A History of Greek Philosophy / SOCRATES

Page 10

 “Have we not here a key to the great secret? If each man, in respect of that which he knows best because he lives by it and for it, knows with intimate knowledge and certainty that there at least there is a Law working, not himself, but higher and greater than he,—have we not here a hint of the truth for the universe as a whole; that there also and in all its operations, great as well as small, there must be a Law, a great Idea or Ideal working, which was before all things, works in and gives value to all things, will be the consummation of all things? Is not this what we mean by the Divine?”

Thus Socrates, despising not the meaner things of life, but bending from the airy speculations of the proud to the realities which true labour showed him, laid his ear, so to speak, close to the breast of nature, and caught there the sound of her very heart-beats.

“Virtue is knowledge,” thus he formulated his new vision of things. Knowledge, yes; but real knowledge; not mere head-knowledge or lip-knowledge, but the knowledge of the skilled man, the man who by obedience and teachableness and self-restraint has come to a knowledge evidencing itself in works expressive of the law that is in him, as he is in it. Virtue is knowledge; on the one hand, therefore, not something in the air, unreal, intangible; but something in me, in you, in each man, something which you cannot handle except as individual and in individuals; on the other hand, something more than individual or capricious or uncertain,—something which is absolute, over-ruling, eternal.

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