free-thought, their contributory influence to Greek Skepticism does not seem to have been very powerful.

TREVOR. Very true; and as to the Sophists, their method will come before us when we discuss Sokrates, whom I regard as their chief.

ARUNDEL (rising to go). A very doubtful proposition, Doctor, which, together with your overcharged patronage of those teachers, I should feel inclined to contest, if the clock were not at this moment striking eleven.

EVENING III.

SOKRATES AND THE SOKRATIC SCHOOLS.

1

Ὑμεῖς μέντοι ἂν ἐμοὶ πείθησθε, σμικρὸν φροντίσαντες Σωκράτους, τῆς δὲ ἀληθείας πολὺ μᾶλλον, ἐὰν μέν τι ὑμῖν δοκῶ ἀληθὲς λέγειν, ξυνομολογήσατε, εἰ δὲ μὴ, παντὶ λόγῳ ἀντιτείνατε.

Sokrates apud Platonem.

'You may dislike philosophy: you may undervalue, or altogether proscribe, the process of theorizing. This is the standing-point usual with the bulk of mankind, ancient as well as modern, who generally dislike all accurate reasoning, or analysis and discrimination of familiar abstract words, as mean and tiresome hair-splitting. But if you admit the business of theorizing to be legitimate, useful, and even honourable, you must reckon on free working of independent, individual minds as the operative force, and on the necessity of dissentient, conflicting manifestations of this common force as essential conditions to any successful result. Upon no other conditions can you obtain any tolerable body of reasoned Truth-or even reasoned quasi-truth.'

GROTE, Plato, vol. iii. p. 485.

'Dulce mihi cruciari,

Parva vis doloris est;

Malo mori quam fœdari,

Major vis amoris est.'

Old Latin Hymn.

DU MERIL, Poésies Populaires Latines, p. 139.

EVENING III.

SOKRATES AND THE SOKRATIC SCHOOLS.

MISS LEYCESTER. A pretty and appropriate designation for this evening, speaking literally not ecclesiastically, in respect of the object to which we mean to devote it, would be-The eve of Saint Sokrates.'

MRS. ARUNDEL. Saint Sokrates! Miss Leycester!
MISS LEYCESTER. Most true, Mrs. Arundel!

He was

so named by Erasmus, who said that as often as he read his life and his death he could scarce refrain from saying, 'Sancte Sokrates, ora pro nobis.'

TREVOR. I must say I cordially sympathise with Erasmus; and if Mrs. Arundel will read, if she has never done so, the Apology and Krito of Plato, I think she will understand why Sokrates has received, though informally, philosophical canonization. But it is not as a saint in the usual acceptation of the term, but as a 'sinner,' that he comes before us. He is the choregus of Greek free-thought.

ARUNDEL. Greek thought, if you like, Doctor; I demur to the 'free,' at least in your sense of Skeptical.

HARRINGTON. On the contrary, I think Trevor is right. The outcome of Sokratic thought is really Skepticism in the sense of suspense, though not in that of negation. He questions not the existence of truth, but methods of attaining it.

TREVOR. You might have said all methods of attaining it excepting one, Dialectic; and this exception is on his own showing just as fallible as the rest. Consequently, he is a complete though undeclared Skeptic. That he was not a negative Dogmatist, as Pyrrhôn was, is clear, but he is not the less but rather the greater Skeptic on that account. Free suspense is, or should be, as careful to avoid positive

negation as distinct affirmation. The difference between Sokrates and Pyrrhôn is—the former simply maintained his ignorance of truth, saying, with Montaigne, 'Je ne sçais pas,' or Que je sçais ;' while the latter went further, and held all truth-knowledge to be impossible-a very different position.

MISS LEYCESTER. I suppose the difference consisted in this: Sokrates was content with the assertion of his own nescience, while Pyrrhôn, sharing the same conviction, made his ignorance an absolute rule for the rest of humanity, which we may take as another exemplification of the irresistible propensity of mankind to hasty generalization.

TREVOR. Pyrrhôn, if he is not belied, went even further than that. He was not satisfied with saying of himself, "I don't know,' and of his fellow-mortals, 'I am certain you don't know,' but he went a step further and said, 'It is quite impossible that you or I or any being endued with our faculties ever can know anything,' an overweening and arrogant judgment, to which he has not the least right, and which conflicts completely with his own standpoint of professed ignorance.

ARUNDEL. But you see, Doctor, that is precisely the mischief of negation, it does not know when to stop. If I say, e.g. 'I don't know,' I feel inclined immediately to extend my nescience to my neighbours, whom I see to be constituted as I am, and to add, 'You don't know;' and having by induction ascertained that all men in the world are similarly constituted as myself and my neighbours, I next say positively, and of all mankind, 'We don't know,' or perhaps, "We cannot know,' in other words, 'Knowledge is impossible.'

TREVOR. But the same tendency to rapid and unauthorized generalization is just as true of affirmation as of negation. Nothing is more common than for dogmatists of every kind to urge, 'I know and believe certain doctrines in a certain manner. Therefore, you know and believe the same doctrines in precisely the same manner. If you don't, you are infidels, heretics, or fools.'

MISS LEYCESTER. But if both these processes are illicit, what are we to say of the saw of Protagoras, 'Man is the measure of all things'?