d to destroy humanity and {99} civilisation. But its
strength lay latent in an implied denial only of what was merely
traditional; it denied the finality of purely Greek preconceptions; it
was laying the foundations of a broader humanity. It represented the
claim of a new generation to have no dogma or assumption thrust on it
by mere force, physical or moral. "_I_ too am a man," it said; "_I_
have rights; _my_ reason must be convinced." This is the fundamental
thought at the root of most revolutions and reformations and revivals,
and the thought is therefore a necessary and a just one.

Unfortunately it seems to be an inevitable condition of human affairs
that nothing new, however necessary or good can come into being out of
the old, without much sorrow and many a birth-pang. The extravagant,
the impetuous, the narrow-minded on both sides seize on their points of
difference, raise them into battle-cries, and make what might be a
peaceful regeneration a horrid battlefield of contending hates. The
Christ when He comes brings not peace into the world, but a sword. And
men of evil passions and selfish ambitions are quick on both sides to
make the struggle of old and new ideals a handle for their own
indulgence or their own advancement; the Pharisees and the Judases
between them make the Advent in some of its aspects a sorry spectacle.

A reconciler was wanted who should wed what {100} was true in the new
doctrine of individualism with what was valuable in the old doctrine of
universal and necessary truth; who should be able to say, "Yes, I
acknowledge that your individual view of things must be reckoned with,
and mine, and everybody else's; and for that very reason do I argue for
a universal and necessary truth, because the very truth for you as an
individual is just this universal." The union and identification of
the Individual and Universal,--this paradox of philosophy is the
doctrine of Socrates.

{101}

CHAPTER XI

SOCRATES

_The crisis of philosophy--Philosophic midwifery--The wisest of
men--The gadfly of Athens--Justice, beauty, utility--Virtue is
knowledge_

The sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to descend into the
practical interests and personal affairs of men, it followed that any
further step in philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could
only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy, as an analysis of
the data of perception or of nature, had issued in a social