sidering that Socrates expressly mentions the duty of
imparting the truth when discovered to others. Nor must we forget that
the side of ethics which regards others is by the ancients merged in
politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in the Stoics,
the social principle, though taking another form, is really far more
prominent than in most modern treatises on ethics.

The idealizing of suffering is one of the conceptions which have
exercised the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological import
of this, or into the consideration of the errors to which the idea may
have given rise, we need not now enter. All will agree that the ideal of
the Divine Sufferer, whose words the world would not receive, the man of
sorrows of whom the Hebrew prophets spoke, has sunk deep into the heart
of the human race. It is a similar picture of suffering goodness which
Plato desires to pourtray, not without an allusion to the fate of his
master Socrates. He is convinced that, somehow or other, such an one
must be happy in life or after death. In the Republic, he endeavours to
show that his happiness would be assured here in a well-ordered state.
But in the actual condition of human things the wise and good are weak
and miserable; such an one is like a man fallen among wild beasts,
exposed to every sort of wrong and obloquy.

Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led on to the conclusion, that
if 'the ways of God' to man are to be 'justified,' the hopes of another
life must be included. If the question could have been put to him,
whether a man dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he suggests
in the Apology, 'death be only a long sleep,' we can hardly tell
what would have been his answer. There have been a few, who, quite
independently of rewards and punishments or of posthumous reputation,
or any other influence of public opinion, have been willing to sacrifice
their lives for the good of others. It is difficult to say how far in
such cases an unconscious hope of a future life, or a general faith in
the victory of good in the world, may have supported the sufferers. But
this extreme idealism is not in accordance with the spirit of Plato. He
supposes a day of retribution, in which the good are to be rewarded and
the wicked punished. Though, as he says in the Phaedo, no man of sense
will maintain that the details of the stories about another world are
true, he will insist that something of the kind is true, and wil