490 HISTORY C F GREECE. only mail could not acquire such information, but ought not UJ labor after it. But respecting the topics which concern man and society, the views of Sokrates were completely the reverse. This was the field which the gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to human study and acquisition of knowledge ; A field, wherein, with that view, they managed phe- nomena on principles of constant and observable sequence, so that every man who took the requisite pains might know them Nay, Sokrates went a step further ; and this forward step is tU fundamental conviction upon which all his missionary impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these things but ought to know them ; that he could not possibly act well, unless he did know them ; and that it was his imperious duty to learn them as he would learn a profession ; otherwise, he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. Sokrates felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just, temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent, unless he taught himself to know correctly what justice, temper- ance, courage, piety, and patriotism, etc., really were. He was possessed with the truly Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and means. But when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied to acquire it ; fet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here, then, Sokrates found that the first outwork for him to surmount, was, that universal " conceit of knowledge without the reality," against which he declares such emphatic war ; and against which, also, though under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon declares war not less emphatically, two thousand years afterwards : " Opinio copioe inter causas inopiae est." Sokrates found that those notions respecting human and social affairs, on which each man relied and acted, were nothing but spontaneous products of the " intellectus sibi permissus," of the intellect left to itself either without any guidance, or with only the blind guidance of sympathies, antipathies, authority, or silent assimilation. They were products got together, to use Bacon's language, "from much faith and much chance, and from
