THREE:Zeller, while taking a much wider view than Hegel, still assumes that Platos reforms, so far as they were suggested by experience, were simply an adaptation of Dorian practices.148 He certainly succeeds in showing that private property, marriage, education, individual liberty, and personal morality were subjected, at least in Sparta, to many restrictions resembling those imposed in the Platonic state. And Plato himself, by treating the Spartan system as the first form of degeneration from his own ideal, seems to indicate that this of all existing polities made the nearest approach to it. The declarations of the Timaeus149 are, however, much more distinct; and according to them it was in the caste-divisions of Egypt that he found the nearest parallel to his own scheme of social reorganisation. There, too, the priests, or wise men came first, and after them the warriors, while the different branches of industry were separated from one another by rigid demarcations. He may also have been struck by that free admission of women to employments elsewhere filled exclusively by men, which so surprised Herodotus, from his inability to discern its real causethe more advanced differentiation of Egyptian as compared with Greek society.150Cutting, as a process in converting material, includes the force to propel cutting edges, means to guide and control their action, and mechanism to sustain and adjust the material acted upon. In cutting with hand tools, the operator performs the two functions of propelling and guiding the tools with his hands; but in what [58] is called power operations, machines are made to perform these functions. In nearly all processes machines have supplanted hand labour, and it may be noticed in the history and development of machine tools that much has been lost in too closely imitating hand operations when machines were first applied. To be profitable, machines must either employ more force, guide tools with more accuracy, or move them at greater speed, than is attainable by hand. Increased speed may, although more seldom, be an object in the employment of machinery, as well as the guidance of implements or increased force in propelling them. The hands of workmen are not only limited as to the power that may be exerted, and unable to guide tools with accuracy, but are also limited to a slow rate of movement, so that machines can be employed with great advantage in many operations where neither the force nor guidance of tools are wanting.
THREE:Such a character would, in any case, be remarkable; it becomes of extraordinary, or rather of unique, interest when we consider that Socrates could be and do so much, not in spite of being a philosopher, but because he was a philosopher, the chief though not the sole originator of a vast intellectual revolution; one who, as a teacher, constituted the supremacy110 of reason, and as an individual made reason his sole guide in life. He at once discovered new principles, popularised them for the benefit of others, and exemplified them in his own conduct; but he did not accomplish these results separately; they were only different aspects of the same systematising process which is identical with philosophy itself. Yet the very success of Socrates in harmonising life and thought makes it the more difficult for us to construct a complete picture of his personality. Different observers have selected from the complex combination that which best suited their own mental predisposition, pushing out of sight the other elements which, with him, served to correct and complete it. The very popularity that has attached itself to his name is a proof of this; for the multitude can seldom appreciate more than one excellence at a time, nor is that usually of the highest order. Hegel complains that Socrates has been made the patron-saint of moral twaddle.81 We are fifty years further removed than Hegel from the golden age of platitude; the twaddle of our own time is half cynical, half aesthetic, and wholly unmoral; yet there are no signs of diminution in the popular favour with which Socrates has always been regarded. The man of the world, the wit, the viveur, the enthusiastic admirer of youthful beauty, the scornful critic of democracy is welcome to many who have no taste for ethical discourses and fine-spun arguments.