an has his world, the artist his also, and the
man of books and letters a realm still apart from all others. And to each
of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary
importance; he is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing.
To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a litigant; to the grocer the
world is that which eats, and pays--with more or less regularity; to the
scholar the world is in books and ideas. One realizes how possessed he is
with his own little world only when by chance he changes his profession
or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or journalism,
and sees in its true proportion what it was that once absorbed him and
seemed to him so large. When Socrates discusses with Gorgias the value of
rhetoric, the use of which, the latter asserts, relates to the greatest
and best of human things, Socrates says: I dare say you have heard men
singing--at feasts the old drinking-song, in which the singers enumerate
the goods of life-first, health; beauty next; thirdly, wealth honestly
acquired. The producers of these things--the physician, the trainer, the
money-maker--each in turn contends that his art produces the greatest
good. Surely, says the physician, health is the greatest good; there is
more good in my art, says the trainer, for my business is to make men
beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says the money-maker, whether
any one can produce a greater good than wealth. But, insists Gorgias, the
greatest good of men, of which I am the creator, is that which gives men
freedom in their persons, and the power of ruling over others in their
several states--that is, the word which persuades the judge in the court,
or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly: if you
have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your
slave, and the trainer your slave, and the moneymaker of whom you talk
will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for those who are
able to speak and persuade the multitude.

What we call life is divided into occupations and interest, and the
horizons of mankind are bounded by them. It happens naturally enough,
therefore, that there should be a want of sympathy in regard to these
pursuits among men, the politician despising the scholar, and the scholar
looking down upon the politician, and the man of affairs, the man of
industries, not caring to conceal his contempt for both the others. And
still