ecause he lives by it and for it,
knows with intimate knowledge and certainty that there at least there
is a Law working, not himself, but higher and greater than he,--have we
not here a hint of the truth for the universe as a whole; that there
also and in all its operations, great as well as small, there must be a
Law, a great Idea or Ideal working, which was before all things, works
in and gives value to all things, will be the consummation of all
things? Is not this what we mean by the Divine?"

Thus Socrates, despising not the meaner things of life, but bending
from the airy speculations of the proud to the realities which true
labour showed him, laid his ear, so to speak, close to the breast of
nature, and caught there the sound of her very heart-beats.

"Virtue is knowledge," thus he formulated his new vision of things.
Knowledge, yes; but _real_ knowledge; not mere head-knowledge or
lip-knowledge, but the knowledge of the skilled man, the man who by
obedience and teachableness and self-restraint has come to a knowledge
evidencing itself in _works_ expressive of the law that is in him, as
he is in it. _Virtue is knowledge_; on the one hand, therefore, not
something in the air, unreal, intangible; but something in me, in you,
in each man, something which you cannot handle except as individual and
{113} in individuals; on the other hand, something more than individual
or capricious or uncertain,--something which is absolute, over-ruling,
eternal.

_Virtue is knowledge_. And so if a man is virtuous, he is realising
what is best and truest in himself, he is fulfilling also what is best
and truest without himself. He is free, for only the truth makes free;
he is obedient to law, but it is at once a law eternally valid, and a
law which he dictates to himself. And therefore virtue is teachable,
inasmuch as the law in the teacher, perfected in him, is also the law
in the taught, latent in him, by both individually possessed, but
possessed by both in virtue of its being greater than both, of its
being something more than individual.

_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore the law of virtuous growth is
expressed in the maxim engraved on the Delphic temple, 'Know thyself.'
Know thyself, that is, realise thyself; by obedience and self-control
come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility;
satisfy yourself, in the only way in which true self-satisfaction is
possible, by realising in yourself the law