Some of the peculiarities in the Socratic discipline in thus evoking the nobler elements of the nature of man, have been often noted. That it was more a practice of questioning than of returning answers to questions, is implied in what has now been said. The irony which he directed against pretended wisdom, in which, through a confession of his own ignorance, partly sincere and partly scornful, he unmasked those who thought themselves wise, and placed conceited sophistry in its true light; the "cross-examination" by which he analyzed crude opinions, and exposed their contradictions; the sagacity with which he involved the dogmatists in conclusions at variance with their own assumptions, and yet necessarily connected with the concessions which they had made at the outset of a conference—are characteristics which are well known. "Where," in reference to this power, asks Mr. Grote, "where are we to look for a parallel to Socrates, either in or out of the Grecian world? The cross-examining elenchus, which he not only first struck out, but wielded with such matchless effect and to such noble purposes, has been mute ever since his last conversation in the prison; for even his great successor Plato was a writer and lecturer, and not a colloquial dialectician. No man has ever been found strong enough to bend his bow, much less sure enough to use it as he did. His life remains as the only evidence, but a very satisfactory evidence, how much can be done by this sort of intelligent interrogation; how powerful is the interest which it can be made to inspire; how energetic the stimulus which it can apply in awakening dormant reason and generating new mental power." The Socratic method of teaching was essentially inductive, at least in the deeper meaning of the word induction. It was designed to recall men, through intercourse with facts and internal experience, from hypothetical illusions to the realities which experience reveals, and to strengthen them for the act of developing into distinct consciousness, by means of changing facts, those unchanging principles which facts may either conceal or conduct to. Like Bacon, two thousand years afterwards, he spoke in the tone of one conscious that the function of man is patiently to seek truth, rather than dogmatically to assume that he has found, and may systematically expound it. Man cannot, he would say, assume that he is already on the apex of existence, and thus form a priori science, as if the knower were the lord of the knowable. He must ascend by slow degrees, and, as the servant of a wide and deep moral experience, surrender the luxuries of dogmatic hypothesis. As with Bacon, instead of a system of his own, he pours forth questions and aphorisms, which illustrate the impossibility of exhausting what is, in what man can know, and the inferiority of the human knower to the universe of possible knowledge—thus opening the way to the only real, however partial intercourse of man, with the strange world in which he finds himself. It was the method of Socrates to withdraw his hearers from the abstract to the concrete; from the notions put into circulation by means of common language, to notions which should be more in harmony with facts and true principles. He was fond of testing general statements by applying them to particular cases, and he was accustomed to use similes, fables, proverbs, and allegories, as means for leading back his disciples from "vermiculate questions" of the schoolmen of their time to the facts of their own and of all human experience. Such was the method by which this wonderful man, in the enthusiasm of his high moral purpose, tried to deliver his compatriots from their slavery to words and systems, and to awaken in them an insight into what science of any sort, that is worthy of the name, really is [nonsense scribble]. Though he does not rank in the list of technical logicians, he may be placed in the front rank of those who, in the ancient world, roused men to feel the need of a logic deeper and truer than any that is merely verbal or notional; who, in guiding their reflections concerning the nature of true science, and the method of forming it by minds placed in human circumstances and endowed with man's limited faculties, may be regarded as the father of mixed and practical logic, and that discipline, apart from which reasoning becomes verbal wrangling.
How did it come to pass, it may well he asked, that this great and most useful intellectual missionary was made to die the death of a criminal at the hands of the Athenian democracy? Various considerations suggest an answer to this very natural question. The reasonableness of tolerating opinions opposite to our own becomes apparent only by degrees to the judgment of men, while it is always at variance with the uneducated popular feeling. But the reasonableness of tolerating the professed inquirer and critic of all opinions is still less apparent, especially to those who, like the majority of men, are dimly conscious that their opinions are not the result of their own personal insight, and thus cannot, in their hands, stand the test of critical inquiry. The issue of a collision of free inquiry with prevailing tradition and prejudice has been essentially the same in every age, although experience is gradually mitigating the intensity of the conflict. This spirit of inquiry had never previously presented itself in a f orm of sterner energy than in Socrates. Then, in a corrupt democracy, envy and jealousy are the assured reward of intellectual and moral greatness. These common influences were aggravated against the great Athenian by special circumstances. His public life seems to have soon created many enemies. Twenty-five years before his death, Aristophanes, it is said at the suggestion of Miletus, produced on the stage at Athens his famous caricature of the philosophic apostle of a higher code of morals and a truer idea of science, who was attached to none of the great parties of the state, but who found in all of them friends and enemies. The Socrates of the "Clouds" may have helped to gather round the real Socrates, in the course of years, the floating elements and felt dislike which attached to the peculiar mission of his pretended type, and which—not to speak of the Sophists whose commerce in knowledge he must have injured, was felt by some of the most distinguished persons in Athenian society. The men whom he sought out for cross-examination, he tells us himself, were the most famous artists, poets, orators, and statesmen—those at once most sensitive to the humiliation of his intellectual surgery, and most capable of making their enmity effective We must recollect, too, that in the old age of Socrates, the Athenians were suffering the degradation of the tyranny which resulted from their defeat in the Peloponnesian war, and that at the time of his accusation, as they were exulting in deliverance from the yoke of their tyrants and in a return to their ancient institutions, they were all the more disposed to have their suspicions roused by any accusation of leadership in an enterprise of intellectual revolution and neological theology. In these circumstances, an indictment appeared against one who, in popular repute, was the leader at Athens in this very enterprise. Socrates was publicly accused of crime; in the first place of neglecting the public worship of the gods of his country; and in the second place, of corrupting the Athenian youth. The punishment claimed was death. The names of Melitus, Anytus, and Lycon are mentioned as formally his accusers; but the charge expressed the public feeling of the time, and was animated by the concentrated indignation of a quarter of a century against the man who had proved many confident sciolists to be really so profoundly ignorant, that they could not meet his searching interrogations, pursued in the streets and the market-place; without becoming involved in the most glaring contradictions, and who was himself now charged with innovations on the popular religion. He was brought before the judicial assembly of five hundred and condemned, but only by a small majority. The firmness and magnanimity of Socrates did not forsake him. In his apology, he repeated his avowal of ignorance of matters which were to others themes of confident boasting and dogmatism. He was condemned to drink hemlock. The closing scene of this grand life of seventy years is known to all. The farewell to the judges, as he told them that to die was a pleasure, since he was going to hold converse with the gods; the thirty days of waiting for the return of the sacred ship from the Delian festivals; the conversations in the interval with his companions, which Plato has immortalized, and which are the noblest attestations of antiquity to our natural faith in immortality and moral order; the sunset on the fatal evening, as the executioner presented the cup to the firm hand, directed by the unyielding countenance; the silence broken by his parting words as life ebbed away and the darkness gathered over his eyes; the illustrious form recognized as lifeless by the sorrowing attendants—these are familiar to the students of the Phædo, and all educated persons. Socrates was no sooner in his grave than the Athenian democracy repented of their sacrifice, and his accusers suffered from the power they had invoked. His martyr death put the seal to his philosophy, and inaugurated the most splendid period of intellectual greatness which the world has yet seen—the philosophical age of Plato and Aristotle. The schools of Athens rose over the grave of Socrates, and for more than a thousand years maintained there the light which his Athenian persecutors only made more conspicuous by their intolerance.
