THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

8 THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
the crudity of the stone, something of that human kindliness and unassuming
simplicity which made this homely thinker a teacher beloved
of the finest youths in Athens. We know so little about him, and yet we
know him so much more intimately than the aristocratic Plato or the
reserved and scholarly Aristotle. Across two thousand three hundred
years we can yet see his ungainly figure, clad always in the same rumpled
tunic, walking leisurely through the agora, undisturbed by the bedlam of
politics, buttonholing his prey, gathering the young and the learned about
him, luring them into some shady nook of the temple porticos, and asking
them to define their terms.
They were a motley crowd, these youths who flocked about him and
helped him to create European philosophy. There were rich young men
like Plato and Alcibiades, who relished his satirical analysis of Athenian
democracy; there were socialists like Antisthenes, who liked the master's
careless poverty, and made a religion of it; there was even an anarchist
or two among them, like Aristippus, who aspired to a world in which
there would be neither masters nor slaves, and all would be as worri-
lessly free as Socrates. All the problems that agitate human society
to-day, and provide the material of youth's endless debate, agitated as
well that little band of thinkers and talkers, who felt, with their teacher,
that life without discourse would be unworthy of a man. Every school
of social thought had there its representative, and perhaps its origin.
How the master lived hardly anybody knew. He never worked, and he
took no thought of the morrow. He ate when his disciples asked him to
honor their tables; they must have liked his company, for he gave every
indication of physiological prosperity. He was not so welcome at home,
for he neglected his wife and children; and from Xanthippe's point of
view he was a good-for-nothing idler who brought to his family more
notoriety than bread. Xanthippe liked to talk almost as much as Socrates
did; and they seem to have had some dialogues which Plato failed to
record. Yet she, too, loved him, and could not contentedly see him die
even after three-score years and ten.
Why did his pupils reverence him so? Perhaps because he was a man
as well as a philosopher: he had at great risk saved the life of Alcibiades
in battle; and he could drink like a gentleman without fear and without
excess. But no doubt they liked best in him the modesty of his wisdom: he
did not claim to have wisdom, but only to seek it
lovingly; he was
wisdom's amateur, not its professional. It was said that the oracle at
Delphi, with unusual good sense, had pronounced him the wisest of the
Greeks; and he had interpreted this as an approval of the agnosticism
which was the starting-point of his philosophy "One thing only I know,
and that is that I know nothing." Philosophy begins when one learns
to doubt particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas
and one's axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became cer*