Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity.


THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCRATES.--Of Socrates nothing is known except
that he was born at Athens, that he held many public discussions with all
and sundry in the streets of Athens, and that he died under the Thirty
Tyrants. Of his ideas we know nothing, because he wrote nothing, and
because his disciples were far too intelligent; in consequence of which it
is impossible to know if what they said was thought by him, had really been
his ideas or theirs. What seems certain is that neither Aristophanes nor
the judges at the trial of Socrates were completely deceived in considering
him a Sophist; for he proceeded from them. It is true he proceeded from
them by reaction, because evidently their universal scepticism had
terrified him; but nevertheless he was their direct outcome, for like them
he was extremely mistrustful of the old vast systems of philosophy, and to
those men who pretended to know everything he opposed a phrase which is
probably authentic: "I know that I know nothing;" for, like the Sophists,
he wished to recall philosophy to earth from heaven, namely from
metaphysics to the study of man, and nothing else; for, like the Sophists,
he confined and limited the field with a kind of severe and imperious
modesty which was none the less contemptuous of the audacious; for,
finally, like the Sophists, but in this highly analogous to many
philosophers preceding the Sophists, he had but a very moderate and
mitigated respect for the religion of his fellow-citizens.

According to what we know of Socrates from Xenophon, unquestionably the
least imaginative of his disciples, Socrates, like the Sophists, reduced
philosophy to the study of man; but his great and incomparable originality
lay in the fact that whereas the Sophists wished man to study himself in
order to be happy, Socrates wished him to study himself in order to be