ONE:Larry, in his rubber boat, just having given up trying to explain how a number of bits of chewing gum had transferred themselves from the amphibian, where last he saw themor some like themto the seaplane, gestured and pantomimed to try to tell them his news.Modern critics, beginning with Hegel,109 have discovered reasons for considering Socrates a dangerous character, which apparently did not occur to Meltus and his associates. We are told that the whole system of applying dialectics to morality had an unsettling tendency, for if men were once taught that the sacredness of duty rested on their individual conviction they might refuse to be convinced, and act accordingly. And it is further alleged that Socrates first introduced this principle of subjectivity into morals. The persecuting spirit is so insatiable that in default of acts it attacks opinions, and in default of specific opinions it fastens on general tendencies. We know that Joseph de Maistre was suspected by his ignorant neighbours of being a Revolutionist because most of his time was spent in study; and but the other day a French preacher was sent into exile by his ecclesiastical superiors for daring to support Catholic morality on rational grounds.110 Fortunately Greek society was not165 subject to the rules of the Dominican Order. Never anywhere in Greece, certainly not at Athens, did there exist that solid, all-comprehensive, unquestionable fabric of traditional obligation assumed by Hegel; and Zeller is conceding far too much when he defends Socrates, on the sole ground that the recognised standards of right had fallen into universal contempt during the Peloponnesian war, while admitting that he might fairly have been silenced at an earlier period, if indeed his teaching could have been conceived as possible before it actually began.111 For from the first, both in literature and in life, Greek thought is distinguished by an ardent desire to get to the bottom of every question, and to discover arguments of universal applicability for every decision. Even in the youth of Pericles knotty ethical problems were eagerly discussed without any interference on the part of the public authorities. Experience had to prove how far-reaching was the effect of ideas before a systematic attempt could be made to control them.
THREE:The problem, then, which Spinoza set himself was, first, to account for the fundamental assumptions of all science, and more particularly of geometry, by deducing them from a single self-evident principle; and then to use that principle for the solution of whatever problems seemed to stand most in need of its application. And, as usually happens in such adventurous enterprises, the supposed answer of pure reason was obtained by combining or expanding conceptions borrowed without criticism from pre-existing systems of philosophy.
THREE:Two philosophers only can be named who, in modern times, have rivalled or approached the moral dignity of Socrates. Like him, Spinoza realised his own ideal of a good and happy life. Like him, Giordano Bruno, without a hope of future recompense, chose death rather than a life unfaithful to the highest truth, and death, too, under its most terrible form, not the painless extinction by hemlock inflicted in a heathen city, but the agonising dissolution intended by Catholic love to serve as a foretaste of everlasting fire. Yet with neither can the parallel be extended further; for Spinoza, wisely perhaps, refused to face the storms which a public profession and propagation of his doctrine would have raised; and the wayward career of Giordano Bruno was not in keeping with its heroic end. The complex and distracting conditions in which their lot was cast did not permit them to attain that statuesque completeness which marked the classic age of Greek life and thought. Those times developed a wilder energy, a more stubborn endurance, a sweeter purity than any that the ancient world had known. But until the scattered elements are recombined in a still loftier harmony, our sleepless thirst for perfection can be satisfied at one spring alone. Pericles must remain the ideal of statesmanship, Pheidias of artistic production, and Socrates of philosophic power.The principal business of reason is, as we have seen, to376 form abstract ideas or concepts of things. But before the time of Aristotle it had already been discovered that concepts, or rather the terms expressing them, were capable of being united in propositions which might be either true or false, and whose truth might be a matter either of certainty or of simple opinion. Now, in modern psychology, down to the most recent times, it has always been assumed that, just as there is an intellectual faculty or operation called abstraction corresponding to the terms of which a proposition is composed, so also there is a faculty or operation called judgment corresponding to the entire proposition. Sometimes, again, the third operation, which consists in linking propositions together to form syllogisms, is assigned to a distinct faculty called reason; sometimes all three are regarded as ascending steps in a single fundamental process. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, however, had thought out the subject so scientifically. To both the framing, or rather the discovery, of concepts was by far the most important business of a philosopher, judgment and reasoning being merely subsidiary to it. Hence, while in one part of their logic they were realists and conceptualists, in other parts they were nominalists. Abstract names and the definitions unfolding their connotation corresponded to actual entities in Naturethe eternal Ideas of the one and the substantial forms of the otheras well as to mental representations about whose existence they were agreed, while ascribing to them a different origin. But they did not in like manner treat propositions as the expression of natural laws without, or of judgments within, the mind; while reasoning they regarded much more as an art of thinking, a method for the discovery of ideas, than as the Systematisation of a process spontaneously performed by every human being without knowing it; and, even as such, their tendency is to connect it with the theory of definition rather than with the theory of synthetic propositions. Some approach to a realistic view is, indeed, made by both. The377 restless and penetrating thought of Plato had, probably towards the close of his career, led him to enquire into the mutual relations of those Ideas which he had at first been inclined to regard as absolutely distinct. He shows us in the Sophist how the most abstract notions, such as Being, Identity, and so forth, must, to a certain extent, partake of each others nature; and when their relationship does not lie on the surface, he seeks to establish it by the interposition of a third idea obviously connected with both. In the later books of the Republic he also points to a scheme for arranging his Ideas according to a fixed hierarchy resembling the concatenation of mathematical proofs, by ascending and descending whose successive gradations the mind is to become familiarised with absolute truth; and we shall presently see how Aristotle, following in the same track, sought for a counterpart to his syllogistic method in the objective order of things. Nevertheless, with him, as well as with his master, science was not what it is with us, a study of laws, a perpetually growing body of truth, but a process of definition and classification, a systematisation of what had already been perceived and thought.