man who ever lived, not so much for a perfect system as for the impulse
he gave to philosophical inquiries, and for his successful exposure of
error. He inaugurated a new era. Born in Athens in the year 470 B.C.,
the son of a poor sculptor, he devoted his life to the search after
truth for its own sake, and sought to base it on immutable foundations.
He was the mortal enemy of the Sophists, whom he encountered, as Pascal
did the Jesuits, with wit, irony, puzzling questions, and remorseless
logic. It is true that Socrates and his great successors Plato and
Aristotle were called "Sophists," but only as all philosophers or wise
men were so called. The Sophists as a class had incurred the odium of
being the first teachers who received pay for the instruction they
imparted. The philosophers generally taught for the love of truth. The
Sophists were a natural and necessary and very useful development of
their time, but they were distinctly on a lower level than the
Philosophers, or _lovers_ of wisdom.

Like the earlier philosophers, Socrates disdained wealth, ease, and
comfort,--but with greater devotion than they, since he lived in a more
corrupt age, when poverty was a disgrace and misfortune a crime, when
success was the standard of merit, and every man was supposed to be the
arbiter of his own fortune, ignoring that Providence who so often
refuses the race to the swift, and the battle to the strong. He was what
in our time would be called eccentric. He walked barefooted, meanly
clad, and withal not over cleanly, seeking public places, disputing with
everybody willing to talk with him, making everybody ridiculous,
especially if one assumed airs of wisdom or knowledge,--an exasperating
opponent, since he wove a web around a man from which he could not be
extricated, and then exposed him to ridicule in the wittiest city of the
world. He attacked everybody, and yet was generally respected, since it
was _errors_ rather than persons, _opinions_ rather than vices, that he