FORE:This Daemonium, whatever it may have been, formed one of the ostensible grounds on which its possessor was prosecuted and condemned to death for impiety. We might have spared ourselves the trouble of going over the circumstances connected with that tragical event, had not various attempts been made in some well-known works to extenuate the significance of a singularly atrocious crime. The case stands thus. In the year 399 B.C. Socrates, who was then over seventy, and had never in his life been brought before a law-court, was indicted on the threefold charge of introducing new divinities, of denying those already recognised by the State, and of corrupting young men. His principal accuser was one Meltus, a poet, supported by Lycon, a rhetorician,162 and by a much more powerful backer, Anytus, a leading citizen in the restored democracy. The charge was tried before a large popular tribunal, numbering some five hundred members. Socrates regarded the whole affair with profound indifference. When urged to prepare a defence, he replied, with justice, that he had been preparing it his whole life long. He could not, indeed, have easily foreseen what line the prosecutors would take. Our own information on this point is meagre enough, being principally derived from allusions made by Xenophon, who was not himself present at the trial. There seems, however, no unfairness in concluding that the charge of irreligion neither was nor could be substantiated. The evidence of Xenophon is quite sufficient to establish the unimpeachable orthodoxy of his friend. If it really was an offence at Athens to believe in gods unrecognised by the State, Socrates was not guilty of that offence, for his Daemonium was not a new divinity, but a revelation from the established divinities, such as individual believers have at all times been permitted to receive even by the most jealous religious communities. The imputation of infidelity, commonly and indiscriminately brought against all philosophers, was a particularly unhappy one to fling at the great opponent of physical science, who, besides, was noted for the punctual discharge of his religious duties. That the first two counts of the indictment should be so frivolous raises a strong prejudice against the third. The charges of corruption seem to have come under two headsalleged encouragement of disrespect to parents, and of disaffection towards democratic institutions. In support of the former some innocent expressions let fall by Socrates seem to have been taken up and cruelly perverted. By way of stimulating his young friends to improve their minds, he had observed that relations were only of value when they could help one another, and that to do so they must be properly educated. This was twisted into an assertion that ignorant parents might properly be placed163 under restraint by their better-informed children. That such an inference could not have been sanctioned by Socrates himself is obvious from his insisting on the respect due even to so intolerable a mother as Xanthipp.108 The political opinions of the defendant presented a more vulnerable point for attack. He thought the custom of choosing magistrates by lot absurd, and did not conceal his contempt for it. There is, however, no reason for believing that such purely theoretical criticisms were forbidden by law or usage at Athens. At any rate, much more revolutionary sentiments were tolerated on the stage. That Socrates would be no party to a violent subversion of the Constitution, and would regard it with high disapproval, was abundantly clear both from his life and from the whole tenor of his teaching. In opposition to Hippias, he defined justice as obedience to the law of the land. The chances of the lot had, on one memorable occasion, called him to preside over the deliberations of the Sovereign Assembly. A proposition was made, contrary to law, that the generals who were accused of having abandoned the crews of their sunken ships at Arginusae should be tried in a single batch. In spite of tremendous popular clamour, Socrates refused to put the question to the vote on the single day for which his office lasted. The just and resolute man, who would not yield to the unrighteous demands of a crowd, had shortly afterwards to face the threats of a frowning tyrant. When the Thirty were installed in power, he publicly, and at the risk of his life, expressed disapproval of their sanguinary proceedings. The oligarchy, wishing to involve as many respectable citizens as possible in complicity with their crimes, sent for five persons, of whom Socrates was one, and ordered them to bring a certain Leo from Salamis, that he might be put to death; the others obeyed, but Socrates refused to accompany them on their disgraceful errand. Nevertheless, it told heavily against the philosopher that164 Alcibiades, the most mischievous of demagogues, and Critias, the most savage of aristocrats, passed for having been educated by him. It was remembered, also, that he was in the habit of quoting a passage from Homer, where Odysseus is described as appealing to the reason of the chiefs, while he brings inferior men to their senses with rough words and rougher chastisement. In reality, Socrates did not mean that the poor should be treated with brutality by the rich, for he would have been the first to suffer had such license been permitted, but he meant that where reason failed harsher methods of coercion must be applied. Precisely because expressions of opinion let fall in private conversation are so liable to be misunderstood or purposely perverted, to adduce them in support of a capital charge where no overt act can be alleged, is the most mischievous form of encroachment on individual liberty.The next great forward step in speculation was taken by Anaximander, another Milesian, also of distinguished attainments in mathematics and astronomy. We have seen that to Thales water, the all-embracing element, became, as such, the first cause of all things, the absolute principle of existence. His successor adopted the same general point of view, but looked out from it with a more penetrating gaze. Beyond water lay something else which he called the Infinite. He did not mean the empty abstraction which has stalked about in modern times under that ill-omened name, nor yet did he mean infinite space, but something richer and more concrete than either; a storehouse of materials whence the waste of existence could be perpetually made good. The growth and decay of individual forms involve a ceaseless drain on Nature, and the deficiency must be supplied by a corresponding influx from without.A For, be it observed that, although the Greek thinkers were at this period well aware that nothing can come from nothing, they had not yet grasped the complementary truth inalienably wedded to it by Lucretius in one immortal couplet, that nothing can return to nothing; and Kant is quite mistaken when he treats the two as historically inseparable. Common experience forces the one on our attention much sooner than the other. Our incomings are very strictly measured out and accounted for without difficulty, while it is hard to tell what becomes of all our expenditure, physical and economical. Yet, although the indestructibility of matter was a conception which had not yet dawned on Anaximander, he seems to have been feeling his way towards the recognition of a circulatory movement pervading all Nature. Everything, he says, must at last be reabsorbed in the Infinite as a punishment for the sin of its separate existence.10 Some may find in this sentiment a note of Oriental10 mysticism. Rather does its very sadness illustrate the healthy vitality of Greek feeling, to which absorption seemed like the punishment of a crime against the absolute, and not, as to so many Asiatics, the crown and consummation of spiritual perfection. Be this as it may, a doctrine which identified the death of the whole world with its reabsorption into a higher reality would soon suggest the idea that its component parts vanish only to reappear in new combinations.
