To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point of stability in the world of morals, and by a system of attack, invented by himself, to deal in such a manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare the way for his successors, when the time was ripe for a more extended exposition of the new point of { 103} view. Those who in succession to him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in the world of morals, only were called the _Incomplete Socratics_. Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the knowable, the _Complete Socratics_, were the two giants of philosophy, Plato and Aristotle.
Greek philosophy then marks with the life of Socrates a parting of the ways in two senses: _first_, inasmuch as with him came the reaction from a physical or theoretical philosophy, having its issue in a moral chaos; and _second_, inasmuch as from him the two great streams of later philosophy issued--the one a philosophy of law or universals in _action_, the other a philosophy of law or universals in _thought_ and _nature_ as well.
Socrates, son of Sophroniscus a sculptor and Phaenarete a midwife, was born at Athens in or about the year 469 B.C. His parents were probably poor, for Socrates is represented as having been too poor to pay the fees required for instruction by the Sophists of his time. But in whatever way acquired or assimilated, it is certain that there was little of the prevalent culture in cultivated Athens with which Socrates had not ultimately a working acquaintance.
Among a people distinguished generally for their handsome features and noble proportions, Socrates was a notable exception. His face was squat and { 104} round, his eyes protruding, his lips thick; he was clumsy and uncouth in appearance, careless of dress, a thorough 'Bohemian,' as we should call him. He was, however, gifted with an uncommon bodily vigour, was indifferent to heat and cold, by temperament moderate in food and drink, yet capable on occasion of drinking most people 'under the table.' He was of an imperturbable humour, not to be excited either by danger or by ridicule. His vein of sarcasm was keen and trenchant, his natural shrewdness astonishing, all the more astonishing because crossed with a strange vein of mysticism and a curious self-forgetfulness. As he grew up he felt the visitation of a mysterious internal voice, to which or to his own internal communings he would sometimes be observed to listen in abstracted stillness for hours. The voice within him was felt as a restraining force, limiting his action in various ways, but leaving him free to wander about among his fellows, to watch their doings and interpret their thoughts, to question unweariedly his fellows of every class, high and low, rich and poor, concerning righteousness and justice and goodness and purity and truth. He did not enter on his philosophic work with some grand general principle ready-made, to which he was prepared to fit the facts by hook or by crook. Rather he compared himself to his mother, the midwife; he sought to help others to { 105} express themselves; he had nothing to tell them, he wanted them to tell him. This was the irony of Socrates, the eternal _questioning_, which in time came to mean in people's minds what the word does now. For it was hard, and grew every year harder, to convince people that so subtle a questioner was as ignorant as he professed to be; or that the man who could touch so keenly the weak point of all other men's answers, had no answer to the problems of life himself.