or
else excusing them.' For all our life long we are talking with
ourselves:--What is thought but speech? What is feeling but rhetoric?
And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be always in danger
of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at first sounded
paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.

Third Thesis:--

We do not what we will, but what we wish.

Socrates would teach us a lesson which we are slow to learn--that good
intentions, and even benevolent actions, when they are not prompted by
wisdom, are of no value. We believe something to be for our good which
we afterwards find out not to be for our good. The consequences may be
inevitable, for they may follow an invariable law, yet they may often be
the very opposite of what is expected by us. When we increase pauperism
by almsgiving; when we tie up property without regard to changes of
circumstances; when we say hastily what we deliberately disapprove; when
we do in a moment of passion what upon reflection we regret; when from
any want of self-control we give another an advantage over us--we are
doing not what we will, but what we wish. All actions of which the
consequences are not weighed and foreseen, are of this impotent and
paralytic sort; and the author of them has 'the least possible power'
while seeming to have the greatest. For he is actually bringing about
the reverse of what he intended. And yet the book of nature is open
to him, in which he who runs may read if he will exercise ordinary
attention; every day offers him experiences of his own and of other
men's characters, and he passes them unheeded by. The contemplation of
the consequences of actions, and the ignorance of men in regard to them,
seems to have led Socrates to his famous thesis:--'Virtue is knowledge;'
which is not so much an error or paradox as a half truth, seen first in
the twilight of ethical philosophy, but also the half of the truth which
is especially needed in the present age. For as the world has grown
older men have been too apt to imagine a right and wrong apart from
consequences; while a few, on the other hand, have sought to resolve
them wholly into their consequences. But Socrates, or Plato for him,
neither divides nor identifies them; though the time has not yet arrived
either for utilitarian or transcendental systems of moral philosophy, he
recognizes the two elements which seem to lie at the basis of morality.
(Compare the following: