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If you have any other fault to find you won't get off without an answer, unless it is something that can be put right without expense. I now come to January and my "political attitude," in which, after the manner of the Socratics, I shall put the two sides; at the end, however, as they were wont to do, the one which I approve. It is, indeed, a matter for profound reflexion.

Whereas in the case of theimperfect Socraticsas well as of all the earlier philosophers we must content ourselves with more or less casual notes, and at the best with fragments, and for Socrates with second-hand information, when we come to Plato we find ourselves for the first time in the presence of full and authentic information.

Let them read them, if they please, who are of the same opinions; for in the same manner as all men read Plato and the other Socratics, with those who sprung from them, even those who do not agree with their opinions, or are very indifferent about them; but scarcely any one except their own disciples take Epicurus or Metrodorus into their hands; so they alone read these Latin books who think that the arguments contained in them are sound.

Nor had they any sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time. Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not establish the existence of some abstract class of goods.

Finally, in conclusion of the present chapter, books implore of you: make your young men who though ignorant are apt of intellect apply themselves to study, furnishing them with necessaries, that ye may teach them not only goodness but discipline and science, may terrify them by blows, charm them by blandishments, mollify them by gifts, and urge them on by painful rigour, so that they may become at once Socratics in morals and Peripatetics in learning.

He was a voluminous, some thought a too voluminous, expounder of his tenets. Like the other Incomplete Socratics, his teaching was mainly on ethical questions. His chief pupil and successor was the famous Diogenes, a native of Sinope, a Greek colony on the Euxine Sea.

Those who in succession to him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in the world of morals, only were called the Incomplete Socratics. Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the knowable, the Complete Socratics, were the two giants of philosophy, Plato and Aristotle.

To this the several teachers replied in order; first the Pythagoreans, next the Socratics, and afterwards the rest: but among them there was a certain Platonist, who spoke last; and his opinion prevailed, which was to this effect; That the men of the saturnine or golden age knew and acknowledged that they were forms receptive of life from God; and that on this account wisdom was inscribed on their souls and hearts, and hence they saw truth from the light of truth, and by truths perceived good from the delight of the love thereof: but as mankind in the following ages receded from the acknowledgement that all the truth of wisdom and the consequent good of love belonging to them, continually flowed in from God, they ceased to be habitations of God; and then also discourse with God, and consociation with angels ceased: for the interiors of their minds were bent from their direction, which had been elevated upwards to God from God, into a direction more and more oblique, outwardly into the world, and thereby to God from God through the world, and at length inverted into an opposite direction, which is downwards to self; and as God cannot be looked at by a man interiorly inverted, and thereby averted, men separated themselves from God, and were made forms of hell or devils.

If you want Virtue in the state look for it in a good man, not in a speculative tangle of laws. The Spartan constitution, as it stands, is good enough for any one. But it was another of the great Socratics who uttered first the characteristic message of the fourth century, and met the blows of Fortune with a direct challenge. Antisthenes was a man twenty years older than Plato.

Antisthenes, though he had moved hitherto in the somewhat patrician circle of the Socratics, remembered how that his mother was a Thracian slave, and set up his school in Kynosarges among the disinherited of the earth. He made friends with the 'bad, who needed befriending. He dressed like the poorest workman.