t. He forgot that the majority of men's actions are governed by
passions and emotions, "the irrational parts of the soul." Aristotle's
criticism of Socrates is unanswerable. All experience shows that men
do deliberately do wrong, that, knowing well what is right, they
nevertheless do wrong. But it is easy to see why Socrates made this
mistake; he was arguing only from {148} his own case. Socrates really
does appear to have been above human weakness. He was not guided by
passions, but by reason, and it followed as the night follows the day,
that if Socrates knew what was right, he did it. He was unable to
understand how men, knowing the right, could yet do the wrong. If they
are vicious, he thought, it must be because they do not know what is
right. The criticism of Aristotle is thus justified. Yet for all that,
the theory of Socrates is not to be too quickly brushed aside. There
is more truth in it than appears at first sight. We say that a man
believes one thing and does another. Yet it is a matter of question
what a man really believes, and what is the test of his belief. Men go
to church every Sunday, and there repeat formulas and prayers, of
which the main idea is that all earthly riches are worthless in
comparison with spiritual treasures. Such men, if asked, might tell us
that they believe this to be true. They believe that they believe it.
And yet in actual life, perhaps, they seek only for earthly riches,
and behave as if they thought these the supreme good. What do such men
really believe? Do they believe as they speak, or as they act? Is it
not at least arguable that they are really pursuing what they believe
to be good, and that, if they were genuinely convinced of the
superiority of spiritual treasures, they would seek them, and not
material riches? This at least is what Socrates thought. All men seek
the good, but the many do not know what the good is. There is
certainly truth in this in many cases, though in others there can be
no doubt that men do deliberately what they know to be evil.

There are two other characteristic Socratic propositions {149} which
flow from the same general idea, that virtue is identical with
knowledge. The first is, that virtue can be taught. We do not
ordinarily think that virtue can be taught like arithmetic. We think
that virtue depends upon a number of factors, prominent among which
are the inborn disposition of a man, heredity, environment, modified
to some extent by educati