at knowledge which was applied merely to rising in the world.
Though plain, practical, and even homely in his conversation, he was not
utilitarian. Science had no charm to him, since it was directed to
utilitarian ends and was uncertain. His sayings had such a lofty, hidden
wisdom that very few people understood him: his utterances seemed either
paradoxical, or unintelligible, or sophistical. "To the mentally proud
and mentally feeble he was equally a bore." Most people probably thought
him a nuisance, since he was always about with his questions, puzzling
some, confuting others, and reproving all,--careless of love or hatred,
and contemptuous of all conventionalities. So severely dialectical was
he that he seemed to be a hair-splitter. The very Sophists, whose
ignorance and pretension he exposed, looked upon him as a quibbler;
although there were some--so severely trained was the Grecian mind--who
saw the drift of his questions, and admired his skill. Probably there
are few educated people in these times who could have understood him any
more easily than a modern audience, even of scholars, could take in one
of the orations of Demosthenes, although they might laugh at the jokes
of the sage, and be impressed with the invectives of the orator.

And yet there were defects in Socrates. He was most provokingly
sarcastic; he turned everything to ridicule; he remorselessly punctured
every gas-bag he met; he heaped contempt on every snob; he threw stones
at every glass house,--and everybody lived in one. He was not quite just
to the Sophists, for they did not pretend to teach the higher life, but
chiefly rhetoric, which is useful in its way. And if they loved applause
and riches, and attached themselves to those whom they could utilize,
they were not different from most fashionable teachers in any age. And
then Socrates was not very delicate in his tastes. He was too much
carried away by the fascinations of Aspasia, when he knew that she was
not virtuous,--although it was doubtless her remarkable intellect which
most attracted him, not her physical beauty; since in the "Menexenus"
(by many ascribed to Plato) he is made to recite at length one of her
long orations, and in the "Symposium" he is made to appear absolutely
indelicate in his conduct with Alcibiades, and to make what would be
abhorrent to us a matter of irony, although there was the severest
control of the passions.

To me it has always seemed a strange thing that su