LARGE PURPOSE OF SOKRATES. 433 upon a modest scale, and under the pressure of logical embar- rassment weighing on his own mind. But as he proceeded, and found himself successful, as well as acquiring reputation among a certain circle of friends, his earnest soul became more and more penetrated with devotion to that which he regarded as a duty. It was at this time probably, that his friend Chaerephon came back with the oracular answer from Delphi, noticed a few pages above, to which Sokrates himself alludes as having prompted him to extend the range of his conversation, and to question a class of persons whom he had not before ventured to approach, the noted politicians, poets, and artisans. He found them more confident than humbler individuals in their own wisdom, but quite as unable to reply to his queries without being driven to contradictory answers. Such scrutiny of the noted men in Athens is made to stand prominent in the " Platonic Apology," because it was the prin- cipal cause of that unpopularity which Sokrates at once laments and accounts for before the dikasts. Nor can we doubt that it was the most impressive portion of his proceedings, in the eyes both of enemies and admirers, as well as the most flattering to his own natural temper. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to present this part of the general purpose of Sokrates or of his divine mission, if we adopt his own language as if it were the whole ; and to describe him as one standing forward merely to unmask select leading men, politicians, sophists, poets, or others, who had acquired unmerited reputation, and were puffed up with foolish conceit of their own abilities, being in reality shallow and incompetent. Such an idea of Sokrates is at once inadequate and erroneous. His conversation, as I have before remarked, was absolutely universal and indiscriminate ; while the mental defect which he strove to rectify was one not at all peculiar to leading men, but common to them with the mass of mankind, though seeming to be exaggerated in them, partly because more is expected from them, partly because the general feeling of self-estimation stands at a higher level, naturally and reason- ably, in their bosoms, than in those of ordinary persons. That defect was, the "seeming and conceit of knowledge without the reality," on human life with its duties, purposes, and con- VOL. vni. 19 28oc.
