Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/483

VTELL-DOING. 461 obliged to give premiums for these dispositions, an3 to attach penalties to the contrary, by means of praise and censure ; more- cver, the natural sympathies and antipathies of ordinary minds, which determine so powerfully the application of moral terms, run spontaneously in this direction, and even overshoot the limit which reason would prescribe. The analogy between the paid special duty and the general social duty, fails in this particular. Even if Sokrates were correct as to the forrae^ and this would be noway true, in making the intellectual conditions of good conduct stand for the whole, no such inference could safely be extended to the latter. Sokrates affirmed that " well-doing" was the noblest pursuit of man. "Well-doing" consisted in doing a tiling well after having learned it and practised it, by the rational and proper means ; it was altogether disparate from good fortune, or success without rational scheme and preparation. " The best man (he said), and the most beloved by the gods, is he who, as an husband- man, performs well the duties of husbandry ; as a surgeon, those of medical art ; in political life, his duty towards the common- wealth. But the man who does nothing well, is neither useful,, nor agreeable to the gods." l This is the Sokratic view of human life ; to look at it as an assemblage of realities and practical details ; to translate the large words of the moral vocabulary into those homely particulars to which at bottom they refer ; to take account of acts, not of dispositions apart from act (in contradiction to the ordinary flow of the moral sympathies) ; to enforce upon every one, that what he chiefly required was teaching and prac- tice, as preparations for act ; and that therefore ignorance, espec- ially ignorance mistaking itself for knowledge, was his capital deficiency. The religion of Sokrates, as well as his ethics, had reference to practical human ends ; nor had any man ever less of that transcendentalism in his mind, which his scholar Plato exhibits in such abundance. It is indisputable, then, that Sokrates laid down a general ethical theory which is too narrow, and which states a part of the truth as if it were the whole. But, as it frequently happens with philosophers who make the like mistake, we find that he 1 Xcnoph. Mcmor. iii, 9, 14, 15.