WANTED,—A SOCRATES.
CANON MACCOLL, in the interesting lecture on Socrates delivered at Leeds, of which the Yorkshire Poet completed its full report some ten days ago, expresses a strong desire for a modern Socrates. "I have often wished of late," he says, "that we had Socrates back among us to cross-examine our political teachers in Parliament, in the Press, and on the platform. What havoc he would make of many a fallacy which masquerades in the garb of wisdom 1 How many a sophist would be hunted to his last lair and exposed as a charlatan ! How many a self-styled patriot would be convicted as a mere vulgar self-seeker ! But how would it fare with Socrates himself, if he were to come among us here in England, and employ himself as he did of old in Athens ? Doubtless he would run no risk of a compulsory draught of hemlock. That method of silencing inconvenient opponents is out of date. I wish I could think that the spirit which prescribed the method was also a thing of the past. But that is a kind of speculation which might lead us upon dangerous ground, and so I pass away from it."
We hardly agree with the courageous Canon,—who, whatever may be his faults, has certainly never shrunk from presenting his own convictions, popular or unpopular, to the public with the most admirable candour,—that a modern English Socrates, if we could hope for one, would be in any great danger of perse- cution, whether moral or physical. In the time of Socrates, the exposure of men's ignorant conceit, which was the special task of Socrates, was a dangerous one. It took a religious mind like his, and a definite and profound belief that God had laid upon him the obligation to teach men how ignorant of the very founda- tions of human duty they really were, to spur him on to such a task, though we cannot help thinking that, constitutionally brave as Socrates was, and not only constitutionally brave, but full both of the insight of a satirist and of the satirical temper, he did not serionsly dislike that practice of pricking wind-bags, without much reference to the happy moral result of the process, to which he so eagerly devoted himself. Bat if any modern Socrates of our own day were to devote himself simply to exposing the unreality of our modern thought, as Socrates devoted him- self to exposing the unreality of Athenian thought in his own time, we do not think that, however many antipathies he might excite, he would incur any danger of persecution now. It is no more pleasant now than it was in the time of Socrates, for men to find themselves looking foolish when they had thought them- selves very wise. But in our large world, it is very easy to avoid those in whose presence you feel smalL And the modern Socrates, though he would probably be carefully avoided by those who were most in need of his help, would not be in the smallest danger of popular hatred. He would probably live a very quiet life, very much avoided by those who do not want
b be convinced of their own shallowness, but a life exceedingly useful to all who are really in earnest in getting to the bottom of their own confusions, and in fathoming the depth of their own prejudices and prepossessions.
But whether a modern Socrates would be in any serious peril, or only in peril of neglect, we quite agree that such a man would be of the greatest possible value to us, even if he only cleared up the minds of the few who are really anxious to have their confusions exposed and their sophistries refuted. Perhaps there never has been since the day of the actual Socrates, a time in which a satirist such as he was, with a moral purpose such as his at the root of his satiric impulse, would have been more useful. What we know of Socrates is that brilliant men like Alcibiades went to him to learn his knack of showing up the superficiality of others, but left him when they felt that if they stayed under the magic of his influence, they would be compelled to surrender those ambitious and un- scrupulous designs by which their worldly imagination had been fascinated ; that fathers were so incensed at the rivalry in which they found themselves with Socrates for the regard and deference of their own sons, that on that account alone they held him to be a bad citizen ; and, in a word, that with Socrates the irony or satire which demolished con- ceit, ended, in the case of all who could bear to have their conceit humiliated, in inspiring reverence. Now, that is a very rare result of the deepest satire. Amongst the great satirists of the world, hardly one has succeeded in inspiring this moral passion for what is noble and heroic, as Socrates inspired it, probably because hardly one did his work of demolition, as Socrates did it, under the deep sense of a divine command. And the reason why we are so much disposed to echo Mr. MacColl's
longing for a modern Socrates, is that we see a great tendency in the democracy of the present day to indulge in exactly the same idolatry of constitutional forms and rhetorical plausi- bilities which beset the Athenian democracy in the time of Socrates, and which he set himself so effectually to chastise. One of the charges, for instance, on which the accusation that resulted in the condemnation of Socrates to death, was grounded, was that Socrates had condemned the choice of the Archone by lot, as a mode of choice quite inconsistent with the careful selec- tion of such officers. No one, he said, would trust himself on ship- board under the care of a pilot selected by lot ; though it was infinitely more important to select a high civil or political officer by his fitness for his duties, than to select a mere trustee of men's physical safety in that way. Socrates would have made very light, therefore, of our mode of empanelling juries, and would have especially condemned it in those cases where it confessedly leads to the acquittal of the guilty. For Socrates, though he obeyed the laws as laid down by the democracy, was certainly no worshipper of democratic or any other formal inetitutions which do not answer the purpose of making men more just and upright, and of punishing those who are unjust and crooked in their ways. He appears in his defence to have offered no denial of this hostile criticism attributed to him on one of the most highly prized details of the democratic Constitution of Athens.
But not only did Socrates depreciate some of the fundamental institutions of the democracy ; he disputed the notion that to please the people ie the right end of politics. Socrates insists on nothing more emphatically than the baseness of flattering the people for the sake of obtaining what is called popular favour, and what he describes as the power to pervert and to be perverted. " When the Athenian people denies anything that you are saying," be says to one of his opponents, " you go over to its opinion," "for you have not the power to resist the words and ideas of the object of your love ; and you would probably reply, if you were honest, that you most use the same language as the object of your love," for, says Socrates, " every man is pleased when he is spoken to in his own language, and dislikes any other." Now, "the love of the people abides in your soul, and is an adversary to me; but I dare say that if we consider these matters more thoroughly, you may be convinced nevertheless. Please, then, to remember that there are two modes of training all things, including body and soul,—in the one we treat them with a view to pleasure, and in the other with the view to the highest good," and in case their highest good is not pleasant to them,—as it seldom is,— then, says Socrates," we do not indulge but resist them." "And must we not," he adds, "have the same end in view in the treatment of our city and citizens ? Must we not try and make them as good as possible ? For we have already discovered that there is no use in imparting to them any other good, unless the minds of those who are to have the good, be gentle and good." Therefore he condemns rhetoric as being a mere specious mode of flattering the people and fooling them to the top of their bent, instead of applying the medicines which would heal their diseases. Rhetoric, he says, and sophistry are the empirie's equivalents for justice and philosophy. They are to the cure of the soul what the skill in dressing and beautifying the body, and skill in gratifying the palate, are to the art of giving health to the body by a hardy gymnastic and a true medicine. The former pamper the body, the latter train and strengthen it. And so, while justice and philosophy train and strengthen the soul of the State, rhetoric and sophistry only gratify its most unhealthy desires, and tend to render it in- curable instead of curable. "To do injustice," so Socrates sums up his most weighty doctrine," is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice; the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things, as well in public as in private life. When any one has been wrong in anything, he is to be chastised, and the next best thing to a man being just is that he should become just and be chastised and punished; also that he should avoid all flattery of himself as well as others, of the few as of the many ; and rhetoric and any other art should be used by him, and all his actions should be done, always with a view to justice." " When, then," Bays Socrates to his democratic opponent, " we have practised virtue together, we will apply our- selves to politics, if that seems desirable; or we will advise about whatever else may seem good to us, for we shall be better able to judge then. In our present condition we ought not to give our- selves airs, for even on the most important subjects we are always changing our minds, and what a state of education does that imply P" Surely a very valuable and timely lesson not only for 400 B.C., but for the nineteenth century A.D., when the wisdom of flattering the people that all they ask is necessarily right, and that anything which can be described as painful or coercing is of the very essence of political iniquity, is not less, perhaps even more, in vogue than it was when Socrates looked forward to being put to death by the people for not having flattered them, but for having told them a number of plain and wholesome truths.
Canon MacColl concludes his admirable lecture by quoting that noble passage in which Socrates closed his reply after he had been condemned :—" Now it is time to go hence, for me to die, for you to live ; but which is the better state, God alone knows." Now, no doubt we may assert with some confidence that very few of those who heard him can have had any prospect in life half as good as his prospect in death,—which has, indeed, been to all the world since, a perpetual example of the duty of telling the truth to the people, and not flattering them with pleasing and /plausible professions, with assurances that their most malignant acts are excusable, and their most crooked ways are but irregular at worst, and sure to become regular if they are left at sufficient liberty to do wrong or right as they please. With all our hearts we echo Canon MacColl's wish that we could have a Socrates again, and that we could take to him our political souls to examine, as he describes Rhadamanthns examining the soul of a potentate who had no soundness in him,—being " crooked with falsehood and injustice," "because he had lived without truth." We do not think that Socrates would recommend committing the destiny of any people to "potentates" such as these, whether they represented the " constitutional majority " of an unhappy race or not. He would say, we think, that to commit any people to the care of such men, would be even worse than ()lacing over them officers selected by lot,—foolish as he held that happy-go-lucky method to be.
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