The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

all this." 1 Ill
THE SOCRATIC IMPULSE 5
detail, went on to show that I sit here because my
body is made up of bones and muscles ;
and the bones,
as he would say, are hard, and have joints which divide
them, and the muscles are elastic,
and they cover the
bones, which have also a covering or environment of
flesh and skin which contains them ;
and as the bones
are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation
of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this
is
why I am sitting here in a curved posture that is
what he would say ;
and he would have a similar ex
planation of my talking to you, which he would attri
bute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would
assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, for
getting to mention the true cause, which is, that the
Athenians have thought
fit to condemn me, and ac
cordingly I have thought it better and more right to
remain here and undergo my sentence. . . . There is
surely a strange
confusion of causes and conditions in
It was the characteristic of Socrates that he turned
men s thoughts from the study of matter and mechanical
causes to self-reflection or the study of mind : as Cicero
puts it rhetorically, in the Tusculan Disputations (v. 4),
44
Socrates was the first to call down philosophy from
heaven, and to place it in cities, and to introduce it into
the houses of men, compelling men to examine into
life and morals, and good and evil."
This he regarded
as a divine vocation, as a work imposed upon him by
the Deity, in discharging which he made prominent the
position that self-knowledge, "know thyself"
1
Jowett s trans.