assured and indubitable as anything can be that Truth in itself— in its final determination and as a matter of speculation—is indiscoverable. Like Lessing, he is inclined to regard it as the exclusive prerogative of Deity.'

2. The Skepticism of Sokrates has also been overlooked because it has been so inextricably blended with the idealism of Plato. Unfortunately for the history of philosophy, but quite in harmony with his free tendencies, his non-affirming character, and his passion for viva voce discussion, Sokrates left no written work behind him. His method and opinions have to be disentangled from the crude realism of Xenophon, and the extreme transcendentalism of Plato. The latter is especially responsible for the prevalent conception of Sokrates as a half-formed idealist, a teacher whose own progress in the path of ontology, afterwards so boldly developed by Plato, was cut short by death. No doubt the method of Sokrates was introspective. The starting-point of his search was Know thyself;' and although he in one place disclaims any knowledge of Dialectic as a definite system, and professes to rely only on common-sense, the method of self-knowledge enounced in the maxim, 'Dialectic is the Nature of Being,' must have been a fundamental law of his own thought. But while we recognise in these principles the rudiments of Platonic idealism, we must be careful not to allow these, or for that matter any other conclusions as to his teaching, to contravene or obscure his own admission of Nescience. This must always be accepted as the central fact of his intellectual character, the standard by which we must estimate the overcharged personal sentiment of disciples, and the glosses of commentators. How absurd, e.g. is it to suppose that with his profound conviction of Nescience, Sokrates could really have held the doctrine of Reminiscence, or that from the same standpoint he could have indulged in those speculations as to the future world contained in the 'Phaidon' and 'Gorgias.' It seems to me that we should apply to the Sokrates of History his own recommendation, and review those first principles on which his intellectual character has generally been based. When we do this sincerely, taking as our starting-point that mental attribute on which he oftenest insisted, and which is most generally ascribed to him by his fellow-citizens, we can have no hesitation in pronouncing him a Skeptic. No other designation is possible for a man who so continually proclaims his absolute ignorance of truth. 3. Another cause that has tended to hide his Skepticism, or at least to prevent its full acknowledgment, is the noble fearlessness 'Apologia, 23 B.

with which he met death. Sokrates is the first and most distinguished member of that band of martyrs who have endured death in the cause of Free-thought, and of which our list of Skeptics will furnish us with several more instances. But in the death of Sokrates men have forgotten its cause. Martyrdom, as a rule, implies convictions definite, strong, and passionate. But Sokrates is an instance of a martyr who disclaims all convictions in the sense of positive knowledge; whose sole earnest persuasion is that of his own ignorance. Historians, I think, have hastily endeavoured to rectify what they have deemed an anomaly, and in order to assimilate Sokrates to other martyrs have credited him with the creed of a dogmatist. What Sokrates suffered for was not a particular creed, but the confessed want of any creed; or, still better, he died for pure mental liberty, for absolute freedom, whether of belief, disbelief, or unbelief.

But granting the Skepticism of Sokrates, the question immediately suggests itself, How far was he a conscious Skeptic? How far did he conceive that his standpoint of Nescience assimilated him to deniers or oppugners of all truth? To this the answer is not difficult. Skepticism, as a formal profession, was as yet unknown in Greece (we shall come to its introduction when we discuss Pyrrhôn at our next meeting). Free analysis and inquiry had already been carried to their extremest point by Eleatics and Sophists, but there had yet arisen no school of avowed doubters, still less of deniers. So convinced were Hellenic thinkers of the necessity of mental freedom in every direction, that it might have seemed on à priori grounds unlikely that such a school could have found much favour in Greece. The proclamation of the absolute impossibility of all human knowledge was not only a dogma as arbitrary as it was o erbearing, but it left no room for search, for that perpetual exercise of the intellect which to a Greek thinker was its most imperious necessity. I can therefore quite imagine that Sokrates did not think his attitude of ignorance was equivalent to such a denial of all truth as an extreme Sophist might have professed. On the other hand, I am certain he would have denied such an imputation with vehemence. I do not think he quite realised, what I believe unquestionable, that the difference between himself and ordinary Sophists was one of degree rather than of kind. Indeed, he seems to me to have been quite indifferent to distinctions between rival schools of philosophy; and when on his trial he is accused of being a Sophist, the apathy he manifests in rebutting the charge is so great as to amount to a confirmation of it. Be

sides, his Skepticism, with all its consequences, whether good or ill, is a direct result of his Dialectic. Paradoxical as it may seem, it was in simple fealty to Reason, in the full recognition of her supremacy as the sole guide to Truth, that Sokrates allowed what seemed her paralogisms or reductiones ad absurdum.' The misologist, to use his own term, had as little ground for his dislike of Reason as the misanthropist for his hatred of humanity. The logos was as much an entity requiring sympathetic consideration and proper deference as the anthropos with whom it was allied, nay much more, for the reason was the highest faculty of man. Hence above all other matters the rights of the ratiocination had to be considered, not the conclusions haply evolved from it, still less the effect of those conclusions on the ordinary convictions of mankind. If Sokrates is the apostle of truth and reason, he has no business to set up for his mission another didactic purpose of his own. Ratiocination must proceed at its own 'sweet will,' with just enough impulse imparted to it by controversy to keep it in motion, and must not be incumbered with the advocacy of any prescribed dogma. He draws in the 'Phaidon' a distinction between the philosopher and the partisan. The latter, he says, will not care for the rights of the argument, but only how best to impress his own convictions on the minds of his hearers. Sokrates, on the other hand, both in theory and practice, cared for the rights of the argument to an extent that no controversialist has surpassed. If his dialectic terminated in a cul de sac whence was no egress nor regress, it was to be regarded as the chosen conclusion, the pure self-determination of the reason. If the result were Skeptical, an antinomy of positive and negative, it was because the reason would have it so. If the effects of the argument on the convictions of the hearers were disquieting, so much the better; this was the torpedo-shock by which reason was wont sometimes to startle unthinking men. If the end were absolute disbelief in the conventional dogmas of men, the fault, if fault it were, was the reason's. He himself, as its humble minister and missionary, had nothing to do with it. In the eyes of Sokrates, Reason was an absolute potentate, whose decrees had to be received with submission—a kind of intellectual Moira or Fate, whose determinations could not be questioned, and from whose judgments there lay no appeal. Reason, Dialectic, had convinced Sokrates of his Nescience, and had thereby conferred on it a semi-divine sanction, equivalent to if not originally identical with the declaration of the Delphic oracle.

We are here confronted by another question. If Sokrates's disclaimer of knowledge, and his assertion of Nescience as divine

wisdom, forbade the cherishing of any dogmas or definitive tenets, how far, it may be asked, is this negative position compromised by the profession he makes of exercising his mother's maieutic art? Schwegler and others appear to take the well-known passage in the 'Theaitetos' as indicating a dogmatic tendency. No doubt, if we could believe in the earnestness of Sokrates, and if his claim on the point did not conflict with other professions made with much greater bona fides, it would assume that character. Any one claiming as he did to aid in bringing into the world latent truths, must, prima facie, assume their existence in those on whom his art is exercised. But when, setting aside the terms of the passage which is one of the most grotesquely ironical in the whole of the Platonic Dialogues, we examine the manner in which he discharged intellectually his mother's craft, we find strong reason to doubt his sincerity. He himself claimed the fullest right to determine whether the offspring he thus ushered into existence was worth preserving or not, and it is not too much to say that he exercises this right in a manner that, if transferred to ordinary obstetrics, would go far to depopulate the world. He approaches the individual in labour with a distinct prepossession that the issue is really worthless, that the looked-for truths are either spurious or valueless, and prove not the pregnancy but the vacuity of those who vent them. The destructive results of his actual obstetrics we have already contemplated in the 'Dialogues of Search,' and these are indeed the only kind compatible with his general standpoint. It would be a question worth asking of those who think that Sokrates was really serious in his profession of intellectual midwifery, what positive final truths he himself admits having thus elicited; in other words, what are the well-formed and healthy offspring whose birth he really helped to accomplish. The only object Sokrates, in consistency with his own principles, could have had in his exercise of the maieutic art was to prove that his own barrenness-for which he humorously pleads the general childlessness of midwives-was a mental condition largely shared by others who thought themselves gravid with truth and wisdom. And what he would fain accomplish was to force the persons operated onas Charmides, Lysis, and Euthyphro--to perceive their real condition, to create a feeling of intellectual shortcoming, and so to impel them to fuller and well-founded knowledge. What the philosophical obstetrician really delivered them of, and what I maintain was the only offspring for which he looked, was the false conviction of their own wisdom. He would naturally represent this deliverance, as he did his own feeling of ignorance, as the most

important of positive truths. Besides, the argument that Sokrates expected to find in others the wisdom he was unconscious of possessing, completely stultifies his supposed relation to the Delphic oracle. For if the oracle proclaimed that it was his consciousness of his own ignorance that made him the wisest of men, he could not expect to find truth in those who were ex hypothesi not only not conscious of their ignorance, but who imagined themselves to possess distinct verities, and thought they only needed obstetric assistance to divulge them. Were then, I would ask, those on whom Sokrates exercised his art wiser than the Delphic oracle, and was the wisdom which consisted in imagined knowledge superior to that based upon conscious ignorance? To maintain such a position would be to oppose the central truths of the life and doctrine of Sokrates.

Speculatively, then, and theoretically, Sokrates was a Freethinker and Skeptic. He permitted no barrier to his intellectual exercitations; he recognised no mental compulsion forbidding or limiting the scope of his freest researches, except the self-imposed laws of Dialectic itself. Nor could he discern in the condition of the universe any distinct impediment or authoritative prohibition of human inquiry; on the contrary, the reason of the wise man he regarded as the only conceivable method of ascertaining truth. His mental liberty, therefore—both subjectively and objectively— was as complete as even a free-thinker like himself could desire.

But there is another aspect of Sokrates' many-sided character we have not yet touched upon : I mean what relates to his practice. A philosopher and thinker cannot, however much he might desire it, limit all his faculties to thought; he must needs be to some extent a doer. The exigencies of natural laws, of social relations in their simplest form, entail some amount of practical activity. Sokrates was convinced that he knew nothing, was certain that he did not share the assumed knowledge of his fellow-citizens. Still, imperious necessity commanded him to regulate his life and action in some form or manner. This might seem to him incongruous, but it was none the less compulsory. Sokrates in this shared the fate of all thinkers whose intellectual tendencies are most widely removed from the beaten paths of ordinary speculation and action. The idealist, e.g. who is most averse to matter and material existence, is still obliged to take it sometimes into account. The Skeptic, again, whose nescience is most pronounced and complete,

It should be noted that Sokrates disclaims the knowledge of Dialectic, i.e. the formal science professed by the Sophists, and professes to be guided only by the instincts and methods of common-sense. Comp. on this point the Euthydemos and Ion.