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incapacity; he is willing to do good work if he is able. III.--The SUMMUM BONUM with Sokrates was Well-doing. He had no ideal of pursuit for man apart from virtue, or what he esteemed virtue--the noble and the praiseworthy. This was the elevated point of view maintained alike by him and by Plato, and common to them with the ideal of modern ages. Well-doing consisted in doing well whatever a man undertook. 'The best man,' he said, 'and the most beloved by the gods, is he that, as a husbandman, performs well the duties of husbandry; as a surgeon, the duties of the medical art; in political life, his duty towards the commonwealth. The man that does nothing well is neither useful nor agreeable to the gods.' And as knowledge is essential to all undertakings, knowledge is the one thing needful. This exclusive regard to knowledge was his one-sidedness as a moral theorist; but he did not consistently exclude all reference to the voluntary control of appetite and passion. IV.--He inculcated Practical Precepts of a self-denying kind, intended to curb the excesses of human desire and ambition. He urged the pleasures of self-improvement and of duty against indulgences, honours, and worldly advancement. In the 'Apology,' he states it as the second aim of his life (after imparting the shock of conscious ignorance) to reproach men for pursuing wealth and glory more than wisdom and virtue. In 'Kriton,' he lays it down that we are never to act wrongly or unjustly, although others are unjust to us. And, in his own life, he furnished an illustrious example of his teaching. The same lofty strain was taken up by Plato, and repeated in most of the subsequent Ethical schools. V.--His Ethical Theory extended itself to Government, where he applied his analogy of the special arts. The legitimate King was he that knew how to govern well. VI.--The connexion in the mind of Sokrates between Ethics and Theology was very slender. In the first place, his distinction of Divine and Human things, was an exclusion of the arbitrary will of the gods from human affairs, or from those things that constituted the ethical end. But in the next place, he always preserved a pious and reverential tone of mind; and considered that, after patient study, men should still consult the oracles, by which the gods, in cases of difficulty, graciously signified their intentions, and their beneficent care of the race. Then, the practice of well-doing was prom
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