Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, a statuary, and Phænarete, a midwife, was bornb.c. 468. He lived all his life at Athens, serving indeed as a soldier at Potidæa, Amphipolis, and in the battle of Delium; but with these exceptions he never left the city; where he lived as a teacher of philosophy; not, however, founding a school or giving lectures, but frequenting the market-place and all other places of public resort, talking with every one who chose to address him, and putting questions to every one of every rank and profession, so that Grote calls him “a public talker for instruction.” He believed himself to have a special religious mission from the Gods to bring his countrymen to knowledge and virtue. He was at last impeached before the legal tribunals, on the ground of “corrupting the youth of the city, and not worshipping the Gods whom the city worshipped;” and disdaining to defend himself, or rather making a justificatory defence of such a character as to exasperate the judges, he was condemned to death, and executed by having hemlock administered to him,b.c. 399.

From his disciples Plato and Xenophon we have a very full account of his habits and doctrines; though it has been much disputed which of the two is to be considered as giving the most accurate description of his opinions. As a young man he had been to a certain extent a pupil of Archelaus (the disciple of Anaxagoras), and derived his fondness for the dialectic style of argument from Zeno the Eleatic, the favourite Pupil of Parmenides. He differed, however, from all preceding philosophers in discarding and excluding wholly from his[pg xiv] studies all the abstruse sciences, and limiting his philosophy to those practical points which could have influence on human conduct. “He himself was always conversing about the affairs of men,” is the description given of him by Xenophon. Astronomy he pronounced to be one of the divine mysteries which it was impossible to understand and madness to investigate; all that man wanted was to know enough of the heavenly bodies to serve as an index to the change of seasons and as guides for voyages, etc.; and that knowledge might, he said, easily be obtained from pilots and watchmen. Geometry he reduced to its literal meaning of land-measuring, useful to enable one to act with judgment in the purchase or sale of land; but he looked with great contempt on the study of complicated diagrams and mathematical problems. As to general natural philosophy, he wholly discarded it; asking whether those who professed to apply themselves to that study knewhuman affairs so well as to have time to spare fordivine; was it that they thought that they could influence the winds, rain, and seasons, or did they desire nothing but the gratification of an idle curiosity? Men should recollect how much the wisest of them who have attempted to prosecute these investigations differ from one another, and how totally opposite and contradictory their opinions are.

Socrates, then, looked at all knowledge from the point of view of human practice. He first, as Cicero says, (Tusc. Dis. v. 4,) “called philosophy down from heaven and establi