been stated even in its absolute form when Homer said: "The
gods know everything." To Socrates, who always took his starting-point
quite popularly from notions that were universally accepted, this basis
was simply indispensable. And so far from inconveniencing Socrates, the
multiplicity and anthropomorphism of the gods seemed an advantage to
him--the more they were like man in all but the essential qualification,
the better.

The Socratic ignorance has an ethical bearing. Its complement is his
assertion that virtue is knowledge. Here again the gods are the necessary
presupposition and determination. That the gods were good, or, as it was
preferred to express it, "just" (the Greek word comprises more than the
English word), was no less a popular dogma than the notion that they
possessed knowledge. Now all Socrates's efforts were directed towards
goodness as an end in view, towards the ethical development of mankind.
Here again popular belief was his best ally. To the people to whom he
talked, virtue (the Greek word is at once both wider and narrower in sense
than the English term) was no mere abstract notion; it was a living
reality to them, embodied in beings that were like themselves, human
beings, but perfect human beings.

If we correlate this with the negative circumstance that Socrates was no
theologian but a teacher of ethics, we can easily understand a point of
view which accepted popular belief as it was and employed it for working
purposes in the service of moral teaching. Such a point of view, moreover,
gained extraordinary strength by the fact that it preserved continuity
with earlier Greek religious thought. This latter, too, had been ethical
in its bearing; it, too, had employed the gods in the service of its
ethical aim. But its central idea was felicity, not virtue; its
starting-point was the popular dogma of the felicity of the gods, not
their justice. In this way it had come to lay stress on a virtue which
might be termed modesty, but in a religious sense, _i.e._ man must
recognise his difference from the gods as a limited being, subject to the
vicissitudes of an existence above which the gods are raised. Socrates
says just the same, only that he puts knowledge or virtue, which to him
was the same thing, in the place of felicity. From a religious point of
view the result is exactly the same, namely, the doctrine of the gods as
the terminus and ideal, and the insistence on the gulf separating man from
t