en; balanced; keeping his head always;--a mind no
mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control,
either towards passion or ecstasy. One explanation remains--as
in the case of Joan, or of H.P. Blavatsky;--he was neither
deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear;
and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not
appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a
greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might
have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we
pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a
crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?

It is a strange figure to find in Greece; drawn thither, one
would say, by the attraction of opposites. He must have owed
some of his power to his being such a contrast to all things
familiar. Personal beauty was extremely common, and he was
comically ugly. The Athenians were one of the best-educated
populations of ancient or modern times--far ahead of ourselves;
and he was ill-educated, and acted as a public teacher. He was
hen-pecked at home, in an age when the place of woman was a very
subordinate and submissive one; and he was the butt of all
joke-lovers abroad, and himself enjoyed the joke most of all.
And he quietly stood alone, against the mob and his fellow-judges,
for the hapless victors of Arginusae in 406; and he quietly stood
alone against the Thirty Tyrants during their reign of terror in
404, disobeying them at peril of his life. But Strip him of the
"thing of sinews and muscles," as he called his outer self;
forget the queer old personality that appears in the _Clouds_ of
Aristophanes, or for that matter in the _Memorabilia_ of
Xenophon--and what kind of picture of Socrates should we see?
The humor would not go, for it is a universal quality; it has
been said no Adept was ever without it; could you draw aside the
veil of Mother Isis herself, and draw it suddenly, I suspect you
should surprise a laugh vanishing from her face. So the humor
would remain; and with it there would be ... something calm,
aloof, unshakable, yet vitally affectioned towards Athens, the
Athenians, humanity; something unsurprised at, far less hoping or
fearing anything from, life or death; in possession of "the
peace which passeth understanding"; native to "the eternity that
baffles all faculty of computation";--something that drew all
sorts and conditions of Ath