Nor, again, is there any real incongruity between the eager and comprehensive search of Sokrates and the indifference with which he contemplated the result. Convinced of his actual Nescience, he was nevertheless not sanguine of exchanging it for Science, at least to any appreciable extent. How his search might terminate here or hereafter he was indeed by no means anxious. Probably, like Lessing, had the alternative been submitted to him, he would have preferred the search to the find. Undoubtedly he would have done so had the latter condition implied a cessation of intellectual activity. Having in his possession a few working certainties of a practical kind, he was indifferent to speculative infallibility. Reverting to our former simile, he resembled a hunter who has a crust of bread in his pocket sufficient to allay the worst pangs of hunger, and is comparatively indifferent to the spoil; but who nevertheless feels the necessity of the exercise, the free movement of the body, the expansion and exhilaration of mind which the pursuit of the chase gives him. Moreover, to Sokrates the matter had a still more solemn bearing. Search for Truth and Knowledge was his divinely assigned mission, just as his persuasion of Nescience was its divinely sanctioned startingpoint. To abjure his call, to retire from his task, as he told his judges, would be an open breach of the divine command. Rather than commit this he would willingly suffer death. Sokrates, then, by his own frank and unreserved confession of Nescience, must be reckoned a self-avowed Skeptic. This estimate is confirmed-if confirmation of his own repeated declaration be thought needful-by the method presented to us in the Platonic 'Dialogues of Search.' It is to these the inquirer must always turn for a complete account of the Sokratic elenchus by the disciple most capable of entering into its spirit and purport. But on referring to them we find a portrayal of Sokrates as a subtle, profound, but at the same time unmitigated Skeptic. From his standpoint of Nescience he analyses and discusses a variety of prevalent notions-metaphysical, religious, ethical, political; and in all cases he arrives ultimately at inconclusive or negative results. In one he discusses prudence, in another friendship, in a third courage; while others are taken up with Rhetoric, the methods of the Sophists, impiety, the teachableness of virtue, &c., but in all alike the conclusion is uncertain. Truths, apparently the most obvious and easy of definition, are shown on Sokratic analysis to be charged with insuperable difficulties. All his interlocutors are landed one after another in an inextricable labyrinth of self-contradictions and absurdities, from which the sole escape is the admission of complete ignorance. Nor is this result wonderful: anything more unscrupulous, more unreasonable, more determinedly captious and implacably contentious, it is quite impossible to conceive. With all his covert sneers at 'All-wise Eristics' and Sophists, Sokrates approves himself more Eristic than the former, and more Sophistical than the latter. Accordingly, current notions, opinions, and beliefs fall before his dialectical battery like naked savages before a Gatling gun. No dogma or permanent conviction could, indeed, stand before such unprincipled tactics. No fort of human belief-no matter what its original strength-could long hold out before so determined an attack, such an unceasing and varied succession of stratagems, assaults, feints, ambuscades, subterfuges, and surprises, as Sokrates brings to bear upon the opinions of his fellow-citizens. Allowing, as in duty bound, a fair margin to his confidence in dialectics, and granting the truth of Aristotle's remark that he was precluded from any definite conclusion or dogmatic assertion by his own profession of nescience,' it must still be a lasting charge against Sokrates, from a dogmatic standpoint, that his methods in application transcend all reasonable scope; that his Dialectic is, in effect, an example of Eristic of the worst kind. What this excess serves to prove and this, as regards Sokrates, is the chief outcome of the Dialogues of Search-is the intensity of his own conviction of Nescience, and the determination he displays in showing that his condition is really shared by many who in their own estimation are models of wisdom and knowledge. Unfortunately, in trying to effect this he has left us, I will not say a portrait, but a caricature of a Skeptic whose Skepticism is incurable, of a rationalist who can at times reason away ratiocination, of a logician who can logically annihilate logic. In order more fully to determine the character of the Dialogues of Search, and to fix their true position in Skeptical thought, all that is needed is to compare them-(1) with the methods of the Sophists which they occasionally vilify; (2) with those of the more pronounced Skeptics, e.g. Pyrrhôn, Ainesidemos, and especially Sextos Empeirikos. With the first they shared, as we have seen, the inordinate disputatiousness, the love of discussion for its own sake independently both of fair starting-points and legitimate conclusions, the desire of dialectical victory at any cost, and therefore the effort to make the worse prove the better cause of which Aristophanes had accused Sokrates. With the Skeptics, too, he Soph. Elench. chap. xxxiv. Comp. Cicero, Lucullus, chap. v. shares a determination to negation often in excess of his own standpoint. He avails himself of quibbles, fallacies, and ambiguities without limit, in order to establish an inconclusive issue. It would, indeed, be difficult to name a single illegitimate process employed by subsequent Skeptics which has no parallel or example in the Platonic Dialogues. Sokrates is evidently well versed in all the bypaths, as well as the main roads, of Dialectic, and is by no means scrupulous in employing the former when the latter do not serve his purpose. Hence, notwithstanding his belief in absolute truth which differentiates him from the school of Pyrrhôn, he often reasons as if he believed truth to be an impossibility, or at least as if its presence on the side of an adversary would have been an unwelcome phenomenon. I am convinced that this is only what I have already termed it, an exaggeration of his own suspensive position. He finds it in practice difficult (subsequent Skeptics found it impossible) to assert distinctly his own Nescience without implying that this was incontrovertibly the condition of all men. But however this may be, of the fact of his unprincipled Eristic and his ostensible preference of Victory over Truth there can be no doubt. Bacon, among others, has long ago pointed out that characteristic of the Sokratic method as one that allied him to the Skeptics, and Professor Jowett remarks, à propos of his discussion on friendship, that Sokrates 'allowed himself to be carried away by a sort of Eristic or illogical logic against which the truest definition of friendship would be unable to stand.' A similar remark, it may be added, might be made on most of the themes of the Platonic Dialogues. It would be easy to carry out into greater detail the general proof of the Skepticism of Sokrates furnished by the Dialogues of Search,' by enumerating other instances of his profound distrust of commonly received dogmas. Setting aside for the present corroborative testimony, of which both among contemporaries and later writers there is no lack, we cannot but be struck with the thorough-going character which Sokrates confesses to have marked his Doubt. We have seen that, like a celebrated English Skeptic of our own day, he was not inclined to attach to 1 Speaking of the De Elenchis Sophismatum of Aristotle, and of the Greek Thinkers who had practised it, he says, 'Neque illud tantum in persona sophistarum antiquorum. verum etiam in persona ipsius Socratis, qui cum illud semper agat, ut nihil affirmet, sed a ceteris in medium adducta infirmet, ingeniosissime objectionum, fallaciarum, et redargutionum modos expressit.' De Aug. Sci. lib. v. cap. iv. Works, Ellis and Spedding, vol. i. p. 642. the properties of numbers that indubitable certainty generally accorded to them. The combination of one and one is often adduced as the 'Ne plus ultra' of Scientific Truth. To Sokrates it afforded matter for puzzlement and doubt. Self-identity-the 'Cogito, ergo sum' of Descartes-is generally regarded as an irresistible truth. But Sokrates seems to have doubted his own identity—to have admitted the impossibility of discriminating between his dream and waking states, and professed his ignorance as to whether he were Sokrates or a multiform serpent of Typhon,1 -an anomalous result to have followed, which it seems to have done, the observance of γνῶθι σεαυτόν. His doubt further spread itself to the mythological, religious, and ethical beliefs of his countrymen. Indeed, his dictum that the first principles of all systems should be analyzed and reviewed from time to time must be regarded, from the dogmatist point of view, as a Philosophical Radicalism of a very sweeping kind. His doubt embraced also Language, of which he affirmed his inability to say how it came into existence, while traces of Nominalism are by no means rare in his utterances. Added to all these are his own frequent admissions of Nescience and his encomium on the awakening effects of doubt both on the individual and on the State. And if he held in reserve two or three abstract truths, the reservation was so well kept that it might easily have escaped the notice, not only of a casual observer, but even of an occasional disciple. The every-day attitude presented by Sokrates to his fellow-citizens was that of an intrepid reasoner-a doubter on most points of popular belieff-a secret despiser of the national gods, and an astute advocate, well skilled in making the worse seem the better cause. His mission was regarded as a dissemination of Doubt, and he himself as a veritable though half-disguised Skeptic. But granting this to be the character of Sokrates, why—it will be objected-have historians of Philosophy not only refused to pronounce him a Skeptic, but have agreed to consider him as the most potent adversary of the Skepticism of the Sophists? For this three causes may be assigned (I enumerated them in our opening discussion) : 1. A perverted stress upon Sokratic irony. 2. The fact that we have the Skepticism of Sokrates distilled through and largely neutralized by the Idealistic Dogmatism of Plato. 3. The halo of martyrdom which has somewhat induced an oblivion of the cause for which he suffered, i.e. Free-Thought. 1 Phaidros, 230 A. Comp. Sextos Empeirikos, adv. Math. lib. vi. § 265. 1. The Nescience professed by Sokrates has been held to be an ironical profession of a state he was really far from feeling. He assumed it in order-(1) to render his persistent inquiry for information reasonable; (2) to convict others of an ignorance as great, if not greater, than his own. Sokrates, it is said, is a dogmatist in the cloak of a Sophist or Skeptic. If he allows any of his arguments to terminate inconclusively, this is not because he does not know the true conclusion, but because for the sake of his interlocutors and his pretended ignorance he will not disclose it. If, e.g. he permits Lysis to depart with no definition of Friendship capable of withstanding the assaults of a libertine logic, or if Euthyphro is dismissed unenlightened as to the true definition of Impiety, this is not because Sokrates does not know what Friendship or Impiety is, but because he is bent on discovering for the benefit of his hearers their own unexpected ignorance upon such obvious and every-day topics. Now this reasoning seems to me utterly devoid of foundation. Sokrates—though I am far from denying his masterly employment of irony-is, on the subject of his Nescience, sincere enough. He really does share the ignorance though not the mental confusion of his interlocutors on the points controverted. He is thoroughly persuaded that no definition of Friendship' or 'Impiety,' or any other of his conversational themes, can be propounded which will withstand the assaults of an Eristic, rapid, versatile, and unprincipled. Indeed, it is in his superior knowledge of Dialectic, in his profounder study of the avenues to human conviction, that his Nescience as regards fixed principles and dogmatic truths may be said to consist. Thus he is far more convinced of his ignorance than his hearers are of theirs because he is aware of the almost numberless aspects of relativity under which most human truths, especially of a religious or ethical kind, are capable of being presented; and it was precisely in this fuller conception of Nescience that, as he himself observed, lay the main difference between himself and ordinary men. In other words, Sokrates is a real, not a fictitious, Skeptic; his Ignorance is felt, not assumed. Indeed, his conviction of it is all the more vivid and indestructible for being based on knowledge, just as the study of the Buddhist found its outcome in a Nirvana of semiconsciousness. Sokrates has explored every department of Greek thought; he has followed every stream of its speculation to its fountain-head; he has weighed every argument of every subjectmatter in the scale of his reason; he has applied to every portion of human knowledge as it came before him a Dialectic, boid, ruthless, and utterly unscrupulous. He ends with a conviction as |