Gorgias
and has the nature of disease and death. Especially when crimes are
committed on the great scale—the crimes of tyrants, ancient or
modern—after a while, seeing that they cannot be undone, and have
become a part of history, mankind are disposed to forgive them, not
from any magnanimity or charity, but because their feelings are blunted
by time, and “to forgive is convenient to them.” The tangle of good and
evil can no longer be unravelled; and although they know that the end
cannot justify the means, they feel also that good has often come out
of evil. But Socrates would have us pass the same judgment on the
tyrant now and always; though he is surrounded by his satellites, and
has the applauses of Europe and Asia ringing in his ears; though he is
the civilizer or liberator of half a continent, he is, and always will
be, the most miserable of men. The greatest consequences for good or
for evil cannot alter a hair’s breadth the morality of actions which
are right or wrong in themselves. This is the standard which Socrates
holds up to us. Because politics, and perhaps human life generally, are
of a mixed nature we must not allow our principles to sink to the level
of our practice.
And so of private individuals—to them, too, the world occasionally
speaks of the consequences of their actions:—if they are lovers of
pleasure, they will ruin their health; if they are false or dishonest,
they will lose their character. But Socrates would speak to them, not
of what will be, but of what is—of the present consequence of lowering
and degrading the soul. And all higher natures, or perhaps all men
everywhere, if they were not tempted by interest or passion, would
agree with him—they would rather be the victims than the perpetrators
of an act of treachery or of tyranny. Reason tells them that death
comes sooner or later to all, and is not so great an evil as an
unworthy life, or rather, if rightly regarded, not an evil at all, but
to a good man the greatest good. For in all of us there are slumbering
ideals of truth and right, which may at any time awaken and develop a
new life in us.
Second Thesis:—
It is better to suffer for wrong doing than not to suffer.
There might have been a condition of human life in which the penalty
followed at once, and was proportioned to the offence. Moral evil would
then be scarcely distinguishable from physical; mankind would avoid
vice as they avoid pain or death. But nature, with a view of deepening
and enlarging our characters, has for the most part hidden from us the
consequences of our actions, and we can only foresee them by an effort
of reflection. To awaken in us this habit of reflection is the business
of early education, which is continued in maturer years by observation
and experience. The spoilt child is in later life said to be
unfortunate—he had better have suffered when he was young, and been
saved from suffering afterwards. But is not the sovereign equally
unfortunate whose education and manner of life are always concealing
from him the consequences of his own actions, until at length they are
revealed to him in some terrible downfall, which may, perhaps, have
been caused not by his own fault? Another illustration is afforded by
the pauper and criminal classes, who scarcely reflect at all, except on
the means by which they can compass their immediate ends. We pity them,
and make allowances for them; but we do not consider that the same
principle applies to human actions generally. Not to have been found
out in some dishonesty or folly, regarded from a moral or religious
point of view, is the greatest of misfortunes. The success of our evil
doings is a proof that the gods have ceased to strive with us, and have
given us over to ourselves. There is nothing to remind us of our sins,
and therefore nothing to correct them. Like our sorrows, they are
healed by time;
“While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen.”
The “accustomed irony” of Socrates adds a corollary to the
argument:—“Would you punish your enemy, you should allow him to escape
unpunished”—this is the true retaliation. (Compare the obscure verse of
Proverbs, “Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him,” etc., quoted in
Romans.)
Men are not in the habit of dwelling upon the dark side of their own
lives: they do not easily see themselves as others see them. They are
very kind and very blind to their own faults; the rhetoric of self-love
is always pleading with them on their own behalf. Adopting a similar
figure of speech, Socrates would have them use rhetoric, not in defence
but in accusation of themselves. As they are guided by feeling rather
than by reason, to their feelings the appeal must be made. They must
speak to themselves; they must argue with themselves; they must paint
in eloquent words the character of their own evil deeds. To any
suffering which they have deserved, they must persuade themselves to
submit. Under the figure there lurks a real thought, which, expressed
in another form, admits of an easy application to ourselves. For do not
we too accuse as well as excuse ourselves? And we call to our aid the
rhetoric of prayer and preaching, which the mind silently employs while
the struggle between the better and the worse is going on within us.
And sometimes we are too hard upon ourselves, because we want to
restore the balance which self-love has overthrown or disturbed; and
then again we may hear a voice as of a parent consoling us. In
religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the consciences
of men “accusing or else excusing them.” For all our life long we are
talking with ourselves:—What is thought but speech? What is feeling but
rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be always
in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at
first sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.
Third Thesis:—
We do not what we will, but what we wish.
Socrates would teach us a lesson which we are slow to learn—that good
intentions, and even benevolent actions, when they are not prompted by
wisdom, are of no value. We believe something to be for our good which
we afterwards find out not to be for our good. The consequences may be
inevitable, for they may follow an invariable law, yet they may often
be the very opposite of what is expected by us. When we increase
pauperism by almsgiving; when we tie up property without regard to
changes of circumstances; when we say hastily what we deliberately
disapprove; when we do in a moment of passion what upon reflection we
regret; when from any want of self-control we give another an advantage
over us—we are doing not what we will, but what we wish. All actions of
which the consequences are not weighed and foreseen, are of this
impotent and paralytic sort; and the author of them has “the least
possible power” while seeming to have the greatest. For he is actually
bringing about the reverse of what he intended. And yet the book of
nature is open to him, in which he who runs may read if he will
exercise ordinary attention; every day offers him experiences of his
own and of other men’s characters, and he passes them unheeded by. The
contemplation of the consequences of actions, and the ignorance of men
in regard to them, seems to have led Socrates to his famous
thesis:—“Virtue is knowledge;” which is not so much an error or paradox
as a half truth, seen first in the twilight of ethical philosophy, but
also the half of the truth which is especially needed in the present
age. For as the world has grown older men have been too apt to imagine
a right and wrong apart from consequences; while a few, on the other
hand, have sought to resolve them wholly into their consequences. But
Socrates, or Plato for him, neither divides nor identifies them; though
the time has not yet arrived either for utilitarian or transcendental
systems of moral philosophy, he recognizes the two elements which seem
to lie at the basis of morality. (Compare the following: “Now, and for
us, it is a time to Hellenize and to praise knowing; for we have
Hebraized too much and have overvalued doing. But the habits and
discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal
possession. And as humanity is constituted, one must never assign the
second rank to-day without being ready to restore them to the first
to-morrow.” Sir William W. Hunter, Preface to Orissa.)
Fourth Thesis:—
To be and not to seem is the end of life.
The Greek in the age of Plato admitted praise to be one of the chief
incentives to moral virtue, and to most men the opinion of their
fellows is a leading principle of action. Hence a certain element of
seeming enters into all things; all or almost all desire to appear
better than they are, that they may win the esteem or admiration of
others. A man of ability can easily feign the language of piety or
virtue; and there is an unconscious as well as a conscious hypocrisy
which, according to Socrates, is the worst of the two. Again, there is
the sophistry of classes and professions. There are the different
opinions about themselves and one another which prevail in different
ranks of society. There is the bias given to the mind by the study of
one department of human knowledge to the exclusion of the rest; and
stronger far the prejudice engendered by a pecuniary or party interest
in certain tenets. There is the sophistry of law, the sophistry of
medicine, the sophistry of politics, the sophistry of theology. All of
these disguises wear the appearance of the truth; some of them are very
ancient, and we do not easily disengage ourselves from them; for we
have inherited them, and they have become a part of us. The sophistry
of an ancient Greek sophist is nothing compared with the sophistry of a
religious order, or of a church in which during many ages falsehood has
been accumulating, and everything has been said on one side, and
nothing on the other. The conventions and customs which we observe in
conversation, and the opposition of our interests when we have dealings
with one another (“the buyer saith, it is nought—it is nought,” etc.),
are always obscuring our sense of truth and right. The sophistry of
human nature is far more subtle than the deceit of any one man. Few
persons speak freely from their own natures, and scarcely any one dares
to think for himself: most of us imperceptibly fall into the opinions
of those around us, which we partly help to make. A man who would shake
himself loose from them, requires great force of mind; he hardly knows
where to begin in the search after truth. On every side he is met by
the world, which is not an abstraction of theologians, but the most
real of all things, being another name for ourselves when regarded
collectively and subjected to the influences of society.
Then comes Socrates, impressed as no other man ever was, with the
unreality and untruthfulness of popular opinion, and tells mankind that
they must be and not seem. How are they to be? At any rate they must
have the spirit and desire to be. If they are ignorant, they must
acknowledge their ignorance to themselves; if they are conscious of
doing evil, they must learn to do well; if they are weak, and have
nothing in them which they can call themselves, they must acquire
firmness and consistency; if they are indifferent, they must begin to
take an interest in the great questions which surround them. They must
try to be what they would fain appear in the eyes of their fellow-men.
A single individual cannot easily change public opinion; but he can be
true and innocent, simple and independent; he can know what he does,
and what he does not know; and though not without an effort, he can
form a judgment of his own, at least in common matters. In his most