crates attracted notice at
Delphi as a defender of the old-fashioned religious views approved by the
Oracle, precisely in virtue of his opposition to the ideas then in vogue.

If we accept this explanation we are, however, excluded from taking
literally Plato's account of the answer of the Delphic Oracle and
Socrates's attitude towards it. Plato presents the case as if the Oracle
were the starting-point of Socrates's philosophy and of the peculiar mode
of life which was indissolubly bound up with it. This presentation cannot
be correct if we are to regard the Oracle as historical and understand it
as we have understood it. The Oracle presupposes the Socrates we know: a
man with a religious message and a mode of life which was bound to attract
notice to him as an exception from the general rule. It cannot, therefore,
have been the cause of Socrates's finding himself. On the other hand, it
is difficult to imagine a man choosing a mode of life like that of
Socrates without a definite inducement, without some fact or other that
would lead him to conceive himself as an exception from the rule. If we
look for such a fact in the life of Socrates, we shall look in vain as
regards externals. Apart from his activities as a religious and ethical
personality, his life was that of any other Attic citizen. But in his
spiritual life there was certainly one point, but only one, on which he
deviated from the normal, namely, his _daimonion_. If we examine the
accounts of this more closely the only thing we can make of them is--or so
at least it seems to me--that we are here in the presence of a
form--peculiar, no doubt, and highly developed--of the phenomena which are
nowadays classed under the concept of clairvoyance. Now Plato makes
Socrates himself say that the power of avoiding what would harm him, in
great things and little, by virtue of a direct perception (a "voice"),
which is what constituted his _daimonion_, was given him from childhood.
That it was regarded as something singular both by himself and others is
evident, and likewise that he himself regarded it as something
supernatural; the designation _daimonion_ itself seems to be his own. I
think that we must seek for the origin of Socrates's peculiar mode of life
in this direction, strange as it may be that a purely mystic element
should have given the impulse to the most rationalistic philosophy the
world has ever produced. It is impossible to enter more deeply into this
probl