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We find nothing so sweet in life as a quiet rest a tranquil and profound sleep without dreams. Now compare the monologue, 'To be or not to be, of the first quarto with the one contained in the second. It will then be seen that those Sokratic ideas, rendered by Montaigne in his own manner, have been worked into the first quarto.
The POLITIKUS is on the Art of Government, and gives the Platonic beau idéal of the One competent person, governing absolutely, by virtue of his scientific knowledge, and aiming at the good and improvement of the governed. This is merely another illustration of the Sokratic ideal a despotism, anointed by supreme good intentions, and by an ideal skill.
To subsist upon the narrowest means; to acquire indifference to pain, by a discipline of endurance; to despise all the ordinary pursuits of wealth and pleasure, were Sokratic peculiarities, and were the beau idéal of Cynicism.
In a truly Sokratic dialogue, Sokrates is in search of a definition of Courage; as happens in the search dialogues, there is no definite result, but the drift of the discussion is to make courage a mode of intelligence, and to resolve it into the grand desideratum of the knowledge of good and evil belonging to the One Wise Man. CHARMIDES discusses Temperance.
And farther, in imitation of his master, he carried on his search after truth under the guise of ascertaining the exact meaning or definition of leading terms; as Virtue, Courage, Holiness, Temperance, Justice, Law, Beauty, Knowledge, Rhetoric, &c. We shall first pass in review the chief Dialogues containing Ethical doctrines. The ALKIBIADES I. is a good specimen of the Sokratic manner.
And I sometimes think, by the way, that curtailed as it is to literary proportions in the dialogues of Plato, bereft of all that personal potency which it had when it flowed, instinct with earnestness, from the lips of the teacher even to this day the wit of man has perhaps devised no better general gymnastics for the understanding than the Sokratic dialectic.
It is a happy example of the Sokratic manner and purpose, of exposing the conceit of knowledge, the fancy that people understand the meaning of the general terms habitually employed. LYSIS on Friendship, or Love, might be expected to furnish some ethical openings, but it is rather a piece of dialectic, without result, farther than to impart the consciousness of ignorance.
It is urged that a mendacious person, able to tell the truth if he chooses, is better than one unable to tell it, although wishing to do so; the knowledge is of greater worth than the good disposition. This is a following out of the Sokratic analogy of the professions, to a purely ideal demand; the wise man is never producible.
It is in this argument that he recites the well-known apologue called the choice of Herakles; in which, Virtue on the one hand, and Pleasure with attendant vice on the other, with their respective consequences, are set before a youth in his opening career. The whole argument with Aristippus was purely prudential; but Aristippus was not convinced nor brought over to the Sokratic ideal.
This was not spoken seriously; but Antisthenes, the Sokratic philosopher, was serious when he said of the Thebans, who were in high spirits after their victory at Leuktra, that they were as pleased as schoolboys who had beaten their master.
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