence both of knowledge and sensation. But I am not responsible for what I never said, nor will I admit that my common-sense account of knowledge can be overthrown by unintelligible Heraclitean paradoxes.'
  IV. Still at the bottom of the arguments there remains a truth, that knowledge is something more than sensible perception;this alone would not distinguish man from a tadpole. The absoluteness of sensations at each moment destroys the very consciousness of sensations (compare Phileb.), or the power of comparing them. The senses are not mere holes in a 'Trojan horse,' but the organs of a presiding nature, in which they meet. A great advance has been made in psychology when the senses are recognized as organs of sense, and we are admitted to see or feel 'through them' and not 'by them,' a distinction of words which, as Socrates observes, is by no means pedantic. A still further step has been made when the most abstract notions, such as Being and Not-being, sameness and difference, unity and plurality, are acknowledged to be the creations of the mind herself, working upon the feelings or impressions of sense. In this manner Plato describes the process of acquiring them, in the words 'Knowledge consists not in the feelings or affections (pathemasi), but in the process of reasoning about them (sullogismo).' Here, is in the Parmenides, he means something not really different from generalization. As in the Sophist, he is laying the foundation of a rational psychology, which is to supersede the Platonic reminiscence of Ideas as well as the Eleatic Being and the individualism of Megarians and Cynics.
  V. Having rejected the doctrine that 'Knowledge is perception,' we now proceed to look for a definition of knowledge in the sphere of opinion. But here we are met by a singular difficulty: How is false opinion possible? For we must either know or not know that which is presented to the mind or to sense. We of course should answer at once: 'No; the alternative is not necessary, for there may be degrees of knowledge; and we may know and have forgotten, or we may be learning, or we may have a general but not a particular knowledge, or we may know but not be able to explain;' and many other ways may be imagined in which we know and do not know at the same time. But these answers belong to a later stage of metaphysical discussion; whereas the difficulty in question naturally arises owing to the childhood of the human mind, like the parallel difficulty respecting Not-being. Men had only recently arrived at the notion of opinion; they could not at once define the true and pass beyond into the false. The very word doxa was full of ambiguity, being sometimes, as in the Eleatic philosophy, applied to the sensible world, and again used in the more ordinary sense of opinion. There is no connexion between sensible appearance and probability, and yet both of them met in the word doxa, and could hardly be disengaged from one another in the mind of the Greek living in the fifth or fourth century B.C. To this was often added, as at the end of the fifth book of the Republic, the idea of relation, which is equally distinct from either of them; also a fourth notion, the conclusion of the dialectical process, the making up of the mind after she has been 'talking to herself' (Theat.).
  --
  Assuming the distinction between knowledge and opinion, Theaetetus, in answer to Socrates, proceeds to define knowledge as true opinion, with definite or rational explanation. This Socrates identifies with another and different theory, of those who assert that knowledge first begins with a proposition.
  The elements may be perceived by sense, but they are names, and cannot be defined. When we assign to them some predicate, they first begin to have a meaning (onomaton sumploke logou ousia). This seems equivalent to saying, that the individuals of sense become the subject of knowledge when they are regarded as they are in nature in relation to other individuals.
  --
  Many (1) fine expressions, and (2) remarks full of wisdom, (3) also germs of a metaphysic of the future, are scattered up and down in the dialogue. Such, for example, as (1) the comparison of Theaetetus' progress in learning to the 'noiseless flow of a river of oil'; the satirical touch, 'flavouring a sauce or fawning speech'; or the remarkable expression, 'full of impure dialectic'; or the lively images under which the argument is described,'the flood of arguments pouring in,' the fresh discussions 'bursting in like a band of revellers.' (2) As illustrations of the second head, may be cited the remark of Socrates, that 'distinctions of words, although sometimes pedantic, are also necessary'; or the fine touch in the character of the lawyer, that 'dangers came upon him when the tenderness of youth was unequal to them'; or the description of the manner in which the spirit is broken in a wicked man who listens to reproof until he becomes like a child; or the punishment of the wicked, which is not physical suffering, but the perpetual companionship of evil (compare Gorgias); or the saying, often repeated by Aristotle and others, that 'philosophy begins in wonder, for Iris is the child of Thaumas'; or the superb contempt with which the philosopher takes down the pride of wealthy landed proprietors by comparison of the whole earth. (3) Important metaphysical ideas are: a. the conception of thought, as the mind talking to herself; b. the notion of a common sense, developed further by Aristotle, and the explicit declaration, that the mind gains her conceptions of Being, sameness, number, and the like, from reflection on herself; c. the excellent distinction of Theaetetus (which Socrates, speaking with emphasis, 'leaves to grow') between seeing the forms or hearing the sounds of words in a foreign language, and understanding the meaning of them; and d. the distinction of Socrates himself between 'having' and 'possessing' knowledge, in which the answer to the whole discussion appears to be contained.
  ...
  --
  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Theodorus, Theaetetus.
  Euclid and Terpsion meet in front of Euclid's house in Megara; they enter the house, and the dialogue is read to them by a servant.
  --
  EUCLID: He wanted to get home: although I entreated and advised him to remain, he would not listen to me; so I set him on his way, and turned back, and then I remembered what Socrates had said of him, and thought how remarkably this, like all his predictions, had been fulfilled. I believe that he had seen him a little before his own death, when Theaetetus was a youth, and he had a memorable conversation with him, which he repeated to me when I came to Athens; he was full of admiration of his genius, and said that he would most certainly be a great man, if he lived.
  TERPSION: The prophecy has certainly been fulfilled; but what was the conversation? can you tell me?
  EUCLID: No, indeed, not offhand; but I took notes of it as soon as I got home; these I filled up from memory, writing them out at leisure; and whenever I went to Athens, I asked Socrates about any point which I had forgotten, and on my return I made corrections; thus I have nearly the whole conversation written down.
  TERPSION: I rememberyou told me; and I have always been intending to ask you to show me the writing, but have put off doing so; and now, why should we not read it through?having just come from the country, I should greatly like to rest.
  --
  EUCLID: Here is the roll, Terpsion; I may observe that I have introduced Socrates, not as narrating to me, but as actually conversing with the persons whom he mentionedthese were, Theodorus the geometrician (of Cyrene), and Theaetetus. I have omitted, for the sake of convenience, the interlocutory words 'I said,' 'I remarked,' which he used when he spoke of himself, and again, 'he agreed,' or 'disagreed,' in the answer, lest the repetition of them should be troublesome.
  TERPSION: Quite right, Euclid.
  --
  THEODORUS: Yes, Socrates, I have become acquainted with one very remarkable Athenian youth, whom I commend to you as well worthy of your attention. If he had been a beauty I should have been afraid to praise him, lest you should suppose that I was in love with him; but he is no beauty, and you must not be offended if I say that he is very like you; for he has a snub nose and projecting eyes, although these features are less marked in him than in you. Seeing, then, that he has no personal attractions, I may freely say, that in all my acquaintance, which is very large, I never knew any one who was his equal in natural gifts: for he has a quickness of apprehension which is almost unrivalled, and he is exceedingly gentle, and also the most courageous of men; there is a union of qualities in him such as I have never seen in any other, and should scarcely have thought possible; for those who, like him, have quick and ready and retentive wits, have generally also quick tempers; they are ships without ballast, and go darting about, and are mad rather than courageous; and the steadier sort, when they have to face study, prove stupid and cannot remember. Whereas he moves surely and smoothly and successfully in the path of knowledge and enquiry; and he is full of gentleness, flowing on silently like a river of oil; at his age, it is wonderful.
   Socrates: That is good news; whose son is he?
  --
  THEODORUS: Theaetetus, Socrates, is his name; but I rather think that the property disappeared in the hands of trustees; notwithstanding which he is wonderfully liberal.
   Socrates: He must be a fine fellow; tell him to come and sit by me.
  THEODORUS: I will. Come hither, Theaetetus, and sit by Socrates.
   Socrates: By all means, Theaetetus, in order that I may see the reflection of myself in your face, for Theodorus says that we are alike; and yet if each of us held in his hands a lyre, and he said that they were tuned alike, should we at once take his word, or should we ask whether he who said so was or was not a musician?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Of course he is, Socrates.
   Socrates: And is he an astronomer and calculator and musician, and in general an educated man?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Very true, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then now is the time, my dear Theaetetus, for me to examine, and for you to exhibit; since although Theodorus has praised many a citizen and stranger in my hearing, never did I hear him praise any one as he has been praising you.
  THEAETETUS: I am glad to hear it, Socrates; but what if he was only in jest?
   Socrates: Nay, Theodorus is not given to jesting; and I cannot allow you to retract your consent on any such pretence as that. If you do, he will have to swear to his words; and we are perfectly sure that no one will be found to impugn him. Do not be shy then, but stand to your word.
  --
  THEODORUS: The reverse of rudeness, Socrates: but I would rather that you would ask one of the young fellows; for the truth is, that I am unused to your game of question and answer, and I am too old to learn; the young will be more suitable, and they will improve more than I shall, for youth is always able to improve. And so having made a beginning with Theaetetus, I would advise you to go on with him and not let him off.
   Socrates: Do you hear, Theaetetus, what Theodorus says? The philosopher, whom you would not like to disobey, and whose word ought to be a comm and to a young man, bids me interrogate you. Take courage, then, and nobly say what you think that knowledge is.
  THEAETETUS: Well, Socrates, I will answer as you and he bid me; and if I make a mistake, you will doubtless correct me.
   Socrates: We will, if we can.
  --
  THEAETETUS: What do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: Perhaps nothing. I will endeavour, however, to explain what I believe to be my meaning: When you speak of cobbling, you mean the art or science of making shoes?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Yes, Socrates, there is no difficulty as you put the question. You mean, if I am not mistaken, something like what occurred to me and to my friend here, your namesake Socrates, in a recent discussion.
   Socrates: What was that, Theaetetus?
  --
  THEAETETUS: But I am unable, Socrates, to give you a similar answer about knowledge, which is what you appear to want; and therefore Theodorus is a deceiver after all.
   Socrates: Well, but if some one were to praise you for running, and to say that he never met your equal among boys, and afterwards you were beaten in a race by a grown-up man, who was a great runnerwould the praise be any the less true?
  --
  THEAETETUS: I am eager enough, Socrates, if that would bring to light the truth.
   Socrates: Come, you made a good beginning just now; let your own answer about roots be your model, and as you comprehended them all in one class, try and bring the many sorts of knowledge under one definition.
  THEAETETUS: I can assure you, Socrates, that I have tried very often, when the report of questions asked by you was brought to me; but I can neither persuade myself that I have a satisfactory answer to give, nor hear of any one who answers as you would have him; and I cannot shake off a feeling of anxiety.
   Socrates: These are the pangs of labour, my dear Theaetetus; you have something within you which you are bringing to the birth.
  THEAETETUS: I do not know, Socrates; I only say what I feel.
   Socrates: And have you never heard, simpleton, that I am the son of a midwife, brave and burly, whose name was Phaenarete?
  --
  THEAETETUS: At any rate, Socrates, after such an exhortation I should be ashamed of not trying to do my best. Now he who knows perceives what he knows, and, as far as I can see at present, knowledge is perception.
   Socrates: Bravely said, boy; that is the way in which you should express your opinion. And now, let us examine together this conception of yours, and see whether it is a true birth or a mere wind-egg:You say that knowledge is perception?
  --
  THEAETETUS: What do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: I am about to speak of a high argument, in which all things are said to be relative; you cannot rightly call anything by any name, such as great or small, heavy or light, for the great will be small and the heavy lightthere is no single thing or quality, but out of motion and change and admixture all things are becoming relatively to one another, which 'becoming' is by us incorrectly called being, but is really becoming, for nothing ever is, but all things are becoming. Summon all philosophersProtagoras, Heracleitus, Empedocles, and the rest of them, one after another, and with the exception of Parmenides they will agree with you in this. Summon the great masters of either kind of poetryEpicharmus, the prince of Comedy, and Homer of Tragedy; when the latter sings of
  --
  THEAETETUS: Who indeed, Socrates?
   Socrates: Yes, Theaetetus; and there are plenty of other proofs which will show that motion is the source of what is called being and becoming, and inactivity of not-being and destruction; for fire and warmth, which are supposed to be the parent and guardian of all other things, are born of movement and of friction, which is a kind of motion;is not this the origin of fire?
  --
  THEAETETUS: I believe, Socrates, that you have truly explained his meaning.
   Socrates: Then now apply his doctrine to perception, my good friend, and first of all to vision; that which you call white colour is not in your eyes, and is not a distinct thing which exists out of them. And you must not assign any place to it: for if it had position it would be, and be at rest, and there would be no process of becoming.
  --
  THEAETETUS: I should say 'No,' Socrates, if I were to speak my mind in reference to this last question, and if I were not afraid of contradicting my former answer.
   Socrates: Capital! excellent! spoken like an oracle, my boy! And if you reply 'Yes,' there will be a case for Euripides; for our tongue will be unconvinced, but not our mind. (In allusion to the well-known line of Euripides, Hippol.: e gloss omomoch e de thren anomotos.)
  --
  THEAETETUS: Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of them; by the Gods I am! and I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.
   Socrates: I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder). But do you begin to see what is the explanation of this perplexity on the hypothesis which we attri bute to Protagoras?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Yes, indeed, Socrates, they are very hard and impenetrable mortals.
   Socrates: Yes, my boy, outer barbarians. Far more ingenious are the brethren whose mysteries I am about to reveal to you. Their first principle is, that all is motion, and upon this all the affections of which we were just now speaking are supposed to depend: there is nothing but motion, which has two forms, one active and the other passive, both in endless number; and out of the union and friction of them there is generated a progeny endless in number, having two forms, sense and the object of sense, which are ever breaking forth and coming to the birth at the same moment. The senses are variously named hearing, seeing, smelling; there is the sense of heat, cold, pleasure, pain, desire, fear, and many more which have names, as well as innumerable others which are without them; each has its kindred object,each variety of colour has a corresponding variety of sight, and so with sound and hearing, and with the rest of the senses and the objects akin to them. Do you see, Theaetetus, the bearings of this tale on the preceding argument?
  --
  THEAETETUS: I do not know what to say, Socrates; for, indeed, I cannot make out whether you are giving your own opinion or only wanting to draw me out.
   Socrates: You forget, my friend, that I neither know, nor profess to know, anything of these matters; you are the person who is in labour, I am the barren midwife; and this is why I soo the you, and offer you one good thing after another, that you may taste them. And I hope that I may at last help to bring your own opinion into the light of day: when this has been accomplished, then we will determine whether what you have brought forth is only a wind-egg or a real and genuine birth. Therefore, keep up your spirits, and answer like a man what you think.
  --
  THEAETETUS: Very true, Socrates.
   Socrates: But then, my boy, how can any one contend that knowledge is perception, or that to every man what appears is?
  THEAETETUS: I am afraid to say, Socrates, that I have nothing to answer, because you rebuked me just now for making this excuse; but I certainly cannot undertake to argue that madmen or dreamers think truly, when they imagine, some of them that they are gods, and others that they can fly, and are flying in their sleep.
   Socrates: Do you see another question which can be raised about these phenomena, notably about dreaming and waking?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Indeed, Socrates, I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond;and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing.
   Socrates: You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both.
  --
   Socrates: Let us take you and me, or anything as an example:There is Socrates in health, and Socrates sickAre they like or unlike?
  THEAETETUS: You mean to compare Socrates in health as a whole, and Socrates in sickness as a whole?
   Socrates: Exactly; that is my meaning.
  --
   Socrates: And would you not say the same of Socrates sleeping and waking, or in any of the states which we were mentioning?
  THEAETETUS: I should.
   Socrates: All agents have a different patient in Socrates, accordingly as he is well or ill.
  THEAETETUS: Of course.
  --
   Socrates: The combination of the draught of wine, and the Socrates who is sick, produces quite another result; which is the sensation of bitterness in the tongue, and the motion and creation of bitterness in and about the wine, which becomes not bitterness but something bitter; as I myself become not perception but percipient?
  THEAETETUS: True.
  --
  THEAETETUS: Very true, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then, if that which acts upon me has relation to me and to no other, I and no other am the percipient of it?
  --
  THEAETETUS: I cannot but agree, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then this is the child, however he may turn out, which you and I have with difficulty brought into the world. And now that he is born, we must run round the hearth with him, and see whether he is worth rearing, or is only a wind-egg and a sham. Is he to be reared in any case, and not exposed? or will you bear to see him rejected, and not get into a passion if I take away your first-born?
  THEODORUS: Theaetetus will not be angry, for he is very good-natured. But tell me, Socrates, in heaven's name, is this, after all, not the truth?
   Socrates: You, Theodorus, are a lover of theories, and now you innocently fancy that I am a bag full of them, and can easily pull one out which will overthrow its predecessor. But you do not see that in reality none of these theories come from me; they all come from him who talks with me. I only know just enough to extract them from the wisdom of another, and to receive them in a spirit of fairness. And now I shall say nothing myself, but shall endeavour to elicit something from our young friend.
  THEODORUS: Do as you say, Socrates; you are quite right.
   Socrates: Shall I tell you, Theodorus, what amazes me in your acquaintance Protagoras?
  --
  THEODORUS: He was a friend of mine, Socrates, as you were saying, and therefore I cannot have him refuted by my lips, nor can I oppose you when I agree with you; please, then, to take Theaetetus again; he seemed to answer very nicely.
   Socrates: If you were to go into a Lacedaemonian palestra, Theodorus, would you have a right to look on at the naked wrestlers, some of them making a poor figure, if you did not strip and give them an opportunity of judging of your own person?
  THEODORUS: Why not, Socrates, if they would allow me, as I think you will, in consideration of my age and stiffness; let some more supple youth try a fall with you, and do not drag me into the gymnasium.
   Socrates: Your will is my will, Theodorus, as the proverbial philosophers say, and therefore I will return to the sage Theaetetus: Tell me, Theaetetus, in reference to what I was saying, are you not lost in wonder, like myself, when you find that all of a sudden you are raised to the level of the wisest of men, or indeed of the gods?for you would assume the measure of Protagoras to apply to the gods as well as men?
  --
  THEAETETUS: But neither you nor we, Socrates, would be satisfied with such arguments.
   Socrates: Then you and Theodorus mean to say that we must look at the matter in some other way?
  --
  THEAETETUS: We shall say, Socrates, that we know what we actually see and hear of themthat is to say, we see and know the figure and colour of the letters, and we hear and know the elevation or depression of the sound of them; but we do not perceive by sight and hearing, or know, that which grammarians and interpreters teach about them.
   Socrates: Capital, Theaetetus; and about this there shall be no dispute, because I want you to grow; but there is another difficulty coming, which you will also have to repulse.
  --
  THEAETETUS: Impossible, Socrates; the supposition is monstrous.
   Socrates: Am I talking nonsense, then? Think: is not seeing perceiving, and is not sight perception?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Who, Socrates, would dare to say so?
   Socrates: But we must say so, if the previous argument is to be maintained.
  --
  THEODORUS: Not I, Socrates, but rather Callias, the son of Hipponicus, is guardian of his orphans. I was too soon diverted from the abstractions of dialectic to geometry. Nevertheless, I shall be grateful to you if you assist him.
   Socrates: Very good, Theodorus; you shall see how I will come to the rescue. If a person does not attend to the meaning of terms as they are commonly used in argument, he may be involved even in greater paradoxes than these. Shall I explain this matter to you or to Theaetetus?
  --
   Socrates: He will repeat all those things which we have been urging on his behalf, and then he will close with us in disdain, and say:The worthy Socrates asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am refuted, but if he answers something else, then he is refuted and not I. For do you really suppose that any one would admit the memory which a man has of an impression which has passed away to be the same with that which he experienced at the time? Assuredly not. Or would he hesitate to acknowledge that the same man may know and not know the same thing? Or, if he is afraid of making this admission, would he ever grant that one who has become unlike is the same as before he became unlike? Or would he admit that a man is one at all, and not rather many and infinite as the changes which take place in him? I speak by the card in order to avoid entanglements of words. But, O my good sir, he will say, come to the argument in a more generous spirit; and either show, if you can, that our sensations are not relative and individual, or, if you admit them to be so, prove that this does not involve the consequence that the appearance becomes, or, if you will have the word, is, to the individual only. As to your talk about pigs and baboons, you are yourself behaving like a pig, and you teach your hearers to make sport of my writings in the same ignorant manner; but this is not to your credit. For I declare that the truth is as I have written, and that each of us is a measure of existence and of non-existence. Yet one man may be a thousand times better than another in proportion as different things are and appear to him. And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man have no existence; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils which appear and are to a man, into goods which are and appear to him. And I would beg you not to press my words in the letter, but to take the meaning of them as I will explain them. Remember what has been already said,that to the sick man his food appears to be and is bitter, and to the man in health the opposite of bitter. Now I cannot conceive that one of these men can be or ought to be made wiser than the other: nor can you assert that the sick man because he has one impression is foolish, and the healthy man because he has another is wise; but the one state requires to be changed into the other, the worse into the better. As in education, a change of state has to be effected, and the sophist accomplishes by words the change which the physician works by the aid of drugs. Not that any one ever made another think truly, who previously thought falsely. For no one can think what is not, or, think anything different from that which he feels; and this is always true. But as the inferior habit of mind has thoughts of kindred nature, so I conceive that a good mind causes men to have good thoughts; and these which the inexperienced call true, I maintain to be only better, and not truer than others. And, O my dear Socrates, I do not call wise men tadpoles: far from it; I say that they are the physicians of the human body, and the husbandmen of plantsfor the husbandmen also take away the evil and disordered sensations of plants, and infuse into them good and healthy sensationsaye and true ones; and the wise and good rhetoricians make the good instead of the evil to seem just to states; for whatever appears to a state to be just and fair, so long as it is regarded as such, is just and fair to it; but the teacher of wisdom causes the good to take the place of the evil, both in appearance and in reality. And in like manner the Sophist who is able to train his pupils in this spirit is a wise man, and deserves to be well paid by them. And so one man is wiser than another; and no one thinks falsely, and you, whether you will or not, must endure to be a measure. On these foundations the argument stands firm, which you, Socrates, may, if you please, overthrow by an opposite argument, or if you like you may put questions to mea method to which no intelligent person will object, quite the reverse. But I must beg you to put fair questions: for there is great inconsistency in saying that you have a zeal for virtue, and then always behaving unfairly in argument. The unfairness of which I complain is that you do not distinguish between mere disputation and dialectic: the disputer may trip up his opponent as often as he likes, and make fun; but the dialectician will be in earnest, and only correct his adversary when necessary, telling him the errors into which he has fallen through his own fault, or that of the company which he has previously kept. If you do so, your adversary will lay the blame of his own confusion and perplexity on himself, and not on you. He will follow and love you, and will hate himself, and escape from himself into philosophy, in order that he may become different from what he was. But the other mode of arguing, which is practised by the many, will have just the opposite effect upon him; and as he grows older, instead of turning philosopher, he will come to hate philosophy. I would recommend you, therefore, as I said before, not to encourage yourself in this polemical and controversial temper, but to find out, in a friendly and congenial spirit, what we really mean when we say that all things are in motion, and that to every individual and state what appears, is. In this manner you will consider whether knowledge and sensation are the same or different, but you will not argue, as you were just now doing, from the customary use of names and words, which the vulgar pervert in all sorts of ways, causing infinite perplexity to one another. Such, Theodorus, is the very slight help which I am able to offer to your old friend; had he been living, he would have helped himself in a far more gloriose style.
  THEODORUS: You are jesting, Socrates; indeed, your defence of him has been most valorous.
   Socrates: Thank you, friend; and I hope that you observed Protagoras bidding us be serious, as the text, 'Man is the measure of all things,' was a solemn one; and he reproached us with making a boy the medium of discourse, and said that the boy's timidity was made to tell against his argument; he also declared that we made a joke of him.
  THEODORUS: How could I fail to observe all that, Socrates?
   Socrates: Well, and shall we do as he says?
  --
  THEODORUS: He who is sitting by you, Socrates, will not easily avoid being drawn into an argument; and when I said just now that you would excuse me, and not, like the Lacedaemonians, compel me to strip and fight, I was talking nonsenseI should rather compare you to Scirrhon, who threw travellers from the rocks; for the Lacedaemonian rule is 'strip or depart,' but you seem to go about your work more after the fashion of Antaeus: you will not allow any one who approaches you to depart until you have stripped him, and he has been compelled to try a fall with you in argument.
   Socrates: There, Theodorus, you have hit off precisely the nature of my complaint; but I am even more pugnacious than the giants of old, for I have met with no end of heroes; many a Heracles, many a Theseus, mighty in words, has broken my head; nevertheless I am always at this rough exercise, which inspires me like a passion. Please, then, to try a fall with me, whereby you will do yourself good as well as me.
  --
  THEODORUS: The thing is incredible, Socrates.
   Socrates: And yet that absurdity is necessarily involved in the thesis which declares man to be the measure of all things.
  --
  THEODORUS: Yes, indeed, Socrates, thousands and tens of thousands, as Homer says, who give me a world of trouble.
   Socrates: Well, but are we to assert that what you think is true to you and false to the ten thousand others?
  --
  THEODORUS: I think, Socrates, that we are running my old friend too hard.
   Socrates: But I do not know that we are going beyond the truth. Doubtless, as he is older, he may be expected to be wiser than we are. And if he could only just get his head out of the world below, he would have overthrown both of us again and again, me for talking nonsense and you for assenting to me, and have been off and underground in a trice. But as he is not within call, we must make the best use of our own faculties, such as they are, and speak out what appears to us to be true. And one thing which no one will deny is, that there are great differences in the understandings of men.
  --
  THEODORUS: Well, Socrates, we have plenty of leisure.
   Socrates: That is true, and your remark recalls to my mind an observation which I have often made, that those who have passed their days in the pursuit of philosophy are ridiculously at fault when they have to appear and speak in court. How natural is this!
  --
  THEODORUS: Nay, Socrates, not until we have finished what we are about; for you truly said that we belong to a brotherhood which is free, and are not the servants of the argument; but the argument is our servant, and must wait our leisure. Who is our judge? Or where is the spectator having any right to censure or control us, as he might the poets?
   Socrates: Then, as this is your wish, I will describe the leaders; for there is no use in talking about the inferior sort. In the first place, the lords of philosophy have never, from their youth upwards, known their way to the Agora, or the dicastery, or the council, or any other political assembly; they neither see nor hear the laws or decrees, as they are called, of the state written or recited; the eagerness of political societies in the attainment of officesclubs, and banquets, and revels, and singing-maidens,do not enter even into their dreams. Whether any event has turned out well or ill in the city, what disgrace may have descended to any one from his ancestors, male or female, are matters of which the philosopher no more knows than he can tell, as they say, how many pints are contained in the ocean. Neither is he conscious of his ignorance. For he does not hold aloof in order that he may gain a reputation; but the truth is, that the outer form of him only is in the city: his mind, disdaining the littlenesses and nothingnesses of human things, is 'flying all abroad' as Pindar says, measuring earth and heaven and the things which are under and on the earth and above the heaven, interrogating the whole nature of each and all in their entirety, but not condescending to anything which is within reach.
  THEODORUS: What do you mean, Socrates?
   Socrates: I will illustrate my meaning, Theodorus, by the jest which the clever witty Thracian handmaid is said to have made about Thales, when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. She said, that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was before his feet. This is a jest which is equally applicable to all philosophers. For the philosopher is wholly unacquainted with his next-door neighbour; he is ignorant, not only of what he is doing, but he hardly knows whether he is a man or an animal; he is searching into the essence of man, and busy in enquiring what belongs to such a nature to do or suffer different from any other;I think that you understand me, Theodorus?
  --
  THEODORUS: That is very true, Socrates.
   Socrates: But, O my friend, when he draws the other into upper air, and gets him out of his pleas and rejoinders into the contemplation of justice and injustice in their own nature and in their difference from one another and from all other things; or from the commonplaces about the happiness of a king or of a rich man to the consideration of government, and of human happiness and misery in generalwhat they are, and how a man is to attain the one and avoid the otherwhen that narrow, keen, little legal mind is called to account about all this, he gives the philosopher his revenge; for dizzied by the height at which he is hanging, whence he looks down into space, which is a strange experience to him, he being dismayed, and lost, and stammering broken words, is laughed at, not by Thracian handmaidens or any other uneducated persons, for they have no eye for the situation, but by every man who has not been brought up a slave. Such are the two characters, Theodorus: the one of the freeman, who has been trained in liberty and leisure, whom you call the philosopher,him we cannot blame because he appears simple and of no account when he has to perform some menial task, such as packing up bed-clothes, or flavouring a sauce or fawning speech; the other character is that of the man who is able to do all this kind of service smartly and neatly, but knows not how to wear his cloak like a gentleman; still less with the music of discourse can he hymn the true life aright which is lived by immortals or men blessed of heaven.
  THEODORUS: If you could only persuade everybody, Socrates, as you do me, of the truth of your words, there would be more peace and fewer evils among men.
   Socrates: Evils, Theodorus, can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the mortal nature, and this earthly sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him, is to become holy, just, and wise. But, O my friend, you cannot easily convince mankind that they should pursue virtue or avoid vice, not merely in order that a man may seem to be good, which is the reason given by the world, and in my judgment is only a repetition of an old wives' fable. Whereas, the truth is that God is never in any way unrighteoushe is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most like him. Herein is seen the true cleverness of a man, and also his nothingness and want of manhood. For to know this is true wisdom and virtue, and ignorance of this is manifest folly and vice. All other kinds of wisdom or cleverness, which seem only, such as the wisdom of politicians, or the wisdom of the arts, are coarse and vulgar. The unrighteous man, or the sayer and doer of unholy things, had far better not be encouraged in the illusion that his roguery is clever; for men glory in their shamethey fancy that they hear others saying of them, 'These are not mere good-for-nothing persons, mere burdens of the earth, but such as men should be who mean to dwell safely in a state.' Let us tell them that they are all the more truly what they do not think they are because they do not know it; for they do not know the penalty of injustice, which above all things they ought to knownot stripes and death, as they suppose, which evil-doers often escape, but a penalty which cannot be escaped.
  --
  THEODORUS: Very true, Socrates.
   Socrates: Too true, my friend, as I well know; there is, however, one peculiarity in their case: when they begin to reason in private about their dislike of philosophy, if they have the courage to hear the argument out, and do not run away, they grow at last strangely discontented with themselves; their rhetoric fades away, and they become helpless as children. These however are digressions from which we must now desist, or they will overflow, and drown the original argument; to which, if you please, we will now return.
  THEODORUS: For my part, Socrates, I would rather have the digressions, for at my age I find them easier to follow; but if you wish, let us go back to the argument.
   Socrates: Had we not reached the point at which the partisans of the perpetual flux, who say that things are as they seem to each one, were confidently maintaining that the ordinances which the state commanded and thought just, were just to the state which imposed them, while they were in force; this was especially asserted of justice; but as to the good, no one had any longer the hardihood to contend of any ordinances which the state thought and enacted to be good that these, while they were in force, were really good;he who said so would be playing with the name 'good,' and would not touch the real questionit would be a mockery, would it not?
  --
  THEODORUS: Certainly, Socrates, he used to profess in the strongest manner that he was the superior of all men in this respect.
   Socrates: To be sure, friend: who would have paid a large sum for the privilege of talking to him, if he had really persuaded his visitors that neither a prophet nor any other man was better able to judge what will be and seem to be in the future than every one could for himself?
  --
  THEODORUS: That is the best refutation of him, Socrates; although he is also caught when he ascribes truth to the opinions of others, who give the lie direct to his own opinion.
   Socrates: There are many ways, Theodorus, in which the doctrine that every opinion of every man is true may be refuted; but there is more difficulty in proving that states of feeling, which are present to a man, and out of which arise sensations and opinions in accordance with them, are also untrue. And very likely I have been talking nonsense about them; for they may be unassailable, and those who say that there is clear evidence of them, and that they are matters of knowledge, may probably be right; in which case our friend Theaetetus was not so far from the mark when he identified perception and knowledge. And therefore let us draw nearer, as the advocate of Protagoras desires; and give the truth of the universal flux a ring: is the theory sound or not? at any rate, no small war is raging about it, and there are combination not a few.
  --
  THEODORUS: Nay, Socrates, not to examine thoroughly what the two parties have to say would be quite intolerable.
   Socrates: Then examine we must, since you, who were so reluctant to begin, are so eager to proceed. The nature of motion appears to be the question with which we begin. What do they mean when they say that all things are in motion? Is there only one kind of motion, or, as I rather incline to think, two? I should like to have your opinion upon this point in addition to my own, that I may err, if I must err, in your company; tell me, then, when a thing changes from one place to another, or goes round in the same place, is not that what is called motion?
  --
  THEODORUS: How is that possible, Socrates, either in the case of this or of any other qualityif while we are using the word the object is escaping in the flux?
   Socrates: And what would you say of perceptions, such as sight and hearing, or any other kind of perception? Is there any stopping in the act of seeing and hearing?
  --
  THEODORUS: Very good, Socrates; and now that the argument about the doctrine of Protagoras has been completed, I am absolved from answering; for this was the agreement.
  THEAETETUS: Not, Theodorus, until you and Socrates have discussed the doctrine of those who say that all things are at rest, as you were proposing.
  THEODORUS: You, Theaetetus, who are a young rogue, must not instigate your elders to a breach of faith, but should prepare to answer Socrates in the remainder of the argument.
  THEAETETUS: Yes, if he wishes; but I would rather have heard about the doctrine of rest.
  THEODORUS: Invite Socrates to an argumentinvite horsemen to the open plain; do but ask him, and he will answer.
   Socrates: Nevertheless, Theodorus, I am afraid that I shall not be able to comply with the request of Theaetetus.
  --
  THEAETETUS: I should say 'through,' Socrates, rather than 'with.'
   Socrates: Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses, which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive objects of sense.
  --
  THEAETETUS: Indeed, Socrates, I cannot answer; my only notion is, that these, unlike objects of sense, have no separate organ, but that the mind, by a power of her own, contemplates the universals in all things.
   Socrates: You are a beauty, Theaetetus, and not ugly, as Theodorus was saying; for he who utters the beautiful is himself beautiful and good. And besides being beautiful, you have done me a kindness in releasing me from a very long discussion, if you are clear that the soul views some things by herself and others through the bodily organs. For that was my own opinion, and I wanted you to agree with me.
  --
  THEAETETUS: Clearly not, Socrates; and knowledge has now been most distinctly proved to be different from perception.
   Socrates: But the original aim of our discussion was to find out rather what knowledge is than what it is not; at the same time we have made some progress, for we no longer seek for knowledge in perception at all, but in that other process, however called, in which the mind is alone and engaged with being.
  THEAETETUS: You mean, Socrates, if I am not mistaken, what is called thinking or opining.
   Socrates: You conceive truly. And now, my friend, please to begin again at this point; and having wiped out of your memory all that has preceded, see if you have arrived at any clearer view, and once more say what is knowledge.
  THEAETETUS: I cannot say, Socrates, that all opinion is knowledge, because there may be a false opinion; but I will venture to assert, that knowledge is true opinion: let this then be my reply; and if this is hereafter disproved, I must try to find another.
   Socrates: That is the way in which you ought to answer, Theaetetus, and not in your former hesitating strain, for if we are bold we shall gain one of two advantages; either we shall find what we seek, or we shall be less likely to think that we know what we do not knowin either case we shall be richly rewarded. And now, what are you saying?Are there two sorts of opinion, one true and the other false; and do you define knowledge to be the true?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Begin again, Socrates,at least if you think that there is the slightest necessity for doing so. Were not you and Theodorus just now remarking very truly, that in discussions of this kind we may take our own time?
   Socrates: You are quite right, and perhaps there will be no harm in retracing our steps and beginning again. Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.
  --
  THEAETETUS: There can be no doubt, Socrates, if you exclude these, that there is no other alternative but knowing or not knowing a thing.
   Socrates: That point being now determined, must we not say that he who has an opinion, must have an opinion about something which he knows or does not know?
  --
  THEAETETUS: That, Socrates, is impossible.
   Socrates: But perhaps he thinks of something which he does not know as some other thing which he does not know; for example, he knows neither Theaetetus nor Socrates, and yet he fancies that Theaetetus is Socrates, or Socrates Theaetetus?
  THEAETETUS: How can he?
  --
  THEAETETUS: That, again, is not unlikely, Socrates.
   Socrates: Then suppose some one to say to us, Theaetetus:Is it possible for any man to think that which is not, either as a self-existent substance or as a predicate of something else? And suppose that we answer, 'Yes, he can, when he thinks what is not true.'That will be our answer?
  --
  THEAETETUS: I will give up the word 'other,' Socrates; and I agree to what you say.
   Socrates: If a man has both of them in his thoughts, he cannot think that the one of them is the other?
  --
  THEAETETUS: You mean to say, as I suspected at the time, that I may know Socrates, and at a distance see some one who is unknown to me, and whom I mistake for himthen the deception will occur?
   Socrates: But has not that position been relinquished by us, because involving the absurdity that we should know and not know the things which we know?
  --
   Socrates: See whether you can follow me better now: Socrates can recognize Theodorus and Theaetetus, but he sees neither of them, nor does he perceive them in any other way; he cannot then by any possibility imagine in his own mind that Theaetetus is Theodorus. Am I not right?
  THEAETETUS: You are quite right.
  --
  THEAETETUS: Yes, Socrates, you have described the nature of opinion with wonderful exactness.
   Socrates: Or again, when I know both of you, and perceive as well as know one of you, but not the other, and my knowledge of him does not accord with perceptionthat was the case put by me just now which you did not understand.
  --
  THEAETETUS: And is not that, Socrates, nobly said?
   Socrates: Nobly! yes; but wait a little and hear the explanation, and then you will say so with more reason; for to think truly is noble and to be deceived is base.
  --
  THEAETETUS: No man, Socrates, can say anything truer than that.
   Socrates: Then now we may admit the existence of false opinion in us?
  --
   Socrates: I am not only out of heart, but in positive despair; for I do not know what to answer if any one were to ask me:O Socrates, have you indeed discovered that false opinion arises neither in the comparison of perceptions with one another nor yet in thought, but in union of thought and perception? Yes, I shall say, with the complacence of one who thinks that he has made a noble discovery.
  THEAETETUS: I see no reason why we should be ashamed of our demonstration, Socrates.
   Socrates: He will say: You mean to argue that the man whom we only think of and do not see, cannot be confused with the horse which we do not see or touch, but only think of and do not perceive? That I believe to be my meaning, I shall reply.
  --
  THEAETETUS: It is hard to determine, Socrates.
   Socrates: And yet the argument will scarcely admit of both. But, as we are at our wits' end, suppose that we do a shameless thing?
  --
  THEAETETUS: But if you avoid these expressions, Socrates, how will you ever argue at all?
   Socrates: I could not, being the man I am. The case would be different if I were a true hero of dialectic: and O that such an one were present! for he would have told us to avoid the use of these terms; at the same time he would not have spared in you and me the faults which I have noted. But, seeing that we are no great wits, shall I venture to say what knowing is? for I think that the attempt may be worth making.
  --
  THEAETETUS: It would be too absurd, Socrates.
   Socrates: Shall we say then that he is going to read or number what he does not know, although we have admitted that he knows all letters and all numbers?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Perhaps, Socrates, we may have been wrong in making only forms of knowledge our birds: whereas there ought to have been forms of ignorance as well, flying about together in the mind, and then he who sought to take one of them might sometimes catch a form of knowledge, and sometimes a form of ignorance; and thus he would have a false opinion from ignorance, but a true one from knowledge, about the same thing.
   Socrates: I cannot help praising you, Theaetetus, and yet I must beg you to reconsider your words. Let us grant what you saythen, according to you, he who takes ignorance will have a false opinionam I right?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Indeed, Socrates, I do not know what we are to say.
   Socrates: Are not his reproaches just, and does not the argument truly show that we are wrong in seeking for false opinion until we know what knowledge is; that must be first ascertained; then, the nature of false opinion?
  THEAETETUS: I cannot but agree with you, Socrates, so far as we have yet gone.
   Socrates: Then, once more, what shall we say that knowledge is?for we are not going to lose heart as yet.
  --
  THEAETETUS: I cannot think of any but our old one, Socrates.
   Socrates: What was it?
  --
  THEAETETUS: That is a distinction, Socrates, which I have heard made by some one else, but I had forgotten it. He said that true opinion, combined with reason, was knowledge, but that the opinion which had no reason was out of the sphere of knowledge; and that things of which there is no rational account are not knowablesuch was the singular expression which he usedand that things which have a reason or explanation are knowable.
   Socrates: Excellent; but then, how did he distinguish between things which are and are not 'knowable'? I wish that you would repeat to me what he said, and then I shall know whether you and I have heard the same tale.
  --
  THEAETETUS: At any rate, Socrates, I am satisfied with the present statement.
   Socrates: Which is probably correctfor how can there be knowledge apart from definition and true opinion? And yet there is one point in what has been said which does not quite satisfy me.
  --
  THEAETETUS: But how can any one, Socrates, tell the elements of an element? I can only reply, that S is a consonant, a mere noise, as of the tongue hissing; B, and most other letters, again, are neither vowel-sounds nor noises. Thus letters may be most truly said to be undefined; for even the most distinct of them, which are the seven vowels, have a sound only, but no definition at all.
   Socrates: Then, I suppose, my friend, that we have been so far right in our idea about knowledge?
  --
  THEAETETUS: Such a supposition, Socrates, is monstrous and unmeaning.
   Socrates: But if he cannot know both without knowing each, then if he is ever to know the syllable, he must know the letters first; and thus the fine theory has again taken wings and departed.
  --
  THEAETETUS: No, indeed, Socrates; for if I admit the existence of parts in a syllable, it would be ridiculous in me to give up letters and seek for other parts.
   Socrates: Quite true, Theaetetus, and therefore, according to our present view, a syllable must surely be some indivisible form?
  --
  THEAETETUS: As for example, Socrates...?
   Socrates: As, for example, when Hesiod says that a waggon is made up of a hundred planks. Now, neither you nor I could describe all of them individually; but if any one asked what is a waggon, we should be content to answer, that a waggon consists of wheels, axle, body, rims, yoke.
  --
  THEAETETUS: And do you not agree in that view, Socrates?
   Socrates: If you do, my friend; but I want to know first, whether you admit the resolution of all things into their elements to be a rational explanation of them, and the consideration of them in syllables or larger combinations of them to be irrationalis this your view?
  --
  THEAETETUS: I am sure, Socrates, that you have elicited from me a good deal more than ever was in me.
   Socrates: And does not my art show that you have brought forth wind, and that the offspring of your brain are not worth bringing up?

The Coming Race Contents, #The Coming Race, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
  original ancestor is Socrates. Indeed, it may
  be generally asserted that the nation whose

the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  19) Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal. ~ Socrates
  20) The desire for wisdom leads us to the Eternal Kingdom. ~ Book of Wisdom
  --
  21) I renounce the honours to which the world aspires and desire only to know the Truth. ~ Socrates
  22) Always higher must I mount, higher must I see. ~ Angelus Silesius I.15
  --
  2) One of the most important precepts of wisdom is to know oneself. ~ Socrates
  3) There is nothing greater than the practice of the precept which says, "Know thyself". ~ Antoine the Healer
  --
  18) The soul includes everything; whoever knows his soul, knows everything and whoever is ignorant of his soul, is ignorant of everything. ~ Socrates
  19) This mental being in the inner heart who has the truth and the light is the lord and sovereign of all; he who knows it, governs all this that is. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad V.6
  --
  15) The soul like the body accepts by practice whatever habit one wishes it to contract. ~ Socrates
  16) Consecrate yourselves to the purification of your own minds. Be vigilant, be persevering, be attentive, be thoughtful for your own salvation. ~ Mahaparinibbana Sutta
  --
  11) To be a man of worth and not to try to look like one is the true way to glory. ~ Socrates
  12) The supreme virtue does not consider itself a virtue and that is why it is virtue: the inferior positively believes itself to be virtue and that is why it is not virtue. ~ Lao-Tse: Tao-te-King
  --
  4) You tell me that good cheer, raiment, riches and luxury are happiness. I believe that the greatest felicity is to desire nothing, and in order to draw near to this supreme happiness, one must habituate oneself to have need of little. ~ Socrates
  5) O children of desire, cast off your garb of vanities. ~ Baha-ullah
  --
  22) Labour to master adversity even as your passions, to which it would be shameful for you to be subjected. ~ Socrates
  23) Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. ~ Hebrews XII. 4
  --
  15) Therefore neither you, O judges, nor men in general ought to fear death: they have only to remember one thing, that for a just man there is no ill in life and no ill in death. ~ Socrates
  16) For the saint there is no death. ~ Tolstoy

Thus Spoke Zarathustra text, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  21. On Free Death: A celebration of Socrates' way of
  dying as opposed to Jesus'. Nietzsche's own creeping death
  --
  believers but, like Socrates, aims to help others to find themselves and surpass him.
  20.

Timaeus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  A greater danger with modern interpreters of Plato is the tendency to regard the Timaeus as the centre of his system. We do not know how Plato would have arranged his own dialogues, or whether the thought of arranging any of them, besides the two 'Trilogies' which he has expressly connected; was ever present to his mind. But, if he had arranged them, there are many indications that this is not the place which he would have assigned to the Timaeus. We observe, first of all, that the dialogue is put into the mouth of a Pythagorean philosopher, and not of Socrates. And this is required by dramatic propriety; for the investigation of nature was expressly renounced by Socrates in the Phaedo. Nor does Plato himself attribute any importance to his guesses at science. He is not at all absorbed by them, as he is by the IDEA of good. He is modest and hesitating, and confesses that his words partake of the uncertainty of the subject (Tim.). The dialogue is primarily concerned with the animal creation, including under this term the heavenly bodies, and with man only as one among the animals. But we can hardly suppose that Plato would have preferred the study of nature to man, or that he would have deemed the formation of the world and the human frame to have the same interest which he ascribes to the mystery of being and not-being, or to the great political problems which he discusses in the Republic and the Laws. There are no speculations on physics in the other dialogues of Plato, and he himself regards the consideration of them as a rational pastime only. He is beginning to feel the need of further divisions of knowledge; and is becoming aware that besides dialectic, mathematics, and the arts, there is another field which has been hitherto unexplored by him. But he has not as yet defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between medicine and mathematics, and he would have felt that there was as great an impiety in ranking theories of physics first in the order of knowledge, as in placing the body before the soul.
  It is true, however, that the Timaeus is by no means confined to speculations on physics. The deeper foundations of the Platonic philosophy, such as the nature of God, the distinction of the sensible and intellectual, the great original conceptions of time and space, also appear in it. They are found principally in the first half of the dialogue. The construction of the heavens is for the most part ideal; the cyclic year serves as the connection between the world of absolute being and of generation, just as the number of population in the Republic is the expression or symbol of the transition from the ideal to the actual state. In some passages we are uncertain whether we are reading a description of astronomical facts or contemplating processes of the human mind, or of that divine mind (Phil.) which in Plato is hardly separable from it. The characteristics of man are transferred to the world-animal, as for example when intelligence and knowledge are said to be perfected by the circle of the Same, and true opinion by the circle of the Other; and conversely the motions of the world-animal reappear in man; its amorphous state continues in the child, and in both disorder and chaos are gradually succeeded by stability and order. It is not however to passages like these that Plato is referring when he speaks of the uncertainty of his subject, but rather to the composition of bodies, to the relations of colours, the nature of diseases, and the like, about which he truly feels the lamentable ignorance prevailing in his own age.
  --
  HERMOCRATES: 'We will do our best, and have been already preparing; for on our way home, Critias told us of an ancient tradition, which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat to Socrates.' 'I will, if Timaeus approves.' 'I approve.' Listen then, Socrates, to a tale of Solon's, who, being the friend of Dropidas my great-grandfa ther, told it to my grandfa ther Critias, and he told me. The narrative related to ancient famous actions of the Athenian people, and to one especially, which I will rehearse in honour of you and of the goddess. Critias when he told this tale of the olden time, was ninety years old, I being not more than ten. The occasion of the rehearsal was the day of the Apaturia called the Registration of Youth, at which our parents gave prizes for recitation. Some poems of Solon were recited by the boys. They had not at that time gone out of fashion, and the recital of them led some one to say, perhaps in compliment to Critias, that Solon was not only the wisest of men but also the best of poets. The old man brightened up at hearing this, and said: Had Solon only had the leisure which was required to complete the famous legend which he brought with him from Egypt he would have been as distinguished as Homer and Hesiod. 'And what was the subject of the poem?' said the person who made the remark. The subject was a very noble one; he described the most famous action in which the Athenian people were ever engaged. But the memory of their exploits has passed away owing to the lapse of time and the extinction of the actors. 'Tell us,' said the other, 'the whole story, and where Solon heard the story.' He repliedThere is at the head of the Egyptian Delta, where the river Nile divides, a city and district called Sais; the city was the birthplace of King Amasis, and is under the protection of the goddess Neith or Athene. The citizens have a friendly feeling towards the Athenians, believing themselves to be related to them. Hither came Solon, and was received with honour; and here he first learnt, by conversing with the Egyptian priests, how ignorant he and his countrymen were of antiquity. Perceiving this, and with the view of eliciting information from them, he told them the tales of Phoroneus and Niobe, and also of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and he endeavoured to count the generations which had since passed. Thereupon an aged priest said to him: 'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is no old man who is a Hellene.' 'What do you mean?' he asked. 'In mind,' replied the priest, 'I mean to say that you are children; there is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you which is white with age; and I will tell you why. Like the rest of mankind you have suffered from convulsions of nature, which are chiefly brought about by the two great agencies of fire and water. The former is symbolized in the Hellenic tale of young Phaethon who drove his father's horses the wrong way, and having burnt up the earth was himself burnt up by a thunderbolt. For there occurs at long intervals a derangement of the heavenly bodies, and then the earth is destroyed by fire. At such times, and when fire is the agent, those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore are safer than those who dwell upon high and dry places, who in their turn are safer when the danger is from water. Now the Nile is our saviour from fire, and as there is little rain in Egypt, we are not harmed by water; whereas in other countries, when a deluge comes, the inhabitants are swept by the rivers into the sea. The memorials which your own and other nations have once had of the famous actions of mankind perish in the waters at certain periods; and the rude survivors in the mountains begin again, knowing nothing of the world before the flood. But in Egypt the traditions of our own and other lands are by us registered for ever in our temples. The genealogies which you have recited to us out of your own annals, Solon, are a mere children's story. For in the first place, you remember one deluge only, and there were many of them, and you know nothing of that fairest and noblest race of which you are a seed or remnant. The memory of them was lost, because there was no written voice among you. For in the times before the great flood Athens was the greatest and best of cities and did the noblest deeds and had the best constitution of any under the face of heaven.' Solon marvelled, and desired to be informed of the particulars. 'You are welcome to hear them,' said the priest, 'both for your own sake and for that of the city, and above all for the sake of the goddess who is the common foundress of both our cities. Nine thousand years have elapsed since she founded yours, and eight thousand since she founded ours, as our annals record. Many laws exist among us which are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. I will briefly describe them to you, and you shall read the account of them at your leisure in the sacred registers. In the first place, there was a caste of priests among the ancient Athenians, and another of artisans; also castes of shepherds, hunters, and husbandmen, and lastly of warriors, who, like the warriors of Egypt, were separated from the rest, and carried shields and spears, a custom which the goddess first taught you, and then the Asiatics, and we among Asiatics first received from her. Observe again, what care the law took in the pursuit of wisdom, searching out the deep things of the world, and applying them to the use of man. The spot of earth which the goddess chose had the best of climates, and produced the wisest men; in no other was she herself, the philosopher and warrior goddess, so likely to have votaries. And there you dwelt as became the children of the gods, excelling all men in virtue, and many famous actions are recorded of you. The most famous of them all was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis. This great island lay over against the Pillars of Heracles, in extent greater than Libya and Asia put together, and was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean of which the Mediterranean sea was only the harbour; and within the Pillars the empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to Egypt. This mighty power was arrayed against Egypt and Hellas and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. Then your city did bravely, and won renown over the whole earth. For at the peril of her own existence, and when the other Hellenes had deserted her, she repelled the invader, and of her own accord gave liberty to all the nations within the Pillars. A little while afterwards there were great earthquakes and floods, and your warrior race all sank into the earth; and the great island of Atlantis also disappeared in the sea. This is the explanation of the shallows which are found in that part of the Atlantic ocean.'
  Such was the tale, Socrates, which Critias heard from Solon; and I noticed when listening to you yesterday, how close the resemblance was between your city and citizens and the ancient Athenian State. But I would not speak at the time, because I wanted to refresh my memory. I had heard the old man when I was a child, and though I could not remember the whole of our yesterday's discourse, I was able to recall every word of this, which is branded into my mind; and I am prepared, Socrates, to rehearse to you the entire narrative. The imaginary State which you were describing may be identified with the reality of Solon, and our antediluvian ancestors may be your citizens. 'That is excellent, Critias, and very appropriate to a Pana thenaic festival; the truth of the story is a great advantage.' Then now let me explain to you the order of our entertainment; first, Timaeus, who is a natural philosopher, will speak of the origin of the world, going down to the creation of man, and then I shall receive the men whom he has created, and some of whom will have been educated by you, and introduce them to you as the lost Athenian citizens of whom the Egyptian record spoke. As the law of Solon prescribes, we will bring them into court and acknowledge their claims to citizenship. 'I see,' replied Socrates, 'that I shall be well entertained; and do you, Timaeus, offer up a prayer and begin.'
  TIMAEUS: All men who have any right feeling, at the beginning of any enterprise, call upon the Gods; and he who is about to speak of the origin of the universe has a special need of their aid. May my words be acceptable to them, and may I speak in the manner which will be most intelligible to you and will best express my own meaning!
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  The great source of error and also the beginning of truth to them was reasoning from analogy; they could see resemblances, but not differences; and they were incapable of distinguishing illustration from argument. Analogy in modern times only points the way, and is immediately verified by experiment. The dreams and visions, which pass through the philosopher's mind, of resemblances between different classes of substances, or between the animal and vegetable world, are put into the refiner's fire, and the dross and other elements which adhere to them are purged away. But the contemporary of Plato and Socrates was incapable of resisting the power of any analogy which occurred to him, and was drawn into any consequences which seemed to follow. He had no methods of difference or of concomitant variations, by the use of which he could distinguish the accidental from the essential. He could not isolate phenomena, and he was helpless against the influence of any word which had an equivocal or double sense.
  Yet without this crude use of analogy the ancient physical philosopher would have stood still; he could not have made even 'one guess among many' without comparison. The course of natural phenomena would have passed unheeded before his eyes, like fair sights or musical sounds before the eyes and ears of an animal. Even the fetichism of the savage is the beginning of reasoning; the assumption of the most fanciful of causes indicates a higher mental state than the absence of all enquiry about them. The tendency to argue from the higher to the lower, from man to the world, has led to many errors, but has also had an elevating influence on philosophy. The conception of the world as a whole, a person, an animal, has been the source of hasty generalizations; yet this general grasp of nature led also to a spirit of comprehensiveness in early philosophy, which has not increased, but rather diminished, as the fields of knowledge have become more divided. The modern physicist confines himself to one or perhaps two branches of science. But he comparatively seldom rises above his own department, and often falls under the narrowing influence which any single branch, when pursued to the exclusion of every other, has over the mind. Language, two, exercised a spell over the beginnings of physical philosophy, leading to error and sometimes to truth; for many thoughts were suggested by the double meanings of words (Greek), and the accidental distinctions of words sometimes led the ancient philosopher to make corresponding differences in things (Greek). 'If they are the same, why have they different names; or if they are different, why have they the same name?'is an argument not easily answered in the infancy of knowledge. The modern philosopher has always been taught the lesson which he still imperfectly learns, that he must disengage himself from the influence of words. Nor are there wanting in Plato, who was himself too often the victim of them, impressive admonitions that we should regard not words but things (States.). But upon the whole, the ancients, though not entirely dominated by them, were much more subject to the influence of words than the moderns. They had no clear divisions of colours or substances; even the four elements were undefined; the fields of knowledge were not parted off. They were bringing order out of disorder, having a small grain of experience mingled in a confused heap of a priori notions. And yet, probably, their first impressions, the illusions and mirages of their fancy, created a greater intellectual activity and made a nearer approach to the truth than any patient investigation of isolated facts, for which the time had not yet come, could have accomplished.
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  More light is thrown upon the Timaeus by a comparison of the previous philosophies. For the physical science of the ancients was traditional, descending through many generations of Ionian and Pythagorean philosophers. Plato does not look out upon the heavens and describe what he sees in them, but he builds upon the foundations of others, adding something out of the 'depths of his own self-consciousness.' Socrates had already spoken of God the creator, who made all things for the best. While he ridiculed the superficial explanations of phenomena which were current in his age, he recognised the marks both of benevolence and of design in the frame of man and in the world. The apparatus of winds and waters is contemptuously rejected by him in the Phaedo, but he thinks that there is a power greater than that of any Atlas in the 'Best' (Phaedo; Arist. Met.). Plato, following his master, affirms this principle of the best, but he acknowledges that the best is limited by the conditions of matter. In the generation before Socrates, Anaxagoras had brought together 'Chaos' and 'Mind'; and these are connected by Plato in the Timaeus, but in accordance with his own mode of thinking he has interposed between them the idea or pattern according to which mind worked. The circular impulse (Greek) of the one philosopher answers to the circular movement (Greek) of the other. But unlike Anaxagoras, Plato made the sun and stars living beings and not masses of earth or metal. The Pythagoreans again had framed a world out of numbers, which they constructed into figures. Plato adopted their speculations and improved upon them by a more exact knowledge of geometry. The Atomists too made the world, if not out of geometrical figures, at least out of different forms of atoms, and these atoms resembled the triangles of Plato in being too small to be visible. But though the physiology of the Timaeus is partly borrowed from them, they are either ignored by Plato or referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with more favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number applied to the distances of the planets reappear in the Timaeus. It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth century B.C., there were already some who, like Plato, made the earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The four elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices of the Timaeus may also be compared with his (Greek). The passage of one element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the Ionian philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not after the manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he borrows from others are fused and transformed by his own genius. On the other hand we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or Eleatic speculation. He does not imagine the world of sense to be made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on the will of the creator. Instead of maintaining the doctrine that the void has a necessary place in the existence of the world, he rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum, as in the Sophist he also denies the reality of not-being (Aristot. Metaph.). But though in these respects he differs from them, he is deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he differs from them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the 'generous depth' of Parmenides (Theaet.).
  There is a similarity between the Timaeus and the fragments of Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to create a suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is known to us from the Phaedo of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher residing at Thebes in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., after the dispersion of the original Pythagorean society. He was the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who became disciples of Socrates. We have hardly any other information about him. The story that Plato had purchased three books of his writings from a relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful way in which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and the Phaedo. That there really existed in antiquity a work passing under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the Timaeus, as well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus. When the writer says (Stob. Eclog.) that all things are either finite (definite) or infinite (indefinite), or a union of the two, and that this antithesis and synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are reminded of the Philebus. When he calls the centre of the world (Greek), we have a parallel to the Phaedrus. His distinction between the world of order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the world of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and the earth, approximates to Plato's sphere of the Same and of the Other. Like Plato (Tim.), he denied the above and below in space, and said that all things were the same in relation to a centre. He speaks also of the world as one and indestructible: 'for neither from within nor from without does it admit of destruction' (Tim). He mentions ten heavenly bodies, including the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (Greek), and in the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which they are movingthis is hidden from the earth by the counter-earth. Of neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes the earth the centre of his system. Philolaus magnifies the virtues of particular numbers, especially of the number 10 (Stob. Eclog.), and descants upon odd and even numbers, after the manner of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy of remark that these mystical fancies are nowhere to be found in the writings of Plato, although the importance of number as a form and also an instrument of thought is ever present to his mind. Both Philolaus and Plato agree in making the world move in certain numerical ratios according to a musical scale: though Bockh is of opinion that the two scales, of Philolaus and of the Timaeus, do not correspond...We appear not to be sufficiently acquainted with the early Pythagoreans to know how far the statements contained in these fragments corresponded with their doctrines; and we therefore cannot pronounce, either in favour of the genuineness of the fragments, with Bockh and Zeller, or, with Valentine Rose and Schaarschmidt, against them. But it is clear that they throw but little light upon the Timaeus, and that their resemblance to it has been exaggerated.
  That there is a degree of confusion and indistinctness in Plato's account both of man and of the universe has been already acknowledged. We cannot tell (nor could Plato himself have told) where the figure or myth ends and the philosophical truth begins; we cannot explain (nor could Plato himself have explained to us) the relation of the ideas to appearance, of which one is the copy of the other, and yet of all things in the world they are the most opposed and unlike. This opposition is presented to us in many forms, as the antithesis of the one and many, of the finite and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomenathey easily pass into one another; and sometimes the two members of the relation differ in kind, sometimes only in degree. As in Aristotle's matter and form the connexion between them is really inseparable; for if we attempt to separate them they become devoid of content and therefore indistinguishable; there is no difference between the idea of which nothing can be predicated, and the chaos or matter which has no perceptible qualitiesbetween Being in the abstract and Nothing. Yet we are frequently told that the one class of them is the reality and the other appearance; and one is often spoken of as the double or reflection of the other. For Plato never clearly saw that both elements had an equal place in mind and in nature; and hence, especially when we argue from isolated passages in his writings, or attempt to draw what appear to us to be the natural inferences from them, we are full of perplexity. There is a similar confusion about necessity and free-will, and about the state of the soul after death. Also he sometimes supposes that God is immanent in the world, sometimes that he is transcendent. And having no distinction of objective and subjective, he passes imperceptibly from one to the other; from intelligence to soul, from eternity to time. These contradictions may be softened or concealed by a judicious use of language, but they cannot be wholly got rid of. That an age of intellectual transition must also be one of inconsistency; that the creative is opposed to the critical or defining habit of mind or time, has been often repeated by us. But, as Plato would say, 'there is no harm in repeating twice or thrice' (Laws) what is important for the understanding of a great author.
  It has not, however, been observed, that the confusion partly arises out of the elements of opposing philosophies which are preserved in him. He holds these in solution, he brings them into relation with one another, but he does not perfectly harmonize them. They are part of his own mind, and he is incapable of placing himself outside of them and criticizing them. They grow as he grows; they are a kind of composition with which his own philosophy is overlaid. In early life he fancies that he has mastered them: but he is also mastered by them; and in language (Sophist) which may be compared with the hesitating tone of the Timaeus, he confesses in his later years that they are full of obscurity to him. He attri butes new meanings to the words of Parmenides and Heracleitus; but at times the old Eleatic philosophy appears to go beyond him; then the world of phenomena disappears, but the doctrine of ideas is also reduced to nothingness. All of them are nearer to one another than they themselves supposed, and nearer to him than he supposed. All of them are antagonistic to sense and have an affinity to number and measure and a presentiment of ideas. Even in Plato they still retain their contentious or controversial character, which was developed by the growth of dialectic. He is never able to reconcile the first causes of the pre-Socratic philosophers with the final causes of Socrates himself. There is no intelligible account of the relation of numbers to the universal ideas, or of universals to the idea of good. He found them all three, in the Pythagorean philosophy and in the teaching of Socrates and of the Megarians respectively; and, because they all furnished modes of explaining and arranging phenomena, he is unwilling to give up any of them, though he is unable to unite them in a consistent whole.
  Lastly, Plato, though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not Oriental in spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is not seeking in vain to get rid of matter or to find absorption in the divine nature, or in the Soul of the universe. And therefore we are not surprised to find that his philosophy in the Timaeus returns at last to a worship of the heavens, and that to him, as to other Greeks, nature, though containing a remnant of evil, is still glorious and divine. He takes away or drops the veil of mythology, and presents her to us in what appears to him to be the form-fairer and truer farof mathematical figures. It is this element in the Timaeus, no less than its affinity to certain Pythagorean speculations, which gives it a character not wholly in accordance with the other dialogues of Plato.
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  (c) The morality of the Timaeus is singular, and it is difficult to adjust the balance between the two elements of it. The difficulty which Plato feels, is that which all of us feel, and which is increased in our own day by the progress of physical science, how the responsibility of man is to be reconciled with his dependence on natural causes. And sometimes, like other men, he is more impressed by one aspect of human life, sometimes by the other. In the Republic he represents man as freely choosing his own lot in a state prior to birtha conception which, if taken literally, would still leave him subject to the dominion of necessity in his after life; in the Statesman he supposes the human race to be preserved in the world only by a divine interposition; while in the Timaeus the supreme God commissions the inferior deities to avert from him all but self-inflicted evilswords which imply that all the evils of men are really self-inflicted. And here, like Plato (the insertion of a note in the text of an ancient writer is a literary curiosity worthy of remark), we may take occasion to correct an error. For we too hastily said that Plato in the Timaeus regarded all 'vices and crimes as involuntary.' But the fact is that he is inconsistent with himself; in one and the same passage vice is attri buted to the relaxation of the bodily frame, and yet we are exhorted to avoid it and pursue virtue. It is also admitted that good and evil conduct are to be attri buted respectively to good and evil laws and institutions. These cannot be given by individuals to themselves; and therefore human actions, in so far as they are dependent upon them, are regarded by Plato as involuntary rather than voluntary. Like other writers on this subject, he is unable to escape from some degree of self-contradiction. He had learned from Socrates that vice is ignorance, and suddenly the doctrine seems to him to be confirmed by observing how much of the good and bad in human character depends on the bodily constitution. So in modern times the speculative doctrine of necessity has often been supported by physical facts.
  The Timaeus also contains an anticipation of the stoical life according to nature. Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate his erring life according to them. He is to partake of the repose of nature and of the order of nature, to bring the variable principle in himself into harmony with the principle of the same. The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea of 'law.' To feel habitually that he is part of the order of the universe, is one of the highest ethical motives of which man is capable. Something like this is what Plato means when he speaks of the soul 'moving about the same in unchanging thought of the same.' He does not explain how man is acted upon by the lesser influences of custom or of opinion; or how the commands of the soul watching in the citadel are conveyed to the bodily organs. But this perhaps, to use once more expressions of his own, 'is part of another subject' or 'may be more suitably discussed on some other occasion.'
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  PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates.
   Socrates: One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my entertainers to-day?
  TIMAEUS: He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not willingly have been absent from this gathering.
   Socrates: Then, if he is not coming, you and the two others must supply his place.
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  TIMAEUS: Yes, Socrates; and what you said of it was very much to our mind.
   Socrates: Did we not begin by separating the husbandmen and the artisans from the class of defenders of the State?
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  TIMAEUS: Nothing, Socrates; it was just as you have said.
   Socrates: I should like, before proceeding further, to tell you how I feel about the State which we have described. I might compare myself to a person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created by the painter's art, or, better still, alive but at rest, is seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear suited; this is my feeling about the State which we have been describing. There are conflicts which all cities undergo, and I should like to hear some one tell of our own city carrying on a struggle against her neighbours, and how she went out to war in a becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities a result worthy of her training and education. Now I, Critias and Hermocrates, am conscious that I myself should never be able to celebrate the city and her citizens in a befitting manner, and I am not surprised at my own incapacity; to me the wonder is rather that the poets present as well as past are no betternot that I mean to depreciate them; but every one can see that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man's education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent in language. I am aware that the Sophists have plenty of brave words and fair conceits, but I am afraid that being only wanderers from one city to another, and having never had habitations of their own, they may fail in their conception of philosophers and statesmen, and may not know what they do and say in time of war, when they are fighting or holding parley with their enemies. And thus people of your class are the only ones remaining who are fitted by nature and education to take part at once both in politics and philosophy. Here is Timaeus, of Locris in Italy, a city which has admirable laws, and who is himself in wealth and rank the equal of any of his fellow-citizens; he has held the most important and honourable offices in his own state, and, as I believe, has scaled the heights of all philosophy; and here is Critias, whom every Athenian knows to be no novice in the matters of which we are speaking; and as to Hermocrates, I am assured by many witnesses that his genius and education qualify him to take part in any speculation of the kind. And therefore yesterday when I saw that you wanted me to describe the formation of the State, I readily assented, being very well aware, that, if you only would, none were better qualified to carry the discussion further, and that when you had engaged our city in a suitable war, you of all men living could best exhibit her playing a fitting part. When I had completed my task, I in return imposed this other task upon you. You conferred together and agreed to entertain me to-day, as I had entertained you, with a feast of discourse. Here am I in festive array, and no man can be more ready for the promised banquet.
  HERMOCRATES: And we too, Socrates, as Timaeus says, will not be wanting in enthusiasm; and there is no excuse for not complying with your request. As soon as we arrived yesterday at the guest-chamber of Critias, with whom we are staying, or rather on our way thither, we talked the matter over, and he told us an ancient tradition, which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat to Socrates, so that he may help us to judge whether it will satisfy his requirements or not.
  CRITIAS: I will, if Timaeus, who is our other partner, approves.
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  CRITIAS: Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfa ther, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfa ther, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival.
   Socrates: Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of the Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon, to be not a mere legend, but an actual fact?
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  I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak. And so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well provided.
  And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on my way home yesterday I at once communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered it; and after I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly the whole of it. Truly, as is often said, the lessons of our childhood make a wonderful impression on our memories; for I am not sure that I could remember all the discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised if I forgot any of these things which I have heard very long ago. I listened at the time with childlike interest to the old man's narrative; he was very ready to teach me, and I asked him again and again to repeat his words, so that like an indelible picture they were branded into my mind. As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed them as he spoke them to my companions, that they, as well as myself, might have something to say. And now, Socrates, to make an end of my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the particulars, as they were told to me. The city and citizens, which you yesterday described to us in fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. It shall be the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke; they will perfectly harmonize, and there will be no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians. Let us divide the subject among us, and all endeavour according to our ability gracefully to execute the task which you have imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited to the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other instead.
   Socrates: And what other, Critias, can we find that will be better than this, which is natural and suitable to the festival of the goddess, and has the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction? How or where shall we find another if we abandon this? We cannot, and therefore you must tell the tale, and good luck to you; and I in return for my yesterday's discourse will now rest and be a listener.
  CRITIAS: Let me proceed to explain to you, Socrates, the order in which we have arranged our entertainment. Our intention is, that Timaeus, who is the most of an astronomer amongst us, and has made the nature of the universe his special study, should speak first, beginning with the generation of the world and going down to the creation of man; next, I am to receive the men whom he has created, and of whom some will have profited by the excellent education which you have given them; and then, in accordance with the tale of Solon, and equally with his law, we will bring them into court and make them citizens, as if they were those very Athenians whom the sacred Egyptian record has recovered from oblivion, and thenceforward we will speak of them as Athenians and fellow-citizens.
   Socrates: I see that I shall receive in my turn a perfect and splendid feast of reason. And now, Timaeus, you, I suppose, should speak next, after duly calling upon the Gods.
  TIMAEUS: All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the universe, how created or how existing without creation, if we be not altogether out of our wits, must invoke the aid of Gods and Goddesses and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with themselves. Let this, then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I add an exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent.
  First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect. Was the heaven then or the world, whether called by this or by any other more appropriate nameassuming the name, I am asking a question which has to be asked at the beginning of an enquiry about anythingwas the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning? or created, and had it a beginning? Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible. And there is still a question to be asked about him: Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he made the worldthe pattern of the unchangeable, or of that which is created? If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal; but if what cannot be said without blasphemy is true, then to the created pattern. Every one will see that he must have looked to the eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes. And having been created in this way, the world has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is admitted, be a copy of something. Now it is all-important that the beginning of everything should be according to nature. And in speaking of the copy and the original we may assume that words are akin to the matter which they describe; when they relate to the lasting and permanent and intelligible, they ought to be lasting and unalterable, and, as far as their nature allows, irrefutable and immovablenothing less. But when they express only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things themselves, they need only be likely and analogous to the real words. As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates, amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are not able to give notions which are altogether and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do not be surprised. Enough, if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others; for we must remember that I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further.
   Socrates: Excellent, Timaeus; and we will do precisely as you bid us. The prelude is charming, and is already accepted by usmay we beg of you to proceed to the strain?

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun socrates

The noun socrates has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
                  
1. Socrates ::: (ancient Athenian philosopher; teacher of Plato and Xenophon (470-399 BC))


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun socrates

1 sense of socrates                          

Sense 1
Socrates
   INSTANCE OF=> philosopher
     => scholar, scholarly person, bookman, student
       => intellectual, intellect
         => person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
           => organism, being
             => living thing, animate thing
               => whole, unit
                 => object, physical object
                   => physical entity
                     => entity
           => causal agent, cause, causal agency
             => physical entity
               => entity
   INSTANCE OF=> Athenian
     => Greek, Hellene
       => European
         => inhabitant, habitant, dweller, denizen, indweller
           => person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
             => organism, being
               => living thing, animate thing
                 => whole, unit
                   => object, physical object
                     => physical entity
                       => entity
             => causal agent, cause, causal agency
               => physical entity
                 => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun socrates
                                    


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun socrates

1 sense of socrates                          

Sense 1
Socrates
   INSTANCE OF=> philosopher
   INSTANCE OF=> Athenian




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun socrates

1 sense of socrates                          

Sense 1
Socrates
  -> philosopher
   => nativist
   => Cynic
   => eclectic, eclecticist
   => empiricist
   => epistemologist
   => esthetician, aesthetician
   => ethicist, ethician
   => existentialist, existentialist philosopher, existential philosopher
   => gymnosophist
   => libertarian
   => mechanist
   => moralist
   => naturalist
   => necessitarian
   => nominalist
   => pluralist
   => pre-Socratic
   => realist
   => Scholastic
   => Sophist
   => Stoic
   => transcendentalist
   => yogi
   HAS INSTANCE=> Abelard, Peter Abelard, Pierre Abelard
   HAS INSTANCE=> Anaxagoras
   HAS INSTANCE=> Anaximander
   HAS INSTANCE=> Anaximenes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Arendt, Hannah Arendt
   HAS INSTANCE=> Aristotle
   HAS INSTANCE=> Averroes, ibn-Roshd, Abul-Walid Mohammed ibn-Ahmad Ibn-Mohammed ibn-Roshd
   HAS INSTANCE=> Avicenna, ibn-Sina, Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina
   HAS INSTANCE=> Bacon, Francis Bacon, Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, 1st Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans
   HAS INSTANCE=> Bentham, Jeremy Bentham
   HAS INSTANCE=> Bergson, Henri Bergson, Henri Louis Bergson
   HAS INSTANCE=> Berkeley, Bishop Berkeley, George Berkeley
   HAS INSTANCE=> Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
   HAS INSTANCE=> Bruno, Giordano Bruno
   HAS INSTANCE=> Buber, Martin Buber
   HAS INSTANCE=> Cassirer, Ernst Cassirer
   HAS INSTANCE=> Cleanthes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Comte, Auguste Comte, Isidore Auguste Marie Francois Comte
   HAS INSTANCE=> Condorcet, Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat
   HAS INSTANCE=> Confucius, Kongfuze, K'ung Futzu, Kong the Master
   HAS INSTANCE=> Democritus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Derrida, Jacques Derrida
   HAS INSTANCE=> Descartes, Rene Descartes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Dewey, John Dewey
   HAS INSTANCE=> Diderot, Denis Diderot
   HAS INSTANCE=> Diogenes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Empedocles
   HAS INSTANCE=> Epictetus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Epicurus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Haeckel
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hartley, David Hartley
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
   HAS INSTANCE=> Heraclitus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Herbart, Johann Friedrich Herbart
   HAS INSTANCE=> Herder, Johann Gottfried von Herder
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hume, David Hume
   HAS INSTANCE=> Husserl, Edmund Husserl
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hypatia
   HAS INSTANCE=> James, William James
   HAS INSTANCE=> Kant, Immanuel Kant
   HAS INSTANCE=> Kierkegaard, Soren Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lao-tzu, Lao-tse, Lao-zi
   HAS INSTANCE=> Leibniz, Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz
   HAS INSTANCE=> Locke, John Locke
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Carus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lully, Raymond Lully, Ramon Lully
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mach, Ernst Mach
   HAS INSTANCE=> Machiavelli, Niccolo Machiavelli
   HAS INSTANCE=> Maimonides, Moses Maimonides, Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon
   HAS INSTANCE=> Malebranche, Nicolas de Malebranche
   HAS INSTANCE=> Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse
   HAS INSTANCE=> Marx, Karl Marx
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mead, George Herbert Mead
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mill, John Mill, John Stuart Mill
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mill, James Mill
   HAS INSTANCE=> Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat
   HAS INSTANCE=> Moore, G. E. Moore, George Edward Moore
   HAS INSTANCE=> Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
   HAS INSTANCE=> Occam, William of Occam, Ockham, William of Ockham
   HAS INSTANCE=> Origen
   HAS INSTANCE=> Ortega y Gasset, Jose Ortega y Gasset
   HAS INSTANCE=> Parmenides
   HAS INSTANCE=> Pascal, Blaise Pascal
   HAS INSTANCE=> Peirce, Charles Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce
   HAS INSTANCE=> Perry, Ralph Barton Perry
   HAS INSTANCE=> Plato
   HAS INSTANCE=> Plotinus
   => Popper, Karl Popper, Sir Karl Raimund Popper
   HAS INSTANCE=> Pythagoras
   HAS INSTANCE=> Quine, W. V. Quine, Willard Van Orman Quine
   HAS INSTANCE=> Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
   HAS INSTANCE=> Reid, Thomas Reid
   HAS INSTANCE=> Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
   HAS INSTANCE=> Russell, Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Earl Russell
   HAS INSTANCE=> Schopenhauer, Arthur Schopenhauer
   HAS INSTANCE=> Schweitzer, Albert Schweitzer
   HAS INSTANCE=> Seneca, Lucius Annaeus Seneca
   HAS INSTANCE=> Socrates
   HAS INSTANCE=> Spencer, Herbert Spencer
   HAS INSTANCE=> Spengler, Oswald Spengler
   HAS INSTANCE=> Spinoza, de Spinoza, Baruch de Spinoza, Benedict de Spinoza
   HAS INSTANCE=> Steiner, Rudolf Steiner
   HAS INSTANCE=> Stewart, Dugald Stewart
   HAS INSTANCE=> Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Rabindranath Tagore
   HAS INSTANCE=> Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   HAS INSTANCE=> Thales, Thales of Miletus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Theophrastus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Weil, Simone Weil
   HAS INSTANCE=> Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead
   HAS INSTANCE=> Williams, Sir Bernard Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen Williams
   HAS INSTANCE=> Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johan Wittgenstein
   HAS INSTANCE=> Xenophanes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Zeno, Zeno of Citium
   HAS INSTANCE=> Zeno, Zeno of Elea
  -> Athenian
   HAS INSTANCE=> Alcibiades
   HAS INSTANCE=> Demosthenes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Draco
   HAS INSTANCE=> Socrates




--- Grep of noun socrates
isocrates
socrates



IN WEBGEN [10000/155]

Wikipedia - Bramman -- 2014 film directed by Socrates
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Wikipedia - Category:Socrates
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Wikipedia - Socrate
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Wikipedia - Socratic problem -- The problems in reconstructing a historical and philosophical image of Socrates
Wikipedia - Sophroniscus -- Sculptor and father of Socrates
Wikipedia - Template talk:Socrates navbox
Wikipedia - Template talk:Socrates
Wikipedia - The Death of Socrates -- Painting by Jacques-Louis David
Wikipedia - The Flight of Socrates -- 1923 film
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Wikipedia - The unexamined life is not worth living -- A saying by Greek philosopher Socrates
Wikipedia - Trial of Socrates -- 399 B.C.E legal proceedings by the pantheon of Athens against Socrates
Wikipedia - Voltaire's Socrates (play)
Wikipedia - VTech Socrates
Socrates ::: Born: 471 BC; Died: 399 BC; Occupation: Philosopher;
Isocrates ::: Born: 436 BC; Died: 338 BC; Occupation: Orator;
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Goodreads author - Socrates
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/File:Socrates_Louvre.jpg
selforum - socrates considered it was mans duty to
selforum - socrates was great teacher because
selforum - nietzsche admires and envies socrates
selforum - socrates diogenes newton and voltaire
Psychology Wiki - Socrates
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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - socrates
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/Socrates
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ApologyOfSocrates
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VisualNovel/SocratesJonesProPhilosopher
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Artgate_Fondazione_Cariplo_-_Canova_Antonio,_Socrate_congeda_la_propria_famiglia.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:David_-_The_Death_of_Socrates.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Socrates_Louvre.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isocrates
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Socrates
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:GlobalUsage/David_-_The_Death_of_Socrates.jpg
https://animanga.fandom.com/wiki/Socrates_in_Love
https://characters.fandom.com/wiki/Socrates_The_Lion
https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/VTech_Socrates_in_El_Kadsre
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Socrates
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Socrates
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Brain_of_Socrates_(short_story)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Socrates
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Socrates
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere&target=Category:Socrates
Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics
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Der geduldige Socrates
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Isocrates
Mr. Socrates
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Socratea
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Socrates
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Socrates Cafe
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Socrates Drank the Conium (album)
Socrates (film)
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Socrates in Love
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Socrates on Trial
SOCRATES (pain assessment)
Socrates programme
SOCRATES (satellite)
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Socrates (Voltaire)
The Death of Socrates
The Flight of Socrates
The Plot to Save Socrates
Trial of Socrates
VTech Socrates



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