The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great
Philosophers, Volume 8, by Elbert Hubbard

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Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8

Author: Elbert Hubbard

Release Date: November 27, 2007 [EBook #23640]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 8

Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Philosophers

by

ELBERT HUBBARD

Memorial Edition

New York

1916.

CONTENTS

SOCRATES
SENECA
ARISTOTLE
MARCUS AURELIUS
IMMANUEL KANT
SWEDENBORG
SPINOZA
AUGUSTE COMTE
VOLTAIRE
HERBERT SPENCER
SCHOPENHAUER
HENRY D. THOREAU

SOCRATES

I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a
worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor
when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods.

--_The Republic_

[Illustration: SOCRATES]

It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born.
He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public
office, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp,
vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us
familiar--his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit
of his life--his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his
infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith--all these
things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting him
apart.

The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give us
Boswellian pictures of the man.

Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, we
know the man.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wife
Phaenarete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sitting
by, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans of
Pericles. These workmen d