uth of Socrates the following
words:--"Chairephon .... made a pilgrimage to Delphi and had the
audacity to ask this question from the oracle .... He actually asked
if there was any man wiser than I. And the priestess answered, No ....
When I heard the answer, I asked myself: What can the god mean? what
can he be hinting? For certainly I have never thought myself wise in
anything, great or small. What can he mean then, when he asserts that
I am the wisest of men? He cannot lie, of course: that would be
impossible for him. And for a long while I was at a loss to think what
he could mean. At last, after much thought, I started on some such
course as this. I betook myself to one of the men who seemed wise,
thinking that there, if anywhere, I should refute the utterance, and
could say to the oracle: 'This man is wiser than I, and you said I was
the wisest.' Now when I looked into the man--there is no need to give
his name--it was one of our citizens, men of Athens, with whom I had
an experience of this kind--when we talked together I thought, 'This
man seems wise to many men, and above all to himself, but he is not
so'; and then I tried to show that he thought he was wise, but he was
not. Then he got angry with me and so did many who heard us, but I
went away and thought to myself, 'Well, at any rate I am wiser than
this man: probably neither of {130} us knows anything of beauty or of
good, but he thinks he knows something when he knows nothing, and I,
if I know nothing, at least never suppose that I do. So it looks as
though I really were a little wiser than he, just in so far as I do
not imagine myself to know things about which I know nothing at all.'
After that I went to another man who seemed to be wiser still, and I
had exactly the same experience, and then he got angry with me too,
and so did many more. Thus I went round them all, one after the other,
aware of what was happening and sorry for it, and afraid that they
were getting to hate me."

In this passage we can see, too, the supposed origin of another
peculiar Socratic feature, the Socratic "irony." In any discussion,
Socrates would, as a rule, profess himself to be totally ignorant of
the matter in hand, and only anxious to learn the wisdom possessed by
his interlocutor. This professed ignorance was not affectation. He was
genuinely impressed with the notion that not only he, but all other
men, live for the most part in ignorance of the things that are the
most