SOURCE: "The Ethics of Socrates," in The Philosophical Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 200, March, 1925, pp. 117-43.

[After reviewing the arguments for and against Xenophon and Plato as accurate sources of Socratic philosophy, Rogers argues that Plato provides sufficient evidence that Socrates's teaching focused on the proposition that "virtue is knowledge." Rogers then examines the meaning and significance of this statement.]

The beginnings of ethics as a branch of human science it has been customary to trace to Socrates; and while any point of departure is bound to be arbitrary to some extent, since written history does not record a time when men showed no tendency whatever to reflect on the problems of conduct, there are good reasons for the usual procedure. It is true, at least, that it was Socrates who inspired the first efforts to think systematically about the moral life in a form that had historical continuity and a pervading influence upon all subsequent speculation.

Unfortunately, however, when we come to settle accounts with the available evidence, the features of the historical Socrates and the character of the services which he performed to ethical thought are left exceedingly uncertain and obscure. There is an abundance of testimony such as it is; only the testimony does not hang together. Our two main authorities are Xenophon and Plato; and a colorless description may indeed be framed on which the two agree. It is safe to take for granted that Socrates was a man who exerted a large influence upon the life of his day through notable personal qualities; that he was conspicuously self-controlled and temperate in character, and fearless in his speech and conduct; that he devoted himself not to politics but to private conversation and debate, in which he showed a keen and powerful mind, and a moral insight, that attracted the younger men in particular; and that it was problems of conduct that interested him rather than the scientific speculations that hitherto had chiefly engaged Greek thinkers. But when any attempt is made to clothe with flesh and blood these very general and abstract statements, it becomes at once apparent that, as concrete personalities, the Socrates of Plato and the Socrates of Xenophon are very far apart. Most readers have, or think they have, a clear and fairly consistent picture of the man. But the picture comes from Plato, whose gifts as an artist have fixed what probably will always be in the popular mind the Socratic type; and if Plato has created what to any appreciable extent is a fancy portrait, a question at once arises about our right to accept any features of this portrait in particular. Accordingly it becomes quite necessary to start with an attempt to evaluate the main sources from which our knowledge of Socrates is derived.

No one would be inclined to dispute that, of the two, Plato is the more capable witness if only we can rely upon his good faith. He was better acquainted with Socrates personally and with Socrates' most intimate friends; and he was far and away the more competent philosophical mind. Nevertheless it has been Xenophon's testimony that the majority of modern scholars have preferred. Few of them, indeed, have been thoroughgoing in this preference; they have borrowed traits from Plato whenever it has suited their convenience, without any too great a regard for consistency at times. But so far at any rate as Socrates' peculiar contribution to ethics is concerned—if in this form it can still be called a contribution—Xenophon rather than Plato has been taken as the more reliable witness.

The reason for this preference in general—apart from a belief that it is borne out by the very scanty evidence that Aristotle supplies—is the fact that Plato is felt to be quite capable of creating the character of Socrates out of whole cloth; and, if we do thus take the Platonic Socrates as a figure so highly idealized as to become to all intents and purposes a character of fiction, the discrepancies will of course have found a solution. It is the easier to suppose this in that everybody admits that Plato's dialogues cannot by any chance be regarded as literal reports, but are, to some extent at least, artistic constructions; and in the later dialogues, at any rate, he unquestionably does attribute things to Socrates that go beyond all historical probability. And along with this goes the less legitimate reason that critics have plainly often been overimpressed by the matter-of-factness of Xenophon's account, and have assumed too readily that, as between commonplaceness and artistic distinction, the former is more likely to be closer to the facts.

There seems, however, no apparent reason why a spirit of caution should be abandoned when we pass from Plato to Xenophon. To begin with, if Plato is an artist, Xenophon is confessedly an apologist. It is not historical truth at which he is aiming first of all. He is an advocate, concerned to clear the name of Socrates of the charge of being an irreligious and immoral influence in the state; and, with a pious purpose such as this, a writer not only is not bound to be overscrupulous about strict accuracy, but is really under obligations to tidy up his material somewhat. And, as a matter of fact, it is difficult to see how one is to escape the conclusion that Xenophon, no more than Plato, can be trusted for bringing us into contact with the actual words that Socrates uttered. That he had reminiscences to draw upon is probable. But that he should have been able to report with anything like literalness the many long speeches which he retails is in the nature of things altogether unlikely, especially when we remember that it was a recognized convention for historical writers to put speeches into the mouths of their characters.

It is worth noting that there are two distinct methods which Xenophon adopts. On the one hand, there are brief sayings of Socrates, brief historical anecdotes, and brief statements by Xenophon himself that Socrates held such and such views. Here there is on the whole no sufficient ground for denying that Xenophon often had, or supposed he had, something like distinct recollections to go upon, especially since some of these more casual utterances have a pith and pungency that seem to bring us into contact with a real personage.

But, along with these, there are also numerous more elaborate conversations which every reasonable consideration goes to show were framed by Xenophon himself to illustrate or enforce the conception of Socrates and his teaching which he believed himself justified in holding. Not only are these conversations too long and detailed to be vouched for by memory, but they are almost invariably lacking in intellectual distinction; the reasoning is confused and sometimes puerile, and the conclusions for the most part painfully commonplace. It is possible in some cases that the conversation is based on fact. It may very well, for example, have been within Xenophon's knowledge that Socrates had composed a quarrel between two brothers; and a few anecdotes, like that of his advice to Aristarchus, have a rather convincing ring. But that the actual words attributed to him are anywhere more than a natural attempt to dramatize the incident is inherently unlikely. And in other cases this embroidering and dramatizing of the somewhat meagre details of Xenophon's knowledge probably extends to the entire conversation; indeed, Xenophon at times almost says as much when he passes from brief and summary statements to inferences from these, or to an attempt at their concrete illustration.¹ That the name of Euthydemus, in particular, represents a literary device rather than a source of genuine reminiscences, seems almost certain. This is plainly evident in the chapter where Socrates, in a most un-Socratic way, defines for his benefit a number of ethical terms;² and the manner in which the conversations with him—the longest one taking place with no witnesses present—form a crude sort of plot, wherein the young man's aloofness and self-conceit is converted into a spirit of humble discipleship suited to the further reception of Socratic teachings, is much more suggestive of fiction than of fact.

While it is not necessary to suppose, then, that Xenophon's account of Socrates is intentionally misleading, or that he has no first-hand knowledge on which to base his apologia, the habit of quoting uncritically as evidence any statement that he happens to ascribe to Socrates is a most unfortunate one; and we cannot safely use him as a standard by which to condemn Plato whenever Plato's testimony disagrees. On the whole, the a priori probability lies on the other side; the testimony of a close and competent disciple has naturally the right of way. Even the appeal to Plato's artistic interest really points in this direction rather than the other. The more we grant that Plato was artist enough to have created, had he chosen, a new and fictitious character under the historic name of Socrates, the less reason there is for thinking he would actually have done this; from a true artist in Plato's day it is a much more realistic treatment that we should naturally have looked for, and not one that has transformed its original almost beyond recognition. And, in this connection, there is another curious fact that deserves attention. There is in existence a third and independent portrait of Socrates in his earlier days—that drawn by Aristophanes in the Clouds. This third portrait, while it has significant points of contact with that of Plato, is totally irreconcilable with the Socrates of Xenophon. And if, accordingly, we insist on taking the latter as a standard, we must suppose that Aristophanes also, wishing to present a notable Athenian character on the stage, first altered the character so completely that little but the name was left to identify it to his audience. That two such consummate artists as Aristophanes and Plato should both have adopted so unusual a method in dealing with the same contemporary, is to strain the probabilities too far.

In turning now to a closer consideration of the facts at our disposal, we are fortunately in a position to be reasonably confident of a starting point. There is a consensus of evidence that Socrates' teaching centered about the fundamental proposition that virtue is knowledge, along with the related claim that the virtues are all in essence one, and that no man does wrong voluntarily, but only through ignorance. Just what interpretation these general statements are to bear, however, is another and more difficult matter. And any interpretation must be an arbitrary one until some background is provided in the shape of an estimate of Socrates' intellectual characteristics and interests.

There are certain features in the intellectual portrait of Socrates which, as a matter of fact, nearly everyone accepts as historical; though it is seldom clearly recognized how almost exclusively it is to Plato, rather than to Xenophon, that the picture is due. On the very lowest terms, this Platonic Socrates stands out as a man in whom, against a background of strong moral convictions, there plays a quick, ironical, penetrating, sceptical intellect, always on the alert for absurdities and ready to track them down wherever they may lead; and a man who, moreover, directs this same irony against himself as well, and, far from professing to be a source of wisdom, neglects no opportunity of insisting that he knows nothing whatever except his own lack of knowledge, and that his office is simply that of midwife in assisting at the birth of thoughts in other men.

If we take seriously the outstanding features here—and they appear not only in the discussions in which Socrates is depicted as engaging, but, what is more important, in the outright statements where there is most reason to suppose that Plato intends, if anywhere, to tell the truth—we are led to certain conclusions which are not always kept sufficiently in mind. In this light Socrates reveals himself not as first of all an ethical theorist aiming at a scientific definition of the moral concepts, but as a reformer of a peculiar sort. We are overlooking the essential point in Plato, if we fail to keep well in the foreground the explicit assertion that, following the incident of the oracle at Delphi, Socrates conceived of his life as devoted to a special task in the service of the God and of the state. This service was, to awaken the citizens of Athens to the need of a real examination of the ends and ideals they supposed themselves to be accepting, by convincing them that they were by no means the wise and superior persons they were accustomed to assume, and by securing thus a sound starting point for the growth of true wisdom. This particular moral purpose Socrates declares solemnly before his judges is the key for understanding his life.

There is perhaps no better way of conveying the point here than by an expressive modern phrase. Socrates was the first great expert in 'debunking.³ It was the absurdity of human pretensions that chiefly caught his eye in every class of society about him—statesman, artist, artisan—and he made it his lifework to puncture these pretensions, and force men to the uncongenial task of an honest self-analysis. It is to this that Plato makes Socrates himself ascribe the hostility that issued in his condemnation—a statement which, following the decision of the judges, can hardly be suspected of any levity or tendency to quibbling such as might perhaps be thought discoverable in the earlier part of his defence. It is no doubt true that more than personal pique lay back of the action of the judges—in particular, the feeling that Socrates was somehow really dangerous to the Athenian democracy. But there is no real contradiction here. One has only to look about him to realize that to turn the sceptical intelligence upon the solid conventional reputations and estimates of worth that impress the average man, and to encourage any tendency to think freely and for oneself, is to lay the ground for just the charges that assailed Socrates; one is an enemy of sound morality and of the Constitution, a danger to the immaturity of youth, and doubtless an atheist at heart. This spirit of ridicule directed toward pretences and unrealities represents a familiar human type; Socrates differs from the ordinary satirist only in having a more intense personal background of moral conviction. In attacking human futilities, it was not their intellectual absurdity alone that influenced him, but their inadequacy to his own strong sense of values; he was not only a satirist, that is, but a reformer. But he was a reformer, once more, who had no panacea of his own to exploit except the panacea of clear thinking; Socrates' professions of ignorance are an essential part of the picture, and such professions continue to the very end of his life.

It will not be disputed that what has just been pointed to enters into the account that Plato gives of Socrates; and so far it hangs together. Before trying to add to it, however, it will be desirable to turn back briefly to Xenophon. And if we were not in a position to bring this view of Socrates with us to Xenophon's pages, it is quite clear we never should have supposed ourselves to find it there. Xenophon's Socrates is a man with much moral earnestness, indeed; but he has an almost stodgy mind, for the most part without salt or humor. The tone of ironic self-depreciation is conspicuous by its absence. Verbally, it is true, Xenophon admits that Socrates did not set up as a teacher of virtue directly; but in point of fact he appears continually as a preacher and exhorter, who sermonizes even in his attempts at dialectic. Worst of all, he is a good deal of a prig, and his whole life is represented as an earnest attempt to transfer to his associates the seeds of moral excellence of which he is conscious in himself. The difference in the two accounts is shown instructively in the two versions of the famous reply of the oracle. In Plato the reply to Chzrophon's question calls Socrates the wisest of men; and the narrative goes on to tell of Socrates' modest perplexity over this, and of how finally he found a clue to the God's meaning by deciding that it was only in the consciousness of his own ignorance that he excelled other men. But in Xenophon's obviously secondary account, Socrates is made preeminent in righteousness as well as in wisdom—probably Xenophon argues that this follows if knowledge and virtue are the same—and Socrates accepts the answer placidly as his due, and uses it to confound his judges. As a matter of fact, the Socratic ignorance has no place in Xenophon. There is extremely scant evidence of the sceptical caution which according to Plato characterized his intellect; Socrates has perfectly definite ideas about virtue and the good, ideas that in the main coincide with traditional morality and popular opinion. So, while Xenophon seems to be aware of the real nature of the Socratic method as it appears in Plato, he himself follows it only at a remote distance. The conversations are for the most part only in appearance heuristic. Socrates' intentions are obtrusively didactic; he starts with ready-made results in his mind to which he is all the time obviously leading up; it is only formally that his hearers do any thinking of their own, since thought is not necessary to answer 'yes' or 'no' to leading questions; and, in general, the show of logical rigor fails entirely to cover the poverty of thought.

It is difficult to see, then, up to this point, the slightest reason for preferring Xenophon to Plato, while at least one good reason exists for the opposite conclusion. Apart from the superior impression of reality which Plato's picture makes, it is necessary to account for the historical fact of the powerful influence which Socrates exerted over the young men of Athens, an influence continuing throughout a long lifetime, and affecting men of such very different types as Plato, Aristippus, Alcibiades, Euclid, Antisthenes. This influence is a mystery on the supposition that Socrates was the sort of person that Xenophon describes. And such a conclusion becomes still more insistent when consideration is given to a further aspect in which the two portraits differ.

A brief characterization of Socrates' temperament as Xenophon conceives of him, is attained with a fair degree of adequacy by classifying him as an empiricist in method, a utilitarian in theory, and, in general, a devotee of what is ordinarily called common sense. And it is perfectly true that there are elements not obviously inconsistent with this that find a place also in the dialogues of Plato. But especially in a group of dialogues from which comes a peculiarly vivid impression of Socrates as a human being—the Meno, the Phcedrus, the Phcedo, the Symposium—the distinctive feature of his natural temperament appears in an entirely different light. He reveals, in other words, the essential temper of the mystic. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the measure in which this mystical note dominates the picture which such dialogues present. It is not as a plodding empiricist, collecting instances and drawing inductive definitions, that Socrates here is shown to us, but as a passionate enthusiast for an ideal goodness and righteousness and beauty as they exist unchanging in a changeless world. Of such eternal verties this actual world contains only faint and imperfect copies; our knowledge of them comes, accordingly, not from sense particulars, which only help suggest them, but from a vision of the realities themselves which we have had in a former and better existence unincumbered by the body. To reattain this vision is the end of all philosophy; for philosophy is the one method of satisfying fully that love for the beautiful and the good which is the central fact of human nature, and the guiding motive of all genuine wisdom and attainment. And it is only the mystic who is the true philosopher.⁴ Are we to regard this as simply a literary expression of a phase of Plato's own earlier development, or is it to be taken as a true portrait?

It is worth while to return here for a moment to the question of inherent probability. It does not seem likely that most of those who take the traditional view have ever stopped to realize clearly what they are attributing to Plato. If anything is certain, it is that Plato genuinely revered his master, and believed himself to have received from him the impetus to the philosophic life. But is it credible that a disciple should have chosen to present to the world a figure purporting to be that of Socrates, when he himself knew, and his readers knew, that this was very largely a mask covering his own features? It is understandable that he might have attributed opinions to Socrates that went somewhat beyond his actual teachings, within certain limits presently to be noted; and as a matter of fact he did do this pretty clearly. But that he should have made these quite inconsistent with what he was aware that Socrates had really taught, and should even have chosen the sacred moments that preceded his master's martyrdom for exploiting his own contrary views, is very difficult to believe; and especially so when we note again the fact that it involves altering, not Socrates' theoretical opinions merely, but his whole concrete character as well. Surely this is the only instance on record where a pupil has conceived that he is doing honor to a beloved teacher by deliberately representing him to the world as almost the opposite sort of man from what he really was. If Socrates was not a mystic, this is just what Plato has done; and if he was a mystic, it becomes totally impossible to accept Xenophon's portrait. On the other hand, there is no great trouble in accounting for the absence of this trait in Xenophon, since Xenophon is the sort of man who could not possibly have understood the mystic temperament.

And to this may be added once more the point already noticed—that the procedure attributed to Plato is bad art as well. In the Symposium, for example, there is a remarkable portrait of the man Socrates, with his unique mixture of homely realism and of mystical enthusiasm; and the Symposium is commonly regarded as ranking among the very best of Plato's dialogues as a work of art. Now no one has ever suggested that the other characters of the dialogue are not intended to hit off their prototypes; but on the traditional view we are forced to believe that in the midst of his artistic realism, Plato intentionally introduces a discordant note by making his central figure talk in a way entirely out of character. His artistic conscience must have forbidden this had there been no other reason against it.

And there are a number of more or less well established facts that corroborate this reasoning. To begin with, the unquestioned fact of Socrates' historical influence, which Xenophon fails wholly to explain, is no longer a mystery, even apart from any further and more strictly philosophical traits that may be added to the picture. The multiform nature of this influence points unmistakably to a unique personality, with something more to recommend it to the most brilliant representatives of one of the most brilliant of historic epochs than an impressive moral character, and a stout defence of customary morality against his fellow empiricists the Sophists. It is adequately accounted for by that rare combination, which Plato shows us, of logical acuteness and a detached intellect with a wide human interest and sympathy, of an effortless superiority to all the sensual passions with a freedom from ascetic harshness or moral snobbery, and, in particular, of a clear-eyed and ironic appraisal of human life and human nature, and a chronic incapacity for its common idealistic glorification,⁵ with an unclouded conviction of the reality of those standards of which actual life falls so far short, and a mystical enthusiasm for their eternal beauty and perfection.

And the point of this is particularly apparent in the case of Plato himself. Between the empiricist and utilitarian, and the rationalist and idealist, there has always been a spiritual incompatibility which nothing seems to bridge. And accordingly we should have to explain the curious fact that the influence of one of the first of the empiricists shows itself, not among the empiricists themselves, but in connection with a man of an entirely different intellectual temperament, who is constantly showing his dislike and contempt for doctrines with which the teacher he continues to reverence is supposed to have been identified.

And there is other and more detailed evidence to aid in judging the probabilities here. We know that Plato was an artist fully capable of entering into very diverse types of mind, among them the mystical type. But we also know pretty clearly the sort of mind that Plato himself possessed, since we have a large group of later dialogues in which artistic creation has given place to a primary interest in philosophic speculation. And the more these dialogues are examined, the more evident it is that Plato was himself not in any proper sense a mystic, but a rationalist of a somewhat pronounced type. Of course it is possible to suppose that, when he passes from the Symposium and the Phcedo to his later writings, he is holding his deeper beliefs in abeyance; or that mysticism represents an earlier phase which later he outgrew. But either supposition will present serious difficulties to one who has followed in any detail the workings of Plato's mind in the dialogues that are most unquestionably self-revealing, as well as in the evidence supplied by the reports of his disciple Aristotle, and by the history of the early Academy. It is far easier to believe that in the earlier portrait of Socrates Plato is really doing what he pretends to be doing—depicting a mind which in essential ways is temperamentally different from what we know to have been his own.

Of Socrates, on the contrary, we have strong reason to accept as true the attribution of a natural leaning toward mysticism. His trances, the divine voice in which he placed implicit reliance, and to which no purely matter-of-fact explanation does anything like justice, his pious regard for the revelation of the God in dreams and oracles, all point to a temperament far removed from that of his eminent disciple. So too the interest he is represented as taking in the not altogether reputable Orphic mysteries, goes a good deal more naturally with Socrates' character than it does with that of the more fastidious and aristocratic Plato, who indeed elsewhere expresses an opinion of them by no means flattering. And also we have independent testimony here that is conclusive; for some of Aristophanes' best jokes would have been absolutely without point if Socrates' connection with the mysteries had not been notorious in Athens.

But before considering the bearing which this will have on the interpretation of Socrates' ethical teaching, it will first be necessary to turn to another matter of fundamental importance. For we are now in a position to say something about the much disputed question of the relation of Socrates to the 'theory of Ideas.' In attributing to him the mystical vision of an absolute beauty and goodness, we are already in contact with the essence of the Ideal theory as it appears in the earlier dialogues. There is very slight plausibility to the older view that a belief in Ideas originated in the first instance in a process of objectifying what started out as mere conceptual definitions. It is only by a misconception, to begin with, that Socrates' 'method' can be said to be inductive in the modern sense; and there is a shorter and much more direct way in which a belief in Ideas can be accounted for. In the presence of any universally valid truth or notion in which it has a tendency to believe, especially if this possesses an emotional appeal as well, realism is the normal and indeed almost the necessary attitude of the human mind. Accordingly Plato always assumes quite as a matter of course that every man of real intelligence must needs recognize that equality and beauty and justice are objective realities, infinitely more real indeed than the fleeting particulars in which they find expression. Nothing, so Simmias is made to say, is more certain than that the beautiful and the good have a most real existence. The theory that the 'form' is simply a formula created by the human mind, Plato barely mentions, only to dismiss it casually with an argument in which the self-evidence of the contrary view reappears as a basic assumption.

There are two cases in particular where this assumption is especially easy and natural. These are the concepts of mathematics on the one hand, and of ethics on the other; and it is just here that the earlier emphasis of the Ideal theory is placed. Even the thoroughgoing empiricist finds it difficult to convince himself that the truths of arithmetic and geometry are nothing more than subjective points of view; and the testimony of Aristophanes as well as of Plato goes to show that sometime in his career Socrates had been influenced by the number philosophy of the Pythagoreans. And in the field of ethics, in particular, the reasons for the ordinary man are even more compelling. No one with intense moral convictions can without a wrenching of his natural bias look upon moral concepts in any other than a realistic and objective way. Justice stands naturally to him not as a generalized notion merely, gathered from acts of a particular empirical sort; it is an eternal and absolute value, which is only partially exhausted in the multitude of actual deeds of justice with which experience is familiar, and which is adequately realized not even in the most perfect of them. And therewith the search for a true definition comes almost inevitably to be, to the realistic mind, the search for a perfect justice suggested in particular just acts but not contained in them; and it is thence only a step to the speculative conclusion that pure justice has some sort of absolute existence—or our ethical values are jeopardized—in a world that cannot be identified with the shifting world of everyday experience.

It may reasonably be assumed, then, that the starting point of what issued in the historic theory of Ideas is to be looked for, not in any process of promoting human concepts or definitions to a higher realm—concepts as such carry no emotional appeal to explain the Socratic fervor—but in an immediate feeling for the significance and objective validity of norms or standards; on the one hand the intellectual standards that govern rigorous and scientific thinking, and on the other standards of objective value. On the former alternative it would be hard to understand, for example, why Plato makes the youthful Socrates express hesitation about admitting the reality of such Ideas as that of man, though he is perfectly assured of the reality of goodness; for as a concept nothing could be more typical than man. But the attitude attributed to Socrates is easy to explain if one has started with the universality of value standards, and then finds himself logically driven to raise a question about the status of other universals as well. In this way we understand, too, how the ideal realm comes to be characterized almost indiscriminately as one of truth, of goodness, and of beauty. Intellectual and moral values, the two main sides of Socrates' interest, it is nearly always impossible for the real enthusiast to disentangle; while both alike, just because they are values, have to contemplation a further emotional significance which translates them into beauty.

But now there is one further question that needs an answer before we are at liberty to turn to the actual form of Socrates' ethical teaching. Even supposing Socrates to have been a mystic, and to have felt toward moral values in a way that theory might easily translate into a belief in the existence of ideal Forms, how are we to tell where Socrates leaves off and Plato begins, in view of the undoubted fact that there are some things at any rate in the dialogues that cannot easily be regarded as historical? It may be that this is an insurmountable difficulty, and that the dividing line is one which it is impossible to point out. Nevertheless there are certain principles here that possess some plausibility, and that seem to render possible a measure of assurance.

The first of these helps at least to set a lower limit. The argument that Plato is not likely to have lent himself to an essential misrepresentation of his predecessor in view of his own personal relations to him cannot, as has been said, mean that he has been anything like a literal historian of Socrates' views. He may have, and undoubtedly he has, put words in Socrates' mouth which Socrates could not have uttered. But the argument, if valid at all, carries one definite implication. If Plato is restrained by any sense of historical reality, then while it is conceivable that he might hold himself justified at times in attributing what actually were his own thoughts to Socrates, this would only be under certain conditions—in case, that is, he believed that they were immediately implied in things that Socrates really did teach. The line would be no hard and fast one. But nevertheless it would exist; and as the theoretical deductions got farther and farther from their starting point we should expect to find, as we do find, a growing hesitation in making Socrates explicitly responsible for them, until at last Socrates ceases to be the mouthpiece of the Platonic speculations, and is replaced by the hazy figure of Parmenides or an Athenian Stranger.

It follows, then, that while we can be tolerably assured that Socrates really held that mystical belief in an absolute good which in logical language readily translates itself into a realism of universals, we ought perhaps to hesitate a little before concluding that of necessity such an inference was actually drawn by him. There is no inherent improbability that it was so drawn. But also by itself the supposition is quite possible that Plato was the first to call attention to it; for there would be no impiety, and no failure in artistic truth, if he were merely uncovering assumptions he saw to be implicit in his master's teaching. Which alternative is to be preferred depends upon the presence or absence of further evidence.

In considering this evidence, we may revert first to a point which has been already mentioned, and which suggests a second and more positive principle. In a mere series of expanding logical deductions there is no compelling reason for stopping at one point rather than another. But a characteristic personality or temperamental point of view supplies a more promising standard. It is conceivable, perhaps, that Plato's was so complex a character as to combine both the mystic and the scientific rationalist, in different contemporaneous compartments or as different phases of development.

But it is at least equally reasonable to work on the hypothesis that he is portraying in Socrates a personality more or less different from his own. And in that case, since the maturer Plato at any rate is pretty well known to us, it is not hopeless to expect that, by using the two concrete types as a touchstone, we may be in a position to reach conclusions about certain matters of detail, provided any difference of doctrine is to be detected in the dialogues at all comparable to these differences of character. And as a matter of fact such a difference can be readily pointed out.

It has not always been sufficiently emphasized that the doctrine of Ideas assumes two fairly distinct and characteristic forms. In what roughly may be classed as the earlier and less metaphysical of two main groups of Plato's dialogues—and not including the Republic—the attitude adopted toward the Forms is primarily an ethical one; and, furthermore, it represents an interest in terms not of speculative ethics, but of ethics as a discipline or way of life. Here, as has appeared already, Socrates is shown as one whose final quest is that mystical vision of the absolute truth which is also absolute goodness and absolute beauty. For this attitude the notion of holiness is inextricably intermingled with that of contemplative blessedness. Holiness is for the sake of that immortality which mortal nature craves,⁶ which gets partial expression in the desire for fame or children,⁷ but which is only fully realized as all the trivialities of this earthly life are cast aside, and the soul comes into the presence of what is really and eternally true. Philosophy is the preparation for this perfect vision. Through it the soul undergoes a process of purgation from sensual delights which estrange it from the Good. But complete attainment can only come when death has released it wholly from the body, and it has come pure and blameless to the heavenly regions after a life of devotion to the disinterested search for truth.

Unless it is assumed, then, that almost any combination of temperaments is possible in a man of genius, we are in possession of a standard, any large deviation from which will require explanation. Now the fact is that, beginning with the Republic in particular, we do find subtle but important changes in the intellectual portrait of Socrates. On the surface there is still very much in common; but underneath there has been a significant shift of emphasis.

The underlying character of this change may be expressed by saying that the goal of philosophy has ceased to be mystic vision, and has become instead rational understanding. Since the two may so readily be expressed in the same verbal terms, it is easy to overlook the difference; but the difference is real nevertheless. A comparison of the metaphor of the winged horses with the famous analogy of the Cave will help to bring out the divergence. In the earlier presentations, it is almost without exception the ethical interest that is uppermost in Plato's description of the soul and its relation to the body. It is the sensual, not the sensible, that clogs the soul and drags it downward; the life of sense cuts us off from the vision of the Good because our passions and pleasures engross the attention, and turn it away from eternal objects to the trivialities of this passing world. But from the Republic onward the emphasis has passed from ethics to metaphysics. The great problem now becomes how knowledge of these eternal verities is possible. And the source of our human imperfection changes accordingly from pleasure, to sense perception, and the metaphysically unreal character of perceptual objects.

The more it is examined, the more far-reaching will the influence of this shifting of interest from ethics to epistemology appear to be. The life of intellect ceases to be a mystical purification for another and higher world, and scientific knowledge becomes an end in itself. A more or less systematic realm of Ideas, in which logical and mathematical concepts grow increasingly prominent, displaces those simple ideas of goodness and beauty whose very lack of sharp definition has helped to suggest the supreme values of existence; reason turns aside from the goal of contemplative blessedness and becomes the professional thinker's instrument for resolving logical contradictions; and the purgation of the mysteries is rationalized into the removing of man's ignorance, or education.⁸ A striking illustration of this change is furnished by a feature common to the two pictures—the exaltation of the philosophic life. In the earlier Socrates, this means a life freed from the fetters of the body, and attainable even here and now in the occasional moments of mystical experience, though only completely attainable in another form of existence when the body has been left behind. But in its later expressions the idea of the philosophic life assumes a quite different form; as it appeals to Plato himself, it is the life of pure scientific activity, released from the obligation to return to the Cave and take one's part in the work of the state.⁹ But a life apart from the body is altogether different from a life apart from the world of politics and business; and it is impossible to think of Socrates the talker, with his divine mission to stir the sluggish minds of his fellow citizens, and his reluctance to get away from the busy life of men even for a country walk, as setting his heart upon the quiet and remoteness of the scholar's life.

And there are various other things that bear this out. For Plato the Ideas, since they stand for scientific and dialectic truth, naturally will be open only to the elect few; the rest of the world can never be expected to believe in anything absolute.¹⁰ As Socrates views it, on the other hand, the recognition of Ideas is due not to metaphysical competence but to the vision of them in another existence; they may be uncovered by questioning in the most unpromising material; and in general they are the property of human nature rather than of a professional class of philosophers. This exaltation of the philosopher is throughout characteristic of the later treatment. With Socrates it is philosophy alone that counts—the purifying power of the vision of truth—and it is hardly credible that he would not have found in the notion of a professional class of dialectitians, if it had occurred to him, the same source of ironical amusement that he found in the professional scientists and the professional Sophists. It also is worth noticing that the attitude of the earlier Socrates toward nonintellectual processes is more what we should expect from a mystic than Plato's rather harsh and unsympathetic treatment. It is true that Socrates finds the poets, as well as the politicians and the artisans, unable to give a clear account of their meaning; but he does not single them out for condemnation, or adopt that hostility towards the poet's art to which Plato's logic led him in defiance of his instincts. True poetry is God conversing with us,¹¹ and is no more to be deprecated than are the oracles which also come by inspiration rather than by reason, but which on that very account are to be preferred to the human wisdom that has little or no value.¹² Inspiration naturally will play in the mystic's life a rôle that is absent in the rationalist's. And so we find Socrates glorifying a divine madness as the special gift of Heaven and the source of the chiefest blessings among men;¹³ while in his own conduct dreams and divination have an importance which they obviously never had for Plato.

We are not without fairly strong reasons for supposing, then, that Plato himself supplies a test by which, if we do not attempt to go too much into detail, we may separate the real Socrates and his teachings from the additions which Plato was led to make as his own independent thinking revealed what seemed to him the necessary implications of Socrates' standpoint. Whenever the Socrates of the dialogues is standing for an ethical idealism in terms of the mystical pursuit of those vague but preëminently real values which the terms goodness and beauty suggest, we apparently have no sound reason for refusing to believe that Plato is intending to present to us the actual historical outlines of his master; when, on the other hand, the interest of the dialogues turns to a logical analysis of the way in which the ideal is known, and to the relation between sense perception and the higher truth, the strong probability is that we are listening to Plato rather than to Socrates. And to this the external testimony also points; for Aristotle not only leaves a strong impression that Socrates' intellectual interests stopped with ethics, but he states explicitly that the theory of sensible reality belongs to Plato.

This will not mean that Socrates had no theory at all about the way we know Ideas. As a matter of fact there is weighty evidence that he did hold such a theory.

The doctrine of knowledge as recollection is assigned to Socrates so unequivocally and emphatically by Plato, as one which he was notoriously fond of setting forth, that Plato's veracity would seem almost to be involved. But meanwhile the theory of recollection itself goes to enforce the distinction that has just been drawn. For this is a speculation on an entirely different level from that analysis of knowledge as scientific method in which the real Plato is interested; and indeed it drops out of sight as soon as this interest appears.¹⁴ It is a mystical solution, based upon the Pythagorean notion of transmigration rather than on logical analysis; it still remains subsidiary, therefore, to the ethical significance which this doctrine has for Socrates; and sensible reality enters into the situation not as a problem to be solved, but simply as it performs the positive service of suggesting to our minds the ideal pattern which has lapsed from memory.

If we are justified, then, in adopting the conclusions just set forth, we are now ready to return to the main problem, and ask what light these throw, if any, upon the doctrine that virtue is knowledge, together with its various corollaries.

There is one simple meaning attaching to the claim that virtue is knowledge, which is relatively beyond dispute. Not only in Xenophon, but in Plato as well, Socrates is frequently made to argue that only intelligence insures true happiness, that the things men call good are in reality only good when in possession of the wise man rather than the fool, that the unexamined life which takes the ends of conduct for granted without understanding them is hardly worth the living¹⁵; and such proofs that virtue and happiness are impossible without knowledge are then not infrequently converted directly into the proposition that they are knowledge. That Socrates argued thus we have no reason to doubt; and if we stop here, therefore, we should have to say that his epoch-making doctrine consisted of nothing more than a set of rather obvious practical considerations plus a logical fallacy. The best we could do would be to credit to Socrates the general insistence that problems of conduct be examined in the light of reason; though as he was certainly not the first to realize this, it does not permit us to rank his originality very high.

But it is impossible to do justice to Socrates' influence without recognizing that two distinct strains run through his utterances, whose combination constitutes indeed his uniqueness as a teacher. As Alcibiades tells us in the Symposium, on the surface his words were apt to seem matter-of-fact and homely, even ridiculously so; it is only as one penetrates beneath that there flashes out, for one who has the eyes to see, a soul-stirring beauty which calls forth a response from all that is most divine in his hearers. It follows that we are not on safe ground if we take the easiest and most commonplace interpretation as most adequate to Socrates' full meaning. And even apart from the fact that the shrewd and homely traits of common sense in Socrates' nature may lead us to overlook the other and more distinctive side, it is clear from Plato, who certainly is the more adequate reporter here, that allowance has always to be made for the requirements of Socrates' method of interrogation. For, if it is the essence of this method to adopt as its starting point some proposition on which his interlocutor is prepared to agree, then in proportion to the interest he takes in showing up human ignorance will be the likelihood that the assumptions on which the discussion rests fall short of Socrates' own beliefs.

And there is to be found in Plato himself another interpretation of the Socratic dictum. In the Phacdo, in particular, virtue is made definitely to stand for something higher than civic or moral excellence with its background of utilitarian caution.¹⁶ It is not prudence or practical intelligence, but passion and insight—that vision of eternal goodness which constitutes the highest goal of human nature. Now such a clue will render the doctrine that virtue is knowledge not only more significant, but more intelligible as well. If goodness is not utility, but an absolute and emotion-stirring value, it is possible to see how without a logical fallacy knowledge should come to be regarded, not as a means to happiness or virtue, but as virtue itself. The essence of virtue is the response of human nature to the best and highest; it is the insight which is at once knowledge and emotional love.

And this explains the related doctrine that evil is always due to ignorance in a way much more convincing than does the utilitarian consideration—though this too was doubtless used by Socrates in arguing with the worldling—that no one will voluntarily do that which is to his own ultimate hurt. If the knowledge of the Good is to be identified with the mystic fervor of insight, it is easy to see how, for Socrates, it would appear incredible that conduct should not follow inevitably from the perception of that which stirs our immediate love and reverence; if virtuous conduct does not follow, it must be because this vision of the real beauty of righteousness is lacking. It explains, again, why the virtues are not many but one. The moral life is not made up of separate compartments, but is a unity of insight; and from such a vision of things as they truly are all the virtues alike will flow. And it supplies, finally, a clue to Socrates' interminable discussions about the teachability of virtue. If virtue is knowledge, it must in some sense be capable of being taught; but where are we to look to find its teachers? Plainly they do not exist; and yet since virtue itself undoubtedly exists, they ought to be discoverable if virtue is only brought about by teaching. And so long as we mean by teaching what the Sophists meant—professional instruction—Socrates indicates no way out of the dilemma.

But for himself the difficulty is not really there; if the true teacher is he who arouses the dormant insight which the mind already possesses—if to be taught, that is, is the same thing as to remember¹⁷—we can understand how virtue can still be knowledge, even though it cannot be produced by the imparting of information or by exhortation. It can be elicited, if not strictly taught; and it is Socrates' whole mission to elicit it.

And this leads to one further point that at first might seem to raise a difficulty. Socrates' chief merit has often been taken to be that he was the originator of a new scientific method in the field of ethics—the method of logical definition; and he is conceived as having spent his life in an endeavor to define the virtues and the nature of the good. And it is true that Aristotle, and even Plato at times, both tend to convey such an impression. But their own technical interest in scientific methodology is sufficient to account for this without its being necessary to assume anything more than that they thought themselves to have discovered, in Socrates' way of arguing, something which when made explicit could be utilized by the philosopher.

And, as a matter of fact, the internal evidence for the common view is singularly weak. Concretely, Socrates' dialectic appears as incidental to his professed ethical purpose; it is his divine mission as a gadfly of the state that justifies his interest in it, and not the technical and sophisticated concern of the scientist for method. And it is even doubtful whether he could really have cared very much for the results of method, in the form of accurate definitions. When one stops to think about it, it certainly must seem a little strange that, if Socrates had made it his main business to define the virtues, he should not have had some results to show at the close of a life extended beyond the usual period; certainly the rather pitiful results that Xenophon reports would not have been beyond him. But to the end he continues to insist on his own lack of knowledge, and to assign to dialectic a negative rather than a positive value. And this is far more understandable if the demand for definitions was primarily a tool for exposing ignorance, than if it was the quest for a scientific terminology.

It is quite true that a call for clear thinking is at the bottom of Socrates' whole activity. But it is to a clarification of the ends of conduct, and of men's confused ideas about what is really good and worthy, that his dialectic really tends, rather than to a technique of scientific concepts. Indeed this is just what gives Socrates a real claim to originality. The working method of the ethical life is not induction, in the sense that it gets at human ends by generalizing past facts and deeds. It is precisely a matter of determining what is genuinely worth while. And for this we have to presuppose, just as Socrates did, the existence in each man of standards of value which are ultimate, but which also at the start are vague and muddled, so that they have to be cleared up and verified by an analysis of their nature and their consequences. In any case it is only on this showing that we have a natural explanation of the apparent paucity of results in Socrates' positive teaching. If his aim was definition, then he was a failure, and a rather unaccountable failure. But if his real purpose was to get men to discover in their own experience the nature of their ultimate standards of worth, or, in the language of the mystic, to attain to the vision of absolute goodness and beauty, the failure to arrive at technical concepts is a matter of no consequence. An ostentatious proclamation of an inability to reach knowledge is not unnatural in the mystic, and does not at all touch the certainty of his immediate vision of the good; it is hardly in place in the professed scientist and logician.

Socrates' interest lies, then, in the soul and not in logic. But because the soul's destiny is a vision of the good, it is in knowledge that its virtue may be said to lie; while also knowledge of a lower grade is needed, in the form of clear logical analysis and of the utilitarian judgments of 'good horse sense,' to help restore the dim visions that we bring with us into the world, and that have been overlaid by unthinking custom and by an indulgence of the bodily passions. In so far as Xenophon misses this, he fails to give us a true picture. At the same time Xenophon's testimony does not need to be entirely discarded, and it is usually possible to pick out with some measure of confidence the modicum of truth which it contains.

The case that is most important for the history of ethical theory has to do with Socrates' attitude toward pleasure. Xenophon tells us in no uncertain terms that Socrates was, so far as theory goes, what nowadays would be called a hedonistic utilitarian; he taught that utility is what determines not only the goodness of an act, but even the beauty of an object. On the other hand this is an opinion obviously difficult to reconcile with a mystical idealism. And, furthermore, there is abundant evidence, some of it from Xenophon himself, of a personal attitude on the part of Socrates which suggests a quite different conclusion. Certainly he is always represented as himself totally indifferent to pleasure or to worldly success; and Plato even makes him argue explicitly against the prudential conception of the virtues as only an inverted self-indulgence.

It might at first seem easier to set aside Xenophon's testimony, as out of harmony with better established evidence. But there are reasons against quite so drastic a course. Not only does the Platonic Socrates also occasionally use language not very dissimilar to Xenophon's, but it is scarcely credible that a school of professed hedonism should have sprung from Socrates' teaching had Aristippus not found in his words some apparent support. This same consideration, however, it has to be noticed, applies equally of course to another and quite opposed type of ethical doctrine that also claimed the authority of Socrates—the Cynicism of Antisthenes, with its contempt for pleasure. Accordingly the problem is to discover how three distinct and opposed ethical philosophies should have had their source in one man's teaching.

One conclusion follows pretty directly from the existence of the problem; and it bears out the conclusions already drawn as to the relatively non-technical character of Socrates' interest in philosophy. There is no reason to suppose that Socrates himself ever directly raised the question, 'Is pleasure the good'? Not only would the striking difference of opinion among his followers in that case be hard to account for, but it is difficult to see Socrates, the mystic, finding such a question worthy of discussion. And this granted, there are two or three considerations that go a certain way toward dispelling the impression of inconsistency.

First, there should be noticed the very distinctive nature of the personal attitude that is attributed to Socrates. It is not that he feels an ascetic hostility towards pleasure, as if there were something essentially evil about it. Socrates recommends the pleasures of self-control and moderation, the life of few wants and ready satisfaction; and he protests against the tendency of pleasure to seduce man from his true interests. But the point in both cases is the same; the case against pleasure is not its evil and sinister importance, but its insignificance. It occupies us with trivialities when we might be engaged with a vision of the absolute; it entails unnecessary anxieties and disproportionate effort for what in the end is not worth the trouble. And consequently we are not to give it an evil eminence; it is enough that we should refuse to let it dominate us. And this, the logical corollary of his doctrine, is just the attitude we are told that Socrates personally adopted. He did not practice asceticism; and on occasion he could drink his companions under the table. But he drank, not for the pleasure it gave him, but as an incident in the day's work; and he was just as well satisfied to go without.

It is obviously this side of Socrates' teaching and example that, by an exaggeration of emphasis, developed into the Cynicism of Antisthenes. Much less significant, as an aspect of Socrates' own thought, is the hedonism of Aristippus, even though it seems backed by Xenophon's testimony. This would be scarcely understandable, once more, if Socrates had thought pleasure important enough to go out of his way to define its relation to the good. But just because pleasure to Socrates was so emphatically not the good, it is possible to understand how he might have allowed himself to say things from which, taken by themselves, an impression of theoretic hedonism and utilitarianism might have been derived. Two things in particular explain this possibility. In the first place there is not the slightest reason to suppose that Socrates, any more than Plato, would have refused to identify man's destiny with happiness of some sort—the vision of the good is plainly the best and highest happiness—and since it is practically impossible always to use language in a way that makes a sharp distinction between happiness and pleasure, he may very well have talked at times in a manner open to misunderstanding by a literal-minded hearer, without straining at all his personal convictions. And to this is to be added the further fact, already commented on, that the nature of his method makes it necessary constantly to accept and argue on the premises of his interlocutor. And if in a discussion with Protagoras, he takes for granted popular judgments which he is aware that Protagoras will not dispute, only a total disregard of what we know about Socrates' habits can justify an unqualified assumption that he must have been expressing his personal opinions. Even Plato, whose views about pleasure are sufficiently clear, can talk like an ordinary hedonist when he is framing the preamble to a legal statute, intended to convince, not the philosopher, but the average citizen.¹⁸

The other outstanding feature of Xenophon's account—the disposition of Socrates to identify virtue in practice with a respectable acquiescence in existing law and custom—it is also not difficult to account for without accepting the emphasis that Xenophon gives it. That Socrates felt a genuine piety toward the state, as the mother and guardian of her children, would need no further evidence than the Crito, where he justifies his refusal to escape from prison at the expense of bringing discredit upon the lawful forms of government; but it is a far cry from the recognition that a virtuous man will not wantonly disregard his country's laws, to the claim that virtue consists mainly in conventionality and conformism. In all likelihood the traditional opinion is right in supposing that Socrates was not in harmony with the Sophistic tendency toward loosening the bonds of the customary morality. But this it may be reasonably conjectured was due less to a belief in its final value, than to a feeling, common to the mystic temperament, that no reform of conventions, aiming mostly as it does at greater liberty of individual conduct in this present world, is much worth troubling about when the true realm of value lies elsewhere, as well as to a sceptical distrust of the power of human reason to work sure-footedly at such a task.

Notes

¹Memorabilia, 111, 8, 8; IV, 2, 1; 5, 1; 6. 1.

² IV, 6.

³ Cf. Alcibiades' remark, Symposium, 216.

⁴Phado, 69.

⁵Symposium, 198.

⁶Meno, 81.

⁷Symposium, 206 ff.

⁸ Sophist, 231.

⁹Thexetetus, 173-5. Cf. the Republic (Bk. VII) as interpreted by the account that follows of the content of philosophic education.

¹⁰Republic, 493-4.

¹¹Ion, 534.

¹²Apology, 23.

¹³Phcedrus, 244.

¹⁴ Cf. Philebus, 34, where reminiscence is defined psychologically in a way that reverses what it meant for Socrates.

¹⁵" Cf. Laches, 194; Euthydemus, 281; Meno, 88; Apology, 38.

¹⁶Phcedo, 82-4.

¹⁷ Meno, 87.

¹⁸Laws, 733-4.