ONE:"I found Charlton there," Leona panted. "Above all persons in the world, I found Charlton there. He was sitting in the darkness waiting for Isidore----"To Socrates himself the strongest reason for believing in the identity of conviction and practice was, perhaps, that he had made it a living reality. With him to know the right137 and to do it were the same. In this sense we have already said that his life was the first verification of his philosophy. And just as the results of his ethical teaching can only be ideally separated from their application to his conduct, so also these results themselves cannot be kept apart from the method by which they were reached; nor is the process by which he reached them for himself distinguishable from the process by which he communicated them to his friends. In touching on this point, we touch on that which is greatest and most distinctively original in the Socratic system, or rather in the Socratic impulse to systematisation of every kind. What it was will be made clearer by reverting to the central conception of mind. With Protagoras mind meant an ever-changing stream of feeling; with Gorgias it was a principle of hopeless isolation, the interchange of thoughts between one consciousness and another, by means of signs, being an illusion. Socrates, on the contrary, attributed to it a steadfast control over passion, and a unifying function in society through its essentially synthetic activity, its need of co-operation and responsive assurance. He saw that the reason which overcomes animal desire tends to draw men together just as sensuality tends to drive them into hostile collision. If he recommended temperance on account of the increased egoistic pleasure which it secures, he recommended it also as making the individual a more efficient instrument for serving the community. If he inculcated obedience to the established laws, it was no doubt partly on grounds of enlightened self-interest, but also because union and harmony among citizens were thereby secured. And if he insisted on the necessity of forming definite conceptions, it was with the same twofold reference to personal and public advantage. Along with the diffusive, social character of mind he recognised its essential spontaneity. In a commonwealth where all citizens were free and equal, there must also be freedom and equality of reason. Having worked out a theory of life for himself, he138 desired that all other men should, so far as possible, pass through the same bracing discipline. Here we have the secret of his famous erotetic method. He did not, like the Sophists, give continuous lectures, nor profess, like some of them, to answer every question that might be put to him. On the contrary, he put a series of questions to all who came in his way, generally in the form of an alternative, one side of which seemed self-evidently true and the other self-evidently false, arranged so as to lead the respondent, step by step, to the conclusion which it was desired that he should accept. Socrates did not invent this method. It had long been practised in the Athenian law-courts as a means for extracting from the opposite party admissions which could not be otherwise obtained, whence it had passed into the tragic drama, and into the discussion of philosophical problems. Nowhere else was the analytical power of Greek thought so brilliantly displayed; for before a contested proposition could be subjected to this mode of treatment, it had to be carefully discriminated from confusing adjuncts, considered under all the various meanings which it might possibly be made to bear, subdivided, if it was complex, into two or more distinct assertions, and linked by a minute chain of demonstration to the admission by which its validity was established or overthrown.
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ONE:The analogy between modern Europe and the Roman262 empire is, however, as we have already hinted, merely superficial. It has been shown in the course of our analysis that to ensure the triumph of superstition in the old world something more was necessary than the destruction of aristocratic government. Every feeling of libertyexcept the liberty to dieand almost every feeling of self-respect had to be crushed out by the establishment of an authoritative hierarchy extending from the Emperor down to the meanest slaves, before the voice of Hellenic reason could be hushed. But among ourselves it is rather of the opposite faultof too great independence and individualismthat complaints are heard. If we occasionally see a hereditary monarch or a popular minister invested with despotic power, this phenomenon is probably due to the circumstances of a revolutionary period, and will in course of time become more and more exceptional. Flatterers, parasites, and will-hunters are not an increasing but a diminishing class. Modern officers, as a body, show none of that contempt for reasoning and amenability to superstition which characterised the Roman centurions; in France, military men are even distinguished for their deadly hatred of priests. And, what is more important than any other element in our comparison, the reserves which modern civilisation is bringing to the front are of a widely different intellectual stature and equipment from their predecessors under Augustus and the Antonines. Since the reorganisation of industry by science, millions of working-men have received an education which prepares them to understand the universality of law much better than the literary education given to their social superiors, which, indeed, bears a remarkable resemblance to the rhetorical and sophistical training enjoyed by the contemporaries of Maximus Tyrius and Apuleius. If as much cannot be said of the middle classes, they are at any rate far more enlightened than Roman provincials, and are likely to improve still further with the spread of educationanother peculiarly modern phenomenon.263 On this point we have, indeed, something better to argue from than priori probabilities. We see before our eyes the rationalistic movement advancing pari passu with the democratic movement, and, in some countries, overtly aided by it. To say that this alliance has been provoked by an accidental and temporary association of monarchy and aristocracy with Church establishments, is a superficial explanation. The paid advocates of delusion know well where their interest lies. They have learned by experience that democracy means the education of the people, and that the education of the people means the loss of their own prestige. And they know also that, in many cases, the people are already sufficiently educated to use political power, once they have obtained it, for the summary destruction of organised and endowed superstition. What has been said of popular influence applies equally to the influence of women. When they were either not educated at all or only received a literary education, every improvement in their position was simply so much ground gained for superstition. The prospect is very different now. Women are beginning to receive a training like that of men, or rather a training superior to what all but a very few men have hitherto enjoyed. And the result is that, wherever this experiment has been tried, they have flung aside traditional beliefs once supposed to be a necessity of their nature even more decisively and disdainfully than have the professors by whom they are taught.
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ONE:
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