This is frank intellectualism, of course; and the best-refuted doctrine in philosophy. It is amusing to observe the ease with which critics and historians despatch the Socratic ethic. It is "an extravagant paradox," says Sidgwick,[8] "incompatible with moral freedom." "Nothing is easier," says Gomperz,[9] "than to detect the one-sidedness of this point of view." "This doctrine," says Grote,[10] "omits to notice, what is not less essential, the proper conditions of the emotions, desires, etc." "It tended to make all conduct a matter of the intellect and not of the character, and so in a sense to destroy moral responsibility," says Hobhouse.[11] "Himself blessed with a will so powerful that it moved almost without friction," says Henry Jackson,[12] "Socrates fell into the error of ignoring its operations, and was thus led to regard knowledge as the sole condition of well-doing." "Socrates was a misunderstanding," says Nietzsche;[13] "reason at any price, life made clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the instincts, was in itself only a disease, ... and by no means a return to 'virtue,' to 'health,' and to happiness." And the worn-out dictum about seeing the better and approving it, yet following the worse, is quoted as the deliverance of a profound psychologist, whose verdict should be accepted as a final solution of the problem.
Before refuting a doctrine it is useful to try to understand it. What could Socrates have meant by saying that all real virtue is intelligence? What is virtue?
A civilization may be characterized in terms of its conception of virtue. There is hardly anything more distinctive of the Greek attitude, as compared with our own, than the Greek notion of virtue as intelligence. Consider the present connotations of the word _virtue_: men shrink at having the term applied to them; and "nothing makes one so vain," says Oscar Wilde, "as being told that one is a sinner." During the Middle Ages the official conception of virtue was couched in terms of womanly excellence; and the sternly masculine God of the Hebrews suffered considerably from the inroads of Mariolatry. Protestantism was in part a rebellion of the ethically subjugated male; in Luther the man emerges riotously from the monk. But as people cling to the ethical implications of a creed long after the creed itself has been abandoned, so our modern notion of virtue is still essentially mediæval and feminine. Virginity, chastity, conjugal fidelity, gentility, obedience, loyalty, kindness, self-sacrifice, are the stock-in-trade of all respectable moralists; to be "good" is to be harmless, to be not "bad," to be a sort of sterilized citizen, guaranteed not to injure. This sheepish innocuousness comes easily to the natively uninitiative, to those who are readily amenable to fear and prohibitions. It is a static virtue; it contracts rather than expands the soul; it offers no handle for development, no incentive to social stimulation and productivity. It is time we stopped calling this insipidly negative attitude by the once mighty name of virtue. Virtue must be defined in terms of that which is vitally significant in our lives.