448 HISTORY OF GREECE. fancied knowledge, and laying bare the real ignorance, j an immediate effect like the touch of the torpedo : ] the newly- created consciousness of ignorance was alike unexpected, painful, and humiliating, a season of doubt and discomfort ; yet com- bined with an internal working and yearning after truth, never before experienced. Such intellectual quickening, which could never commence until the mind had been disabused of its original illusion of false knowledge, was considered by Sokrates not merely as the index and precursor, but as the indispensable condition, of future progress. It was the middle point in the ascending mental scale ; the lowest point being ignorance unconscious, self- satisfied, and mistaking itself for knowledge ; the next above, ignorance conscious, unmasked, ashamed of itself, and thirsting after knowledge as yet unpossessed ; while actual knowledge, the third and highest stage, was only attainable after passing through the second as a preliminary. 2 This second, was a sort of preg- nancy ; and every mind either by nature incapable of it, or in which, from want of the necessary conjunction, it had never arisen, was barren for all purposes of original or self-appropriat ed thought. Sokrates regarded it as his peculiar vocation and skill, employing another Platonic metaphor, while he had him- self no power of reproduction, to deal with such pregnant and troubled minds in the capacity of a midwife ; to assist them in that mental parturition whereby they were to be relieved, but at the same tune to scrutinize narrowly the offspring which they brought forth; and if it should prove distorted or unpromising, to cast it away with the rigor of a Lykurgean nurse, whatever might be the reluctance of the mother-mind to part with its new-born.3 1 Plato, Men. c. 13, p. 80, A. 6fj.ot6raTOf rrj 7rAama vdpKi) -fj &a?.aaai<j
- This tripartite graduation of the intellectual scale is brought out by
Plato in the Symposion, c. 29, p. 204, A, and in the Lysis, c. 33, p. 218. A. The intermediate point of the scale is what Plato here, though not al- ways, expresses by the word QtAoffoQof, in its strict etymological sense, " a lover of knowledge ;" one who is not yet wise, but who, having learned to know and feel his own ignorance, is anxious to become wise, and .iaa thus made what Plato thought the greatest and most difficult step toward* really becoming so. 3 The effect of the interrogatory procedure of Sokrates, in forcing on the minds ol ? youth a humiliating consciousness of ignoranje and an eager
