CHAPTER I
INDIVIDUALISM AND PHILOSOPHY
Homer ought to be driven from the lists and whipt, and Archilochus likewise.--Herac.l.i.tus.
Thou needs must have knowledge of all things, First of the steadfast core of the Truth that forceth conviction, Then of the notions of mortals, where true conviction abides not.
--Parmenides.
All things were undistinguished: then Intellect came and brought them into order.--Anaxagoras.
Man is the measure of all things.
In regard to the G.o.ds, I am unable to know whether they are or are not.--Protagoras.
STREPSIADES. Don"t you see what a good thing it is to have learning?
There isn"t any Zeus, Phidippides!
PHIDIPPIDES. Who is there then?
STREPS. Vortex rules, having dethroned Zeus.
PHID. Pshaw! what nonsense!
STREPS. You may count it true, all the same.
PHID. Who says so?
STREPS. Socrates the Melian, and Chaerephon, who knows the footprints of fleas.--Aristophanes, _Clouds_.
There is an old-fashioned saw, current of yore among mortals, that a man"s happiness, when full-grown, gives birth and dies not childless, and that from Fortune there springs insatiate woe for all his race. But I, dissenting from all others, am alone of different mind. It is the Irreverent Deed that begets after it more of its kind. For to righteous homes belongs a fair-childrened lot forever; but old Irreverence is sure to beget Irreverence, springing up fresh among evil men, when the numbered hour arrives. And the new Irreverence begets Surfeit of Wealth, and a power beyond all battle, beyond all war, unholy Daring, twin curses, black to homes, like to their parents. But Justice shines in smoky homes, and honors the righteous life, and, leaving, with averted eyes, foundations gilded with impurity of hands, she draws nigh to holy things, honoring not the power of wealth, with its counterfeit stamp of praise. And her will is done.--aeschylus
From the time they are children to the day of their death, we teach them and admonish them. As soon as the child understands what is said to him, his nurse and his mother and his pedagogue and even his father vie with each other in trying to make the best of him that can be made, at every word and deed instructing him and warning him, "This is right," "This is wrong," "This is beautiful," "This is ugly," "This is righteous," "This is sinful," "Do this," "Don"t do that." And if the child readily obeys, well and good; if he does not, then they treat him like a bent and twisted stick, straightening him out with threats and blows. Later on, they send him to school, and then they lay their injunctions upon the masters to pay much more attention to the good behavior of their sons than to their letters and music (??????s??); and the teachers act upon these injunctions. Later yet, when they have learnt to read, and are proceeding to understand the meaning of what is written, just as formerly they understood what was said to them, they put before them on the benches to read the works of good poets, and insist upon their learning them by heart--works which contain many admonitions, and many narratives, n.o.ble deeds, and eulogies of the worthy men of old--their purpose being to awaken the boy"s ambition, so that he may imitate these men and strive to be worthy likewise. The music-teachers also, pursuing the same line, try to inculcate self-control (s?f??s???) and to prevent the boys from falling into mischief. In addition to this, when they have learnt to play on the lyre, their masters teach them other poems, written by great lyric poets, making them sing them and play the accompaniments to them, and compelling them to work into their souls the rhythms and melodies of them, so that they may grow in gentleness, and, having their natures timed and tuned, may be fitted to speak and act. The truth is, the whole life of man needs timing and tuning.
Furthermore, in addition to all this, parents send their sons to the physical trainer, in order that their bodies may be improved and rendered capable of seconding a n.o.ble intent, and they themselves not be forced, from physical deterioration, to play the coward in war or other (serious) matters. And those who can best afford to give this education, give most of it, and these are the richest people. Their sons go earliest to school and leave it latest. And when the boys leave school, the State insists that they shall learn the laws and live according to them, and not according to their own caprice ... And if any one transgresses these laws, the State punishes him ... Seeing that so much attention is devoted to virtue, both in the family and in the State, do you wonder, Socrates, and question whether virtue be something that can be taught? Surely you ought not to wonder at this, but rather to wonder if it could _not_ be taught.--Plato, _Protagoras_ (_words of Protagoras_).
"Isn"t it true, Lysis," said I, "that your parents love you very much?"--"To be sure," said he.--"Then they would wish you to be as happy as possible?"--"Of course," said he.--"And do you think a person is happy who is a slave, and is not allowed to do anything he desires?"--"I don"t, indeed," said he.--"Then, if your father and mother love you and wish you to be happy, they endeavor by every means in their power to make you happy."--"To be sure they do," said he.--"Then they allow you to do anything you please, and never chide you, or prevent you from doing what you desire."--"By Jove! they do, Socrates: they prevent me from doing a great many things."--"What do you mean," said I; "they wish you to be happy, and yet prevent you from doing what you wish? Let us take an example: If you want to ride in one of your father"s chariots, and to hold the reins, when it is competing in a race, won"t they allow you, or will they prevent you?"--"By Jove! no: they would not allow me," said he. "But why should they? There is a charioteer, who is hired by my father."--"What do you mean? They allow a hired man, rather than you, to do what he likes with the horses, and pay him a salary besides?"--"And why not?" said he.--"Well then, I suppose they allow you to manage the mule-team, and if you wanted to take the whip and whip it, they would permit you."--"How could they?" said he.--"What?" said I: "is n.o.body allowed to whip it?"--"Of course,"
he said; "the muleteer."--"A slave or a free man?"--"A slave," said he.--"And so it seems they think more of a slave than of their son, and entrust their property to him rather than to you, and allow him to do what he pleases, whereas they prevent you. But, farther, tell me this. Do they allow you to manage yourself, or do they not even trust you to that extent?"--"How trust me?" said he.--"Then does some one manage you?"--"Yes, my pedagogue here," said he.--"But he is surely not a slave?"--"Of course he is, our slave," said he.--"Is it not strange," said I, "that a freeman should be governed by a slave? But, to continue, what is this pedagogue doing when he governs you?"--"Taking me to a teacher, or something of the kind,"
he said.--"And these teachers, it cannot be that they too govern you?"--"To any extent."--"So then your father likes to set over you a host of masters and managers; but, of course, when you go home to your mother, she lets you do what you like, in order to make you happy, either with the threads or the loom, when she is weaving--does she not? She surely doesn"t in the least prevent you from handling the batten, or the comb, or any of the instruments used in spinning."--And he, laughing, said: "By Jove, Socrates; she not only prevents me, but I should be beaten if I touched them."--"By Hercules," said I, "isn"t it true that you have done some wrong to your father and mother?"--"By Jove, not I," he said.--"But for what reason, then, do they so anxiously prevent you from being happy, and doing what you please, and maintain you the whole day in servitude to some one or another, and without power to do almost anything you like. It seems, indeed, that you derive no advantage from all this wealth, but anybody manages it rather than you, nor from your body, n.o.bly born as it is, but some one else shepherds it and takes care of it. But you govern nothing, Lysis, and do nothing that you desire."--"The reason, Socrates," he said, "is, that I am not of age."--Plato, _Lysis_.
The present state of the const.i.tution is as follows: Citizenship is a right of children whose parents are both of them citizens.
Registration as member of a deme or township takes place when eighteen years of age are completed. Before it takes place the townsmen of the deme find a verdict on oath, firstly, whether they believe the youth to be as old as the law requires, and if the verdict is in the negative he returns to the ranks of the boys.
Secondly, the jury find whether he is freeborn and legitimate. If the verdict is against him he appeals to the Heliaea, and the munic.i.p.ality delegate five of their body to accuse him of illegitimacy. If he is found by the jurors to have been illegally proposed for the register, the State sells him for a slave; if the judgment is given in his favor, he must be registered as one of the munic.i.p.ality. Those on the register are afterwards examined by the senate, and if anyone is found not to be eighteen years old, a fine is imposed on the munic.i.p.ality by which he was registered. After approbation, they are called _epheboi_, or cadets, and the parents of all who belong to a single tribe hold a meeting and, after being sworn, choose three men of the tribe above forty years of age, whom they believe to be of stainless character and fittest for the superintendence of youth, and out of these the commons in ecclesia select one superintendent for all of each tribe, and a governor of the whole body of youths from the general body of the Athenians.
These take them in charge, and after visiting with them all the temples, march down to Piraeus, where they garrison the north and south harbors, Munychia and Acte. The commons also elect two gymnastic trainers for them, and persons who teach them to fight in heavy armor, to draw the bow, to throw the javelin, and to handle artillery. Each of the ten commanders receives as pay a drachma [about 20 cts.] per diem, and each of the cadets four obols [about 13 cts.]. Each commander draws the pay of the cadets of his own tribe, buys with it the necessaries of life for the whole band (for they mess together by tribes), and purveys for all their wants. The first year is spent in military exercises. The second year the commons meet in the theatre and the cadets, after displaying before them their mastery in warlike evolutions, are each presented with a shield and spear, and become mounted patrols of the frontier and garrison the fortresses. They perform this service for two years, wearing the equestrian cloak and enjoying immunity from civic functions. During this period, to guard their military duties from interruption, they can be parties to no action either as defendant or plaintiff, except in suits respecting inheritance, or heiresses, or successions to hereditary priesthoods. When the three years are completed they fall into the ordinary body of citizens.--Aristotle, _Const.i.tution of Athens_ (_Poste"s Version, with slight alterations_).
That perfect harmony between power and worth at which the Athenian State aimed, was something not easily attained or preserved. As far back as its recorded history reaches, we find a struggle for power going on between a party which possessed more power than its worth justified, and a party which possessed less; that is, between a party which, having once been worthy, strove to hold power in virtue of its past history, and one that claimed power in virtue of the worth into which it was growing: in a word, a struggle between declining aristocracy and growing democracy. To the party in power, of course, this seemed a rebellion against lawful authority and privilege, and it did its best to suppress it. Hence came the rigorous legislation of Draco; later the more conciliatory, less out-spoken, but equally aristocratic legislation of Solon; then the tyranny of Pisistratus, lasting as long as he could hold the balance of power between the contending parties; then the const.i.tution of Clisthenes, with the breaking up of the old Athenian aristocratic system, the remodelling of the tribes, the degradation of the Areopagus, and the definite triumph of democracy. To complete the movement and, as it were, to consecrate it, came the Persian Wars, which mark the turning-point, the _peripeteia_, in Athenian history and education. Whatever efforts aristocracy makes to maintain itself after this, are made in the name of, and under cover of a zeal for, democracy.
The aristocratic Athenian State was based upon land-ownership, slavery, and the entire freedom of the land-owning cla.s.s from all but family and State duties, from all need of engaging in productive industry. So long as the chief wealth of the State consisted in land and its produce, so long the population was divided into two cla.s.ses, the rich and the poor, and so long the former had little difficulty in keeping all power in its own hands. But no sooner did the growth of commerce throw wealth into the hands of a cla.s.s that owned no land, and was not above engaging in industry, than this cla.s.s began to claim a share in political power.
There were now two wealthy cla.s.ses, standing opposed to each other, a proud, conservative one, with "old wealth and worth," and a vain, radical one, with new wealth and wants, both bidding for the favor of the cla.s.s that had little wealth, little worth, and many wants, and thus making it feel its importance. Such is the origin of Athenian democracy.
It is the child of trade and productive industry. It owed its final consecration to the Persian Wars, and especially to the battle of Salamis, in which Athens was saved by her fleet, manned chiefly by marines (?p??ta?) from the lower cla.s.ses, the upper cla.s.ses, as we have seen, being trained only for land-service. Thus the battle of Salamis was not only a victory of Greece over Persia, but of foreign trade over home agriculture, of democracy over aristocracy.
The fact that the Athenian democracy owed its origin to trade determined, in great measure, its history and tendencies. One of its many results was that it opened Athens to the influx of foreign men, foreign ideas, and foreign habits, not to speak of foreign G.o.ds, all of which tended to break up the old self-contained, carefully organized life of the people. In no department were their effects sooner or more clearly felt than in that of education. From about the date of the battle of Salamis, when the youthful Ionian, Anaxagoras, came to Athens, a succession of men of "advanced" ideas in art and science sought a field of action within her borders. Such a field, indeed, seemed purposely to have been left open for them by the State, which had provided no means of intellectual or moral education for its young citizens, after they pa.s.sed under its care (see p. 87). Nothing was easier or more profitable than for these wise foreigners to const.i.tute themselves public teachers, and fill the place which the State had left vacant. The State might occasionally object, and seek to punish one or another of them for corrupting of the youth by the promulgation of impious or otherwise dangerous ideas, as it did in the case of Anaxagoras; but their activity was too much in harmony with a tendency of the time,--a radical and individualistic tendency inseparable from democracy,--to be dispensed with altogether. Hence it was that, within a few years after the battle of Salamis, there flourished in Athens a cla.s.s of men unknown before within her boundaries, a cla.s.s of private professors, or "sophists," as they called themselves, who undertook to teach theoretically what the State had a.s.sumed could be taught only practically and by herself, viz., virtue and wisdom. Their ideas were novel, striking, and radical, hence congenial to a newly emanc.i.p.ated populace, vain of its recent achievements, and contemptuous of all that savored of the narrow, pious puritanism of the old time; their premises were magnificent, and their fees high enough to impose upon a cla.s.s that always measures the value of a thing by what it is asked to pay for it; their method of teaching was such as to flatter the vanity, and secure the favor, of both pupils and parents. No wonder that their success was immediate and their influence enormous.
From the days of Socrates to our own, "sophist" has been a term of reproach, and not altogether unjustly so. Hegel, Grote, and Zeller have, indeed, shown that the sophists did not deserve all the obloquy which has attached itself to their name, inasmuch as they were neither much better nor much worse than any cla.s.s of men who set up to teach new doctrines for money, and, as wise economists, suit supply to demand; nevertheless, it may be fairly enough said that they largely contributed to demoralize Athens, by encouraging irreverence for the very conceptions upon which her polity was built, and by pandering to some of the most selfish and individualistic tendencies of democracy. If it be said that they have their place in the history of human evolution, as the heralds of that higher view of life which allows the individual a sphere of activities and interests outside of that occupied by the State, this may at once and without difficulty be admitted, without our being thereby forced to regard them as n.o.ble men. The truth is, they represented, in practice and in theory, the spirit of individualism, which was then everywhere a.s.serting itself against the spirit of nationalism or polity, and which perhaps had to a.s.sert itself in an exaggerated and destructive way, before the rightful claims of the two could be manifested and harmonized. It is the incorporation of this spirit of individualism into education that const.i.tutes the "New Education."
This spirit, as manifested in the sophists and their teaching, directed itself against the old political spirit in all the departments of life--in religion, in politics, in education. It discredited the old popular G.o.ds, upon loyalty to whom the existence of the State had been supposed to depend, subst.i.tuting for them some crude fancy like Vortex, or some bald abstraction like Intellect. It encouraged the individual to seek his end in his own pleasure, and to regard the State as but a means to that end. It championed an education in which these ideas occupied a prominent place. What the sophists actually taught the ambitious young men who sought their instruction, was self-a.s.sertion, unscrupulousness, and a showy rhetoric, in whose triumphal procession facts, fancies, and falsehoods marched together in brilliant array. It is but fair to them to say that, in their endeavor to instruct young men in the art of specious oratory, they laid the foundations of the art of rhetoric and the science of grammar. So much, at least, the world owes to them.
Since it was to the young men, who, freed from the discipline of home, pedagogue, school, and palaestra, could be met with anywhere, in the street, the agora, the gymnasium, that the sophists directed their chief attention, it was of course these who first showed the effects of their teaching. But their influence, falling in, as it did, with the p.r.o.nounced radical tendencies of the time, soon made itself felt in all grades of education, from the family to the university, in the form of an irreverent, flippant, conceited rationalism, before whose self-erected and self-corrupted tribunal every inst.i.tution in heaven and earth was to be tried. In the schools this influence showed itself in various ways: (1) in an increased attention to literature, and especially to the formal side of it, (2) in the tendency to subst.i.tute for the works of the old epic and lyric poets the works of more recent writers tinged with the new spirit, (3) in the introduction of new and complicated instruments and kinds of music, (4) in an increasing departure from the severe physical and moral discipline of the old days.
We now, for the first time, hear of a teacher of literature, distinct from the music master, of teachers who possessed no copy of Homer (Alcibiades is said to have chastised such a one), of flutes, citharas, and the like in use in schools, of wildness and lewdness among boys of tender age. In the palaestra the new spirit showed itself in a tendency to subst.i.tute showy and unsystematic exercises for the vigorous and graded exercises of the older time, to sacrifice education to execution.
But, as already remarked, the new spirit showed itself most clearly and hurtfully in the higher education. The young men, instead of spending their time in vigorous physical exercise in the gymnasia and open country, began now to hang about the streets and public places, listening to sophistic discussions, and to attend the schools of the sophists, exercising their tongues more than any other part of their bodies. The effect of this soon showed itself in a decline of physical power, of endurance, courage, and manliness, and in a strong tendency to luxury and other physical sins. They now began to imagine for themselves a private life, very far from coincident with that demanded of a citizen, and to look upon the old citizen-life, and its ideals, sanctions, and duties, with contempt or pity, as something which they had learnt to rise above. The glory and well-being of their country were no longer their chief object of ambition. The dry rot of individualism, which always seems to those affected by it an evidence of health and manly vigor, was corrupting their moral nature, and preparing the way for the destruction of the State. For it was but too natural that these young men, when they came to be members of the State, should neglect its lessons and claims, and, following the new teachings, live to themselves. Thus, just as the character of the "Old Education" of Athens showed itself in the behavior of her sons in the Persian Wars, so that of her "New Education" showed itself fifty years later in the Peloponnesian War, that long and disastrous struggle which wrecked Athens and Greece.
Yet Athens and her education were not allowed to go to ruin without a struggle. The aristocratic party long stuck to the old principles and tried to give them effect; but, failing to understand the new circ.u.mstances and to take account of them, it erred in the application of them, by seeking simply to restore the old conditions. Individuals also exerted their best efforts for the same end. aeschylus, who had fought at Marathon, and who, more than any other Greek, was endowed with the spirit of religion, interpreted the old mythology in an ethical sense, and in this form worked it into a series of dramas, whereby the history and inst.i.tutions of the Greek people were shown to be due to a guiding Providence of inexorable justice, rewarding each man according to his works, abhorring proud homes "gilded with impurity of hands," and dwelling with the pure and righteous, though housed in the meanest cot.
aeschylus thus became, not only the father of Greek tragedy, but also the sublimest moral teacher Greece ever possessed. For moral grandeur there is but one work in all literature that can stand by the side of aeschylus" _Oresteia_, and that is the _Divine Comedy_. Yet aeschylus was driven from Athens on a charge of impiety, and died in exile.
But it was not the tragic drama alone that was inspired and made a preacher of righteousness: in the hands of Aristophanes, the comic drama exerted all its power for the same end. For over thirty years this inimitable humorist used the public theatre to lash the follies, and hold up to contempt the wretched leaders, of the Athenian populace, pointing out to his countrymen the abyss of destruction that was yawning before them. The world has never seen such earnest comedy, not even in the works of Moliere or Beaumarchais. Yet it was all in vain. Long before his death, Aristophanes was forbidden to hold up to public scorn the degradation of his people.
Among the individual citizens who labored with all their might to bring back Athens to her old worth were two of very different character, endowments, and position, the one laboring in the world of action, the other in the world of thought. The first was Pericles, who, seeing that democracy was the order of the day, accepted it, and, by his personal character and position, strove to guide it to worthy ends. In order to encourage gymnastic exercises, particularly among the sons of the newer families, he built the Lyceum, in a grove sacred to Apollo, between Cynosarges and the city walls, as a gymnasium for them. With a view to encouraging among them the study of music, he built an odeon, or music-hall, under the southeast end of the Acropolis. Both were magnificent structures. What he did towards the completion of the great theatre for the encouragement of dancing, we do not know; that this entered into his plan, there can hardly be any doubt. But Pericles was too wise a man to suppose that he could induce his pleasure-seeking countrymen to subject themselves to the old discipline, without offering them an object calculated to rouse their ambition and call forth their energy. This object was nothing less than a united Greece, with Athens as its capital. How hard he tried to make this object familiar to them, and to render Athens worthy of the place he desired her to occupy, is pathetically attested to this day by the Propylaea and the Parthenon. On the frieze of the latter is represented the solemn sacrifice that was to cement the union of the h.e.l.lenic people, and place it at the head of civilization. When degenerate Greece resisted all his efforts to make her become one peaceably, he tried to make her do so by force, and the Peloponnesian War, started on a mere frivolous pretext, was the result.
He did not live long enough to learn the outcome of this desperate attempt to wake his countrymen to new moral and political life, and it was well. If he had, he might have been forced to recognize that he had been attempting an impossible task,--trying to erect a strong structure with rotten timber, to make a n.o.ble State out of ign.o.ble, selfish men.
Unfortunately, the example of his own private life, in which he openly defied one of the laws of the State, and tried to make concubinage (?ta???s??) respectable, more than undid all the good he sought to accomplish. The truth is, Pericles was himself too deeply imbued with the three vices of his time--rationalism, self-indulgence, and love of show--to be able to see any true remedy for the evils that sprang from them. What was needed was not letters, music, gymnastics, dancing, or dream of empire, but something entirely different--a new moral inspiration and ideal.
This, the second of the men to whom reference has been made, Socrates, sought to supply. In the midst of self-indulgence, he lived a life of poverty and privation; in the midst of splendor and the worship of outward beauty, he pursued simplicity and took pleasure in his ugliness; in the midst of self-a.s.sertive rationalism and all-knowing sophistry, he professed ignorance and submission to the G.o.ds. The problem of how to restore the moral life of Athens and Greece presented itself to Socrates in this form: _The old ethical social sanctions, divine and human, having, under the influence of rationalism and individualism, lost their power, where and how shall we find other sanctions to take their place?_ To answer this one question was the aim of Socrates" whole life. He was not long in seeing that any true answer must rest upon a comprehension of man"s entire nature and relations, and that the sophists were able to impose upon his countrymen only because no such comprehension was theirs. He saw that the old moral life, based upon nave tradition and prescription, sanctioned by G.o.ds of the imagination, would have to give place to a moral life resting upon self-understanding and reflection.
He accordingly adopted as his motto the command of the Delphic oracle, _Know Thyself_ (????? sea?to?), and set to work with all his might to obey it.
He now, therefore, went to meet the sophists on their own ground and with their own methods, and he did this so well as to be considered by many, Aristophanes among them, as the best possible representative of the cla.s.s. What is true is, that he was the first Athenian who undertook to do what the sophists had for some time considered their special function,--to impart a "higher education" to the youth and men of Athens. He went about the streets, shops, walks, schools, and gymnasia of the city, drawing all sorts of persons into conversation, and trying to elicit truth for himself and them (for he pretended to know nothing).
He was never so pleased as when he met a real sophist, who professed to have knowledge, and never so much in his element as when, in the presence of a knot of young men, he could, by his ironical, subtle questions, force said sophist to admit that he too knew nothing. The fact was, Socrates, studying Herac.l.i.tus, had become convinced that the reason why men fell into error was because they did not know themselves, or their own thoughts, because what they called thoughts were mere opinions, mere fragments of thoughts. He concluded that, if men were ever to be redeemed from error, intellectual and moral, they must be made to think whole thoughts. Accordingly, he took the ordinary opinions of men and, by a series of well-directed questions, tried to bring out their implications, that is, the wholes of which they were parts. Such is the Socratic or dialectic (= conversational) method. It does not pretend to impart any new knowledge, but merely, as Socrates said, to deliver the mind of the thoughts with which it is pregnant. And Socrates not only held that saving truth consisted of whole thoughts; he held also that all such thoughts were universally and necessarily true; that, while there might be many opinions about a thing, there could be but one truth, the same for all men, and therefore independent of any man. This was the exact opposite of what Protagoras the sophist had taught, the opposite of the gospel of individualism (see p. 93). Man is so far from being the measure of all things, that there is in all things a measure to which he must conform, if he is not to sink into error. This measure, this system of whole truths, implying an eternal mind to which it is present, and by which it is manifested in the world, is just what man arrives at, if he will but think out his thoughts in their completeness.
In doing so, he at once learns the laws by which the universe is governed and finds a guide and sanction for his own conduct--a sanction no longer external and imposed by the State, but internal and imposed by the mind. A system like this involved a complete reversal of the old view of the relation between man and the State, and at the same time took the feet from under individualism. "It is true," said Socrates in effect, "that the individual, and not the State, is the source of all authority, the measure of all things; but he is so, not as individual, but as endowed with the universal reason by which the world, including the State, is governed." This is the sum and substance of Socrates"
teaching, this is what he believed to be true self-knowledge. This is the truth whose application to life begins a new epoch in human history, and separates the modern from the ancient world; this is the truth that, reiterated and vivified by Christianity, forms the very life of our life to-day.
In adopting this view, Socrates necessarily formed "a party by himself,"
a party which could hope for no sympathy from either of the other two into which his countrymen were divided. The party of tradition charged him with denying the G.o.ds of his country and corrupting her youth; the radical party hated him because he convicted its champions of vanity, superficiality, and ignorance. Between them, they compa.s.sed his death, and Athens learnt, only when it was too late, that she had slain her prophet. But Socrates, though slain, was not dead. His spirit lived on, and the work which he had begun grew and prospered. Yet it could not save Athens, except upon a condition which she neither would nor could accept, that of remodelling her polity and the life of her citizens in accordance with divine truth and justice. Indeed, though he discovered a great truth, Socrates did not present it in a form in which it could be accepted under the given conditions. He himself even did not by any means see all the stupendous implications of his own principle, which, in fact, was nothing less than the ground of all true ethics, all liberty, and all science. It is doubtful whether any one sees them now, and certain that they have been nowhere realized. Still his truth and his life were not without their immediate effect upon Athens and Athenian education. Men, working in his spirit, and inspired with his truth, more or less clearly understood, almost immediately replaced the sophists in Athens, and drew the attention of her citizens, old and young, to the serious search for truth. In fact, from this time on, the intellectual tendency began to prevail over the gymnastic and musical, and this continued until, finally, it absorbed the whole life of the people, and Athens, from being a university-State, became a State-university. Such it was in the days of Cicero, Paul, Plutarch, Lucian, and Proclus. That this one-sided tendency was fatal to the political life of Athens, and therefore, in some degree, to its moral life, is clear enough; and, though we cannot hold Socrates personally responsible for this result, we must still admit that it was one which flowed from his system of thought. Personally, indeed, Socrates was a moral hero, and "five righteous" men like him, had they appeared, would have gone far to save Athens; but this very heroism, this inborn enthusiasm for righteousness, blinded him so far as to make him believe that men had only to know the right in order to be ready to follow it.
Hence that exaggerated importance attached to right knowing, and that comparative neglect of right feeling and right doing, which in the sequel proved so paralyzing. Hence the failure of Socrates" teaching to stem the tide of corruption in Athens, and restore her people to heroism and worth.
Socrates left behind him many disciples, some of whom distinguished themselves in practical ways, others as founders of philosophic schools, emphasizing different sides of his teaching. He was but a few years in his grave when two of these were teaching regularly in the two old gymnasia of Athens. Plato, a full-blooded Athenian, was teaching in the Academy the intellectual and moral theories of his master, while Antisthenes, a half-breed (his mother being a Thracian), was inculcating the lesson of his heroic life in Cynosarges. Their followers were called, respectively, Academics and Cynics. Thus, by these two men, was the higher education for the first time introduced into the public inst.i.tutions of Athens.
Socrates" aim, as we have seen, had been purely a moral one, and this fact was not lost sight of by his immediate followers. The chief question with them all was still: How can the people be brought back to moral life? But, thanks partly to the vagueness in which he had left the details of his doctrine, they were divided with respect to the means whereby this was to be accomplished. One party, best represented by Plato, and following most closely in the footsteps of the master, held that, man being essentially a social being, and morality a relation in society, it was only in and through a social order, a State, that virtue could be realized. Another party, represented by Antisthenes, maintained that virtue was a purely personal matter, and that the wise man stood high above any and all social inst.i.tutions. These two views maintained themselves, side by side, in nearly all subsequent Greek thought, and at last found expression in the State and Church of the Christian world.
Two of Socrates" followers, believers in inst.i.tutional morality, left behind them treatises which have come down to us, giving their views as to the manner in which virtue might be cultivated. These are the practical Xenophon and the theoretic Plato, both men of pure Athenian stock. Nothing will better enable us to comprehend the evils of the "New Education" than a consideration of the means by which these worthy men proposed to remedy them. Both are idealists and Utopians; but the former is conservative and reactionary, while the latter is speculative and progressive. Both are aiming at one thing--a virtuous and happy State, to replace the vicious and wretched one in which they found their lot cast; but they differed in their views regarding the nature of such a State, and the means of realizing it.
CHAPTER II
XENOPHON
Never a good is the rule of the many; let one be the ruler.--Homer