incapacity; he is willing
to do good work if he is able.

III.--The SUMMUM BONUM with Sokrates was Well-doing. He had no ideal
of pursuit for man apart from virtue, or what he esteemed virtue--the
noble and the praiseworthy. This was the elevated point of view
maintained alike by him and by Plato, and common to them with the
ideal of modern ages.

Well-doing consisted in doing well whatever a man undertook. 'The best
man,' he said, 'and the most beloved by the gods, is he that, as a
husbandman, performs well the duties of husbandry; as a surgeon, the
duties of the medical art; in political life, his duty towards the
commonwealth. The man that does nothing well is neither useful nor
agreeable to the gods.' And as knowledge is essential to all
undertakings, knowledge is the one thing needful. This exclusive
regard to knowledge was his one-sidedness as a moral theorist; but he
did not consistently exclude all reference to the voluntary control of
appetite and passion.

IV.--He inculcated Practical Precepts of a self-denying kind, intended
to curb the excesses of human desire and ambition. He urged the
pleasures of self-improvement and of duty against indulgences,
honours, and worldly advancement. In the 'Apology,' he states it as
the second aim of his life (after imparting the shock of conscious
ignorance) to reproach men for pursuing wealth and glory more than
wisdom and virtue. In 'Kriton,' he lays it down that we are never to
act wrongly or unjustly, although others are unjust to us. And, in his
own life, he furnished an illustrious example of his teaching. The
same lofty strain was taken up by Plato, and repeated in most of the
subsequent Ethical schools.

V.--His Ethical Theory extended itself to Government, where he applied
his analogy of the special arts. The legitimate King was he that knew
how to govern well.

VI.--The connexion in the mind of Sokrates between Ethics and Theology
was very slender.

In the first place, his distinction of Divine and Human things, was an
exclusion of the arbitrary will of the gods from human affairs, or
from those things that constituted the ethical end.

But in the next place, he always preserved a pious and reverential
tone of mind; and considered that, after patient study, men should
still consult the oracles, by which the gods, in cases of difficulty,
graciously signified their intentions, and their beneficent care of
the race. Then, the practice of well-doing was prom