his
mercy has not in it the stern stuff of justice, it degenerates into
mawkishness and sentimental humanitarianism. Another man follows only
the ideal of justice, forgetting mercy, and he becomes harsh and
unsympathetic. It takes a greater man, a larger personality,
harmoniously to combine the two. And as it is in the sphere of
practical life, so it is in the arena of thought and philosophy. A
great thinker is not he who seizes upon a single aspect of the truth,
and pushes that to its extreme limit, but the man who combines, in one
many-sided system, all the varying and conflicting sides of truth. By
emphasizing one thought, by being obsessed by a single idea and
pushing it to its logical conclusion, regardless of the other aspects
of the truth, one may indeed achieve a considerable local and {156}
temporary reputation; because such a procedure often leads to striking
paradoxes, to strange and seemingly uncommon conclusions. The
reputations of such men as Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, are
made chiefly in this way. But upon the death of a great all-embracing
personality, just because his thought is a combination of so many
divergent truths, we often find that it splits up into its component
parts, each of which gives rise to a one-sided school of thought. The
disciples, being smaller men, are not able to grasp the great man's
thought in its wholeness and many-sidedness. Each disciple seizes upon
that portion of his master's teaching which has most in common with
his own temperament, and proceeds to erect this one incomplete idea
into a philosophy, treating the part as if it were the whole. This is
exactly what happened after the death of Socrates. Only one man among
his disciples was able to grasp the whole of his teaching, and
understand the whole of his personality, and that was Plato. Among the
lesser men who were the followers and personal friends of Socrates,
there were three who founded schools of philosophy, each partial and
one-sided, but each claiming to be the exponent of the true
Socraticism. Antisthenes founded the Cynic school, Aristippus the
Cyrenaic, and Euclid the Megaric.

Now, of the two aspects of the Socratic philosophy, the theory of
concepts, and the ethical theory, it is easy for us, looking back upon
history, to see which it was that influenced the history of thought
most, and which, therefore, was the most important. But the men of his
own time could not see this. What they fastened upo