moral, honest, and just, without any regard to happiness. For Socrates,
everything had to tend towards morality, to contribute to it, and to be
subordinated to it as the goal and as the final aim. He applied himself
unceasingly, relates Xenophon, to examine and to determine what is good and
evil, just and unjust, wise and foolish, brave and cowardly, etc. He
incessantly applied himself, relates Aristotle--and therein he was as much
a true professor of rhetoric as of morality--thoroughly to define and
carefully to specify the meaning of words in order not to be put off with
vague terms which are illusions of thought, and in order to discipline his
mind rigorously so as to make it an organ for the ascertainment of truth.

HIS METHOD.--He had dialectical methods, "the art of conferring," as
Montaigne called it, more or less happy, which he had probably borrowed
from the Sophists, that contributed to cause him to be considered one of
them, and exercised a wide vogue long after him. He "delivered men's
minds," as he himself said--that is, he believed, or affected to believe,
that the verities are in a latent state in all minds, and that it needed
only patience, dexterity, and skillful investigation to bring them to
light. Elsewhere, he _interrogated_ in a captious fashion in order to
set the interlocutor in contradiction to himself and to make him confess
that he had said what he had not thought he had said, agreed to what he had
not believed he had agreed to; and he triumphed maliciously over such
confusions. In short, he seems to have been a witty and teasing Franklin,
and to have taught true wisdom by laughing at everyone. Folk never like to
be ridiculed, and no doubt the recollection of these ironies had much to do
with the iniquitous judgment which condemned him, and which he seems to
have challenged up to the last.

HIS INFLUENCE.--His influence was infinite. It is from him that
morality became the end itself, the last and supreme end of all