[Footnote H: Laws. VII. 803. B.]

CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

[Sidenote: Socratic ethics retrospective.]

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational
ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind. One
by his irony, another by his frank idealism, and the third by his
preponderating interest in history and analysis, showed clearly enough
how little they dared to hope. They were merely writing an eloquent
epitaph on their country. They were publishing the principles of what
had been its life, gathering piously its broken ideals, and interpreting
its momentary achievement. The spirit of liberty and co-operation was
already dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and petty
quarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He had
begun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and of
justice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul,
he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. He
felt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen might
have preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him which
alone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his material
profit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegrated
society began to drive him to artificial excitements and superstitions.
Democracy had learned to regard as enemies the few in whom public
interest was still represented, the few whose nobler temper and
traditions still coincided with the general good. These last patriots
were gradually banished or exterminated, and with them died the spirit
that rational ethics had expressed. Philosophers were no longer suffered
to have illusions about the state. Human activity on the public stage
had shaken off all allegiance to art or reason.

[Sidenote: Rise of disillusioned moralities.]

The biographer of reason might well be tempted to ignore the subsequent
attitudes into which moral life fell in the West, since they all
embodied a more or less complete despair, and, having abandoned the
effort to express the will honestly and dialectically, they could
support no moral science. The point was merely to console or deceive the
soul with some substitute for happiness. Life is older and more
persistent than reason, and the failure of a first experiment in
rationality does not deprive mankind of that mental and moral vegetation
which they