and actions.

The disinterested self-sacrificing nobility of Socrates' life, thus
devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the
enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and
pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends,
the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested
enemies, the satires of poets; and lastly, the story of the final
attack by an ungrateful people on their one great teacher, of his
unjust condemnation and heroic death--all this we must pass over here.
The story is in outline, at least, a familiar one, and it is one of the
noblest in history. What is more to {109} the purpose for us is to
ascertain how far his search for definitions was successful; how far he
was able to

Take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them;

how far, in short, he was able to evolve a law, a universal principle,
out of the confused babel of common life and thought and speech, strong
enough and wide enough on which to build a new order for this world, a
new hope for the world beyond.

We have said that Socrates made the individual and the concrete the
field of his search. And not only did he look to individuals for
light, he looked to each individual specifically in that aspect of his
character and faculty which was most particular to himself. That is to
say, if he met a carpenter, it was on his carpentering that he
questioned him; if a sculptor, on his practice as a sculptor; if a
statesman, on his statesmanship. In short, he did not want general
vague theories on subjects of which his interlocutors could not be
supposed to have any special experience or knowledge; he interrogated
each on the subject which he knew best.

And what struck him, in contrast to the confusion and uncertainty and
isolation of the sophistic teaching 'in the air,' was that when you get
a man to talk on his own trade, which he _knows_, as is proved by the
actual work he produces, you find invariably two {110} things--_first_,
that the skill is the man's _individual_ possession no doubt, the
result of inborn capacity and continuous training and practice; but
_second_, that just in proportion to that individual skill is the man's
conviction that his skill has reference to a _law_ higher than himself,
outside himself. If the man whom Socrates interviewed was a skilful
statesman, he would tell you he sought to produce obedience to _law_ or
right amon