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 I 
 
AUTHOR: 
 
 BU RN ET, JOH N 
 
 TITLE: 
 
 THE SOCRATIC 
 
 DOCTRINE OF THE 
 
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THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 HENRIETTE HERTZ TRUST 
 
 The Socratic Doctrine of 
 
 the Soul 
 
 » if« 
 
 By 
 
 Professor John Burnet, LL.D. 
 
 ^VV 
 
 u 
 
 London 
 
 Published for the British Academy 
 By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press 
 
 Amen Corner, E.G. 
 
SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL 
 
 LECTURE 
 
 HENRIETTE HERTZ TRUST 
 
 3^3 
 
 THE SOCEATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 
 
 By Professor JOHN BURNET, LL.D. 
 
 Jamiary ^6, 1916 
 
 My Lords^ Ladies and Gentlemen, 
 
 When the President and Council did me the honour of inviting me 
 to deliver the Annual Philosophical Lecture, and when they asked me 
 to take Socrates as my subject, they were, of course, aware that the 
 treatment of such a theme must be largely philological and historical. 
 I, certainly, have no claim to be regarded as a philosopher, but I have 
 tried hard to understand what Socrates was and what he did, and 
 I conceive that to be a question of genuine philosophical interest. 
 Whatever else it is, philosophy, in one aspect of it, is the progressive 
 effort of man to find his true place in the world, and that aspect must 
 be treated historically, since it is part of human progress, and philo- 
 logically, since it involves the interpretation of documents. I am 
 not afraid, then, of the objection that most of what I have to say 
 to-day is history rather than philosophy. We are men, not angels, 
 and for many of us our best chance of getting a glimpse of things on 
 their eternal side is to approach them along the path of time. More- 
 over, some of us have what may be called a sense of loyalty to great 
 men. In a way, no doubt, it does not matter whether we owe a truth 
 to Pythagoras or Socrates or Plato, but it is natural for us to desire 
 to know our benefactors and keep them in grateful remembrance. 
 I make no apology, therefore, for the historical character of much that 
 I have to lay before you, and I shall begin by stating the problem in 
 a strictly historical form. 
 
 I 
 
 In a letter to the philosopher Themistius, the Emperor Julian 
 says : 
 
 The achievements of Alexander the Great are outdone in my eyes 
 by Socrates son of Sophroniscus. It is to him I ascribe the wisdom 
 of Plato, the fortitude of Antisthenes, the generalship of Xenophon, 
 
 M 
 
 /■ 
 
SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 the Eretriac and Megaric philosophies, with Cebes, Simmias, Phaedo 
 and countless others. To him too we owe the colonies that they 
 planted, the Lyceum, the Stoa and the Academies. Who ever found 
 salvation in the victories of Alexander ? . . . Whereas it is thanks to 
 Socrates that all who find salvation in philosophy are being saved 
 even now.^ 
 
 These words of Julian's are still true, and that is partly why there 
 is so little agreement about Socrates. The most diverse philosophies 
 have sought to father themselves upon him, and each new account 
 of him tends to reflect the fashions and prejudices of the hour. At 
 one time he is an enlightened deist, at another a radical atheist. He 
 has been lauded as the father of scepticism and again as the high 
 priest of mysticism ; as a democratic social reformer and as a victim 
 of democratic intolerance and ignorance. He has even been claimed — 
 with at least equal reason— as a Quaker. No wonder that his latest 
 biographer, H. Maier, exclaims : 
 
 In the presence of each fresh attempt to bring the personality of 
 Socrates nearer to us, the impression that always recurs is the same : 
 * The man whose influence was so widespread and so profound cannot 
 have been like that ! ' ^ 
 
 Unfortunately that is just the impression left on me by Maier's own 
 bulky volume, though he has mastered the material and his treatment 
 of it is sound as far as it goes. Unless we can find some other line 
 of approach, it looks as if Socrates must still remain for us the Great 
 Unknown. 
 
 That, to be sure, is not Maier's view. He thinks he knows a great 
 deal about Socrates, or he would not have written 600 pages and 
 more about him. The conclusion he comes to is that Socrates was 
 not, properly speaking, a philosopher, which makes it all the more 
 remarkable that the philosophers of the next generation, however 
 much they differed in other respects, all agreed in regarding Socrates 
 as their master. Maier makes much of the differences between the 
 Socratic schools and urges that these could not have arisen if Socrates 
 had been a philosopher with a system of his own. There seems to be 
 something in that at first sight, but it only makes it more puzzling 
 that these philosophers should have wished to represent their philo- 
 sophies as Socratic at all. In modern times the most inconsistent 
 philosophies have been called Cartesian or Kantian or Hegelian, but 
 in these cases we can usually make out how they were derived from 
 
 » 264c. 
 
 ■ H. Maier, Sokrates, sein Werk und seine geschichtliche SteUung (Tubingen, 
 
 1913), p. 3. 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 5 
 
 Descartes, Kant, or Hegel respectively. Each of these thinkers had 
 set up some new principle which was then applied in divergent and 
 even contradictory ways by their successors, and we should expect to 
 find that Socrates did something of the same kind. Zeller, from 
 whom most of us have learned, thought he knew what it was. 
 Socrates discovered the universal and founded the Begriffsphilosophie. 
 Maier will have nothing to do with that, and I rather think he is wise. 
 The evidence does not bear examination, and in any case the hypo- 
 thesis would only account for Plato (if it would even do that). The 
 other Socratics remain unexplained. If, however, we are to be 
 deprived of this ingenious construction, we want something to replace 
 it, and for this we look to Maier in vain. He tells us that Socrates 
 was not a philosopher in the proper sense of the word, but only 
 a moral teacher with a distinctive method of his own, that of 
 
 * dialectical protreptic *. In other words, his ' philosophy ^ was nothing 
 more than his plan of making people good by arguing with them in 
 a peculiar way. Surely the man whose influence has been so great 
 
 * cannot have been like that ! ^ 
 
 Now it is clearly impossible to discuss the Socratic question in all 
 its bearings within the limits of a single lecture, so what I propose to 
 do is to take Maier as the ablest and most recent advocate of the 
 view that Socrates was not really a philosopher, and to apply the 
 Socratic method of reasoning from admissions made by the other side. 
 If we try to see where these will lead us, we may possibly reach 
 conclusions Maier himself has failed to draw, and these will be all the 
 more cogent if based solely on evidence he allows to be valid. He is 
 a candid writer, and the assumptions he makes are so few that, if 
 a case can be made out on these alone, it stands a fair chance of being 
 a sound one. The experiment seemed at least worth trying, and the 
 result of it was new to myself at any rate, so it may be new to others. 
 
 I resolved not to quarrel, then, with Maier^s estimate of the value 
 of our sources. He rejects the testimony of Xenophon, who did not 
 belong to the intimate Socratic circle, and who was hardly more than 
 twenty-five years old when he saw Socrates for the last time. He 
 also disallows the evidence of Aristotle, who came to Athens as a lad 
 of eighteen thirty years after the death of Socrates, and who had no 
 important sources of information other than those accessible to our- ^ 
 selves. That leaves us with Plato as our sole witness, but Maier does 
 not accept his testimony in its entirety. Far from it. For reasons 
 I need not discuss, since I propose to accept his conclusion as a basis 
 
6 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 
 
 for argument, he holds that we must confine ourselves to Plato^s 
 earliest writings, and he particularly singles out the Apology and Crito, 
 to which he adds the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium, In 
 these two works, and in that single portion of a third, he holds that 
 Plato had no other intention than ^ to set the Master's personality and 
 lifework before our eyes without additions of his own \^ This does 
 not mean, observe, that the Apology is a report of the speech actually 
 delivered by Socrates at his trial, or that the conversation with Crito 
 in the prison ever took place. It simply means that the Socrates we 
 learn to know from these sources is the real man, and that Plato's 
 sole object so far was to preserve a faithful memory of him. Maier 
 uses other early dialogues too, but he makes certain reservations 
 about them which I wish to avoid discussing. I prefer to take his 
 admissions in the strictest sense and with all the qualifications he 
 insists on. The issue, then, takes this form : ^ What could we know of 
 Socrates as a philosopher if no other account of him had come down 
 to us than the Apology , the Crito, and the speech of Alcibiades, and 
 with the proviso that even these are not to be regarded as reports of 
 actual speeches or conversations ? ' I should add that Maier also 
 allows us to treat the allusions in contemporary comedy as corrobora- 
 tive evidence, though they must be admitted with caution. Such are 
 the conditions of the experiment I resolved to try. 
 
 HI 
 
 In the first place, then, we learn from the Apology and Crito that 
 Socrates was just over seventy when he was put to death in the 
 spring of 399 b. c, and that means that he was born in 470 or 469 b. c. 
 He was, then, a man of the Periclean Age. He was already ten years 
 old when Aeschylus brought out the Orestean Trilogy, and about 
 thirty when Sophocles and Euripides were producing their earliest 
 tragedies. He must have watched the building of the new Parthenon 
 from start to finish. We are far too apt to see Socrates against the 
 more sombre background of those later days to which Plato and 
 Xenophon belonged, and to forget that he was over forty when Plato 
 was born. If we wish to understand him historically, we must first 
 replace him among the surroundings of his own generation. In other 
 words, we must endeavour to realize his youth and early manhood. 
 
 To most people Socrates is best known by his trial and death, and 
 that is why he is commonly pictured as an old man. It is not always 
 remembered, for instance, that the Socrates caricatured by Aristo- 
 phanes in the Clouds is a man of forty-six, or that the Socrates who 
 
 ^ p. 147. 
 
 served at Potidaea (432 b. c.) in a manner that would have won him 
 the V.C. to-day was about thirty-seven. On that occasion he saved 
 the life of Alcibiades, who must have been twenty at least, or he 
 would not have been on active service abroad. Even if we assume 
 that Potidaea was his first campaign, Alcibiades was eighteen years 
 younger than Socrates at the very outside, and his speech in the 
 Symposium carries us still further back, to the time when he was 
 about fifteen.^ In reading the account he is made to give of the 
 beginning of his intimacy with Socrates, we are reading of a boy's 
 enthusiasm for a man just turned thirty. The story makes a different 
 impression if we keep that in view. What concerns us now, however, 
 is that the * wisdom ' of Socrates is assumed to be matter of common 
 knowledge in these early days. It was just because he had some 
 strange, new knowledge to impart that Alcibiades sought to win his 
 affection. 2 We shall see the bearing of that shortly. 
 
 From the Apology we learn further that Socrates conceived 
 himself to have a mission to his fellow-citizens, and that his devotion 
 to it had brought him to poverty. H e cann ot have been really poor to 
 begin with ^ for we have found him serving before Potidaea, which 
 means that he had the property qualification required at the time for 
 those who served as hoplites. Nine yeara later (423 b. c), however, 
 when Aristophanes and Amipsias represented him on the comic stage, 
 it appears that his neediness was beginning to be a byword. They 
 both allude to what seems to have been a current joke about his want 
 of a. new cloak and the shifts Jie-was put to to get one. Amipsias J- 
 said he was ^ born to spite the shoemakers ', but Socrates may have ^ 
 had other reasons than poverty for going barefoot. In the same 
 fragment he is addressed as a ^ stouthearted fellow that, for all his 
 hunger, never stooped to be a parasite '. Two years later, Eupolis 
 used stronger language. He calls Socrates a ^garrulous beggar, who 
 has ideas on everything except where to get a meal '. Of course we 
 must not take this language too seriously. Socrates was still serving 
 as a hoplite at Delium, the year before the Clouds of Aristophanes and 
 the Connus of -Amipsias, and at Amphipolis the year after. Some- 
 thing, however, must have happened shortly be fore to bring him into 
 public notice, or the comic poets would not all have turned on him_at 
 once, and it is also clear that he had suffered losses of some kind. 
 
 * In passing from the story of his first intimacy with Socrates to that of 
 Potidaea, Alcibiades says ravra t€ yap fioi anavra irpovy€y6v€i, KOI fi€Ta ravra /crX., 
 * That was an old story, but at a later time, &c.' (Symp. 219 e, 6). 
 
 • He thought it would be a stroke of luck navT aKovaai oa-ajrep ovros jStt 
 (Symp. 217 a, 4). 
 
 
 n 
 
8 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 Very likely these were due to the war m the first place, but the 
 Apology makes him poorer still at the close of his life, and he is made 
 to attribute that to his mission. We may infer, I think, that the 
 public mission of Socrates had begun before the year of the Clouds^ 
 but was still something of a novelty then, so that its nature was not 
 clearly understood. He was absent from Athens, as we know, the 
 year before, and presumably in the preceding years also, though 
 we do not happen to hear of any actual battle in which he took part 
 between Potidaea and Delium. We are told, however, that his habit 
 of meditation was a joke in the army before Potidaea, and that it was 
 there he once stood wrapped in thought for twenty-four hours.* 
 It looks as if the call came to him when he was in the trenches ; and, 
 if so, the mission cannot have become the sole business of his life till 
 after Delium, when he was forty-five years old. Now we have seen 
 that he was known for his ^ wisdom^ long before that, and the 
 Apology confirms the speech of Alcibiades on this point. It was 
 before Socrates entered on his mission that Chaerepho went to 
 Delphi and asked the oracle whether there was any one wiser than 
 Socrates, from which it follows that this ^ wisdom \ whatever it was, 
 was something anterior to and quite independent of the public 
 mission described in the Apology, To sum up, the evidence Maier 
 admits is sufficient to prove that Socrates was known as a ^ wise man ^ 
 before he was forty, and before he began to go about questioning his 
 fellow-citizens. Whatever we may think of the details, both the 
 Apology and the speech of Alcibiades assume that as a matter of 
 course^ which is even more convincing than if it bad been stated in so 
 many words. 
 
 On the other hand, it does not seem likely that the mission of 
 Socrates stood in no sort of relation to the ^ wisdom^ for which 
 he was known in his younger days. The Apology does not help us 
 here. It tells us a good deal about the mission, but nothing as to the 
 nature of the ^ wisdom ^ which prompted the inquiry of Chaerepho, 
 while Alcibiades is not sufficiently sober in the Symposium to give us 
 more than a hint, which would hardly be intelligible yet, but to which 
 we shall return. It will be best, then, to start with the account given 
 in the Apology of that mission to his fellow-citizens to which Socrates 
 devoted the later years of his life, and to see whether we can infer 
 anything from it about the ^ wisdom ^ for which he had been known 
 in early manhood. 
 
 * Symp. 220 c, 3 sqq. Maier says (p. 301 n.) that this obviously depends on 
 trustworthy tradition. 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 
 
 IV 
 
 We are told, then, that at first Socrates refused to accept the 
 declaration of the Pythia that he was the wisest of men, and set 
 himself to refute it by producing some one who was certainly wiser. 
 The result of his efforts, however, was only to show that all the 
 people who were wise in their own eyes and those of others were 
 really ignorant, and he concluded that the meaning of the oracle 
 did not lie on the surface. The god must really mean that all men 
 alike were ignorant, but that Socrates was wiser in this one respect, 
 that he knew he was ignorant, while other men thought they were 
 wise. Having discovered the meaning of the oracle, he now felt 
 it his duty to champion the veracity of the god by devoting the rest 
 of his life to the exposure of other men^s ignorance. 
 
 It ought, one would think, to be obvious that this is a humorous 
 way of stating the case. For very sufficient reasons the Delphic 
 oracle was an object of suspicion at Athens, and, when Euripides 
 exhibits it in an unfavourable light, he only reflects the feelings 
 of his audience. It is incredible that any Athenian should have 
 thought it worth while to make the smallest sacrifice in defence of an 
 institution which had distinguished itself by its pro-Persian and pro- 
 Spartan leanings, or that Socrates should have hoped to conciliate his 
 judges by stating that he had ruined himself in such a cause. We 
 might as well expect a jury of English Nonconformists to be favour- 
 ably impressed by the plea that an accused per son had been reduce d 
 to penury by his advocacy of Papal Infallibility. 
 
 On this point recent German critics have an inkling of the truth, 
 though they draw quite the wrong conclusions. Several of them 
 have made the profound discovery that the speech Plato puts into the 
 mouth of Socrates is not a defence at all, and was not likely to 
 conciliate the court. They go on to infer that he cannot have spoken \ 
 like that, and some of them even conclude that the whole story of the 
 oracle is Plato's invention. That is because they start with the con- 
 viction that Socrates must have tried to make out the best case he 
 could for himself. ^ He only needed,' says Maier,^ ^ to appeal to the 
 correctness with which he had always fulfilled the religious duties of 
 an Athenian citizen. Xenophon's Apology makes him speak thus. 
 And he certainly did speak thus.^ The inference is characteristically 
 German, but the Socrates we think we know from the Apology y 
 the Crito, and the speech of Alcibiades would never have stooped to 
 do anything of the sort. He was not afraid of the State, as German. 
 
 K 
 
 ' p. 105. 
 
f 
 
 jlil 
 
 10 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 professors occasionally are. He certainly admitted its right to deal 
 with its citizens as it thought fit, but that is a very different thing from 
 recognizing its title to control their freedom of thought and speech. 
 The Socrates of the Crito insists, indeed, that a legally pronounced 
 sentence must be executed, and that he must therefore submit to death 
 at the hands of the State ; but we misunderstand him badly if we fail 
 to see that he asserts even more strongly his right not to degrade 
 himself by a humiliating defence, or to make things easy for his 
 accusers by running away, which is just what they wanted him to do. 
 No. Each party must abide by the sentence pronounced ; Socrates 
 must die, and his accusers must lie under condemnation for wicked- 
 ness and dishonesty. That is what he is made to say in the 
 Apology,^ and he adds that so it was bound to be. 
 
 Even Xenophon, who does put forward the plea of religious 
 conformity on behalf of Socrates, shows rather more insight than the 
 Germans. In his own Apology he admits that other accounts of the 
 speech — Plato^s, of course, in particular — had succeeded in repro- 
 ducing the lofty tone (peyaXrjyopia) of Socrates. He really did 
 speak like that, he says,^ and he was (juite indifferent to the result of 
 the»trial. Unfortunately this is immediately spoilt by a complaint 
 that no one had accounted for his indifference, so that it seemed 
 * rather unwise % just as it does to the Germans. Xenophon 's own 
 view, which he modestly attributes to Hermogenes, is that Socrates 
 wished to escape the evils of old age by a timely death. He did not 
 want to become blind and hard of hearing. It has not been given 
 either to Xenophon or to the Germans to see that the only thing to 
 be expected of a brave man accused on a trumpery charge is just that 
 tone of humorous condescension and persiflage which Plato has repro- 
 duced. As we shall see, there are serious moments in the Apology 
 too, but the actual defence is rather a provocation than a plea for 
 acquittal. That is just why we feel so sure that the speech is true to 
 life. 
 
 We need not doubt, then, that Socrates actually gave some such 
 account of his mission as that we read in the Apology, though we 
 must keep in view the ' ironical ' character of this part of the speech. 
 Most English critics take it far too seriously. They seem to think the 
 message of Socrates to his fellow- citizens can have been nothing more 
 than is there revealed, and that his sole business in life was to expose 
 the ignorance of others. If that had really been all, it is surely hard 
 
 1 39 b, 4sqq. 
 
 * Xen. ApoL 1 <» koI br}\ou on tw ovrt ovrm (ppT)6q vno ^(OKpdrovs. 
 present at the trial, but Xenophon was ' somewhere in Asia'. 
 
 Plato was 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 11 
 
 to believe that he would have been ready to face death rather than 
 relinquish his task. No doubt Socrates held that the conviction 
 of ignorance was the first step on the way of salvation, and that 
 it was little use talking of anything else to people who had still this 
 step to take, but even Xenophon, whom these same critics generally 
 regard as an authority on ' the historical Socrates ', represents him as 
 a teacher of positive doctrine. It ought to be possible to discover 
 what this was even from the Apology itself. 
 
 We must not assume, indeed, that Socrates thought it worth while 
 to say much about his real teaching at the trial, though it is likely that 
 he did indicate its nature. There were certainly some among his five 
 hundred judges who deserved to be taken seriously. Even if he did 
 not do this, however, Plato was bound to do it for him, if he wished \ 
 to produce the effect he obviously intended to produce. As a matter 
 of fact, he has done it quite unmistakably, and the only reason why 
 the point is usually missed is that we find it hard to put ourselves in 
 the place of those to whom such doctrine was novel and strange. 
 
 The passage which lets us into the secret is that where Socrates 
 is made to tell his judges that he will not give up what he calls 
 ' philosophy ^ even though they were to offer to acquit him on that 
 condition. Here, if anywhere, is the place where we look for a state- 
 ment of the truth for which he was ready to die, and Plato accordingly 
 makes him give the sum and substance of his * philosophy ^ in words 
 which have obviously been chosen with the greatest care, and to which 
 all possible emphasis is lent by the solemnity of the context and by the 
 rhetorical artifice of repetition. What Socrates is made to say is 
 this : 
 
 I will not cease from philosophy and from exhorting you, and 
 declaring the truth to every one of you I meet, saying in the words 
 I am accustomed to use : ^ My good friend, ... are you not ashamed 
 of caring for money and how to get as much of it as you can, and for 
 honour and reputation, and not caring or taking thought for wisdom 
 and truth and for your soul, and how to make it as good as possible ? ' 
 
 And again : 
 
 I go about doing nothing else but urging you, young and old alike, 
 not to care for your bodies or for money sooner or as much as for your 
 soul, and how to make it as good as you can.^ 
 
 ^ To care for their souls,^ then, was what Socrates urged on his 
 fellow-citizens, and we shall have to consider how much that implies. 
 
 ^ 29 d, 4 sqq., and 30 a, 7 sqq. 
 
 y 
 
12 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 First, however, it should be noted that there are many echoes of the 
 phrase in all the Socratic literature. Xenophon uses it in con- 
 texts which do not appear to be derived from Plato's dialogues. 
 Antisthenes, it seems, employed the phrase too, and he would hardly 
 have borrowed it from Plato. Isocrates refers to it as something 
 familiar.* The Athenian Academy possessed a dialogue which was 
 evidently designed as a sort of introduction to Socratic philosophy for 
 beginners, and is thrown into the appropriate form of a conversation 
 between Socrates and the young Alcibiades. It is not, I think, by 
 Plato, but it is of early date. In it Socrates shows that, if any one 
 is to care rightly for himself, he must first of all know what he is ; 
 it is then proved that each of us is soul, and therefore that to care 
 for ourselves is to care for our souls. It is all put in the most 
 provokingly simple way, with the usual illustrations from shoemaking 
 and the like, and it strikingly confirms what is said in the Apology,^ 
 I am not called upon to labour this point, however, for Maier admits, 
 and indeed insists, that this is the characteristic Socratic formula. 
 Let us see, then, where this admission will lead us. 
 
 Just at first, I fear, it will seem to lead nowhere in particular. 
 Such language has become stale by repetition, and it takes an effort 
 to appreciate it. So far as words go, Socrates has done his work too 
 well. It is an orthodox and respectable opinion to-day that each one 
 of us has a soul, and that its welfare is his highest interest, and that 
 was so already in the fourth century b. c, as we can see from 
 Isocrates. We assume without examination that a similar vague 
 orthodoxy on the subject existed in the days of Socrates too, and 
 that there was nothing very remarkable in his reiteration of it. 
 That is why Maier, having safely reached this point, is content to 
 inquire no further, and pronounces that Socrates was not a philo- 
 sopher in the strict sense, but only a moral teacher with a method 
 of his own. I hope to show that he has left off just where he ought 
 to have begun. 
 
 For it is here that it becomes important to remember that Socrates 
 belonged to the age of Pericles. We have no right to assume that 
 his words meant just as much or as little as they might mean in 
 Isocrates or in a modern sermon. What we have to ask is what 
 they would mean at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War ; and, 
 if we ask that question, we shall find, I believe, that, so far from 
 appearing commonplace, the exhortation to ^ care for his soul ' 
 
 ^ For references see Maier, p. 333, n. 3. The allusion in Isocrates (Antid. 
 § 309) was noted by Grote [Pluto, vol. i, p. 341). 
 " [Plato] Aic. I. 127 e, 9 sqq. 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 13 
 
 must have come as a shock to the Athenian of those days, and may 
 even have seemed not a little ridiculous. It is implied, we must t 
 observe^ that there is something in us which is capable of attaining 
 wisdom, and that this same thing is capable of attaining goodness 
 and righteousness. This something Socrates called ^ soul ^ (ylrvxrj). \ 
 JSovf no one had ever said that before, in the sense in which Socrates 
 meant it. Not only had the word yjrvxri never been used in this way, 
 but the existence of what Socrates called by the name had never been 
 realized. If that can be shown, it will be easier to understand how 
 Socrates came to be regarded as the true founder of philosophy, and 
 our problem will be solved. This involves, of course, an inquiry into 
 the history of the word ylrvxVy which may seem to be taking us 
 a long way from Socrates, but that cannot be helped if we really 
 wish to measure the importance of the advance he made. It will 
 be obvious that in what follows I have been helped by Rohde's 
 Psyche, but that really great work seems to me to miss the very 
 point to which it ought to lead up. It has no chapter on Socrates 
 at all. 
 
 .J 
 
 VI 
 
 Originally, the word ylrvxv meant ^ breath % but, by historical 
 times, it had already been specialized in two distinct ways. It had 
 come to mean courage in the first place, and secondly the breath of 
 life. The first sense has nothing, of course, to do with our present 
 inquiry, but so much confusion has arisen from failure to distinguish 
 it from the second, that it will be as well to clear the ground by 
 defining its range. There is abundant evidence in many languages 
 of a primitive idea that pride and courage naturally expressed them- 
 selves by hard breathing, or — not to put too fine a point upon it — 
 snorting. Perhaps this was first observed in horses. At any rate, 
 the phrase ^to breathe hard^ (nv^Tv fieya) survived in the sense of 
 ^to be proud % and warriors are said ^to breathe wrath ^ and Uo 
 breathe Ares \ So the word yjrvxv was used, just like the Latin 
 spiritus, for what we still call 'high spirit \ Herodotus and the 
 Tragedians have it often in this sense and Thucydides once.^ From 
 this is derived the adjective c<;>/ri;xo9, ^ spirited ^ ^ courageous % and 
 the ' magnanimous ' man, the fieyaXoyfrvxo?, is properly the * man of 
 spirit \ It is clear that, if we wish to discover what Socrates really 
 meant by ^/^X'?? when he called the seat of wisdom and goodness by 
 
 * Thuc. ii. 40, 3. In Herod, v. 124 we are told that Aristagoras was ylrvxriv ovk 
 oKpos, From the context we see clearly that this means he was poor-spirited. 
 I mention this because liddell and Scott are wrong on the point 
 
 \ 
 
m 
 II ^iii 
 
 14 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 that name, we must eliminate all instances of the word which fall 
 under this head. 
 
 TThe second meaning of '^vxv is the ' breath of life % the presence 
 or absence of which is the most obvious distinction between the 
 animate and the inanimate. It is, in the first place, the * ghost* 
 a man ^ gives up ' at death, but it may also quit the body temporarily, 
 which explains the phenomenon of swooning {XLiroy^vyJa), That 
 being so, it seemed natural to suppose it was also the thing that can 
 roam at large when the body is asleep, and even appear to another 
 sleeping person in his dream. Moreover, since we can dream of the 
 dead, what then appears to us must be just what leaves the body at 
 the moment of death. These considerations explain the worldwide 
 belief in the ^ soul ' as a sort of ^ double ' of the real bodily man, the 
 Egyptian ka, the Italian genius , and the Greek V^'^X'^O 
 
 Now this ^ double ' is not identified with whatever it is in us that 
 feels and wills during our waking life. That is generally supposed 
 to be blood and not breath. Ljlomer has a great deal to say about 
 feelings, but he never attributes any feeling to the '^vyrf. The 
 Bufio^ and the v6o9, which do feel and perceive, have their seat in 
 the midriff or the heart ; they belong to the body and perish with Itl 
 In a sense, no doubt, the ^Iruxv continues to exist after death, since 
 it can appear to the sur\'ivors, but in Homer it is hardly even a ghost, 
 since it cannot appear to them otherwise than in a dream. It is 
 a shadow {crKid) or image {€i8<t)\ou), with (no more substance, as 
 Apollodorus put it, than the reflection of the body in a mirrorT^ 
 Departed souls are witless and feeble things. Tiresias is the excep- 
 tion that proves the rule, and in the Nekyia it is only when the 
 shades have been allowed to drink blood that consciousness returns 
 to them for a while. That is not because death has robbed the y^v^n 
 of anything it ever had; it had nothing to do with the conscious 
 life when it was in the body, and cannot therefore have any con- 
 sciousness when detached from it. jA few favourites of heaven escape 
 this dismal lot by being sent to the Isles of the Blest, but these do 
 not really die at all. They are carried away still living and retain 
 their bodies, without which they would be incapable of blissTI This 
 point, too, is well noted by Apollodorus.^ 
 
 * Apollodorus irfpi Beav (Stob. Eel. i, p. 420, Wachsm.) xmoTiOfrcu. ras ylrvxas 
 Tois €i8a)\ois rots tv rots KaroTrrpoif (f)aivofi€voii oyLOiai koX rot? bi.a r5>v vbdrtiiv (rvviara' 
 fievoiSf a KaOdna^ rffiiv f^eiKaarai Koi rds Kipfi<r(ts ^ififlrai, arfptfivadr) de vnoaraaiw 
 ovdffiiav €Xfi' «tf dpTiXrjyl^iv koL dcftriv. 
 
 ^ Apollodorus, ib. (Stob. Eel. i, p. 422) rovrois fiiv oiv koi tu a-mfjLora 7rap€tvai. 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 15 
 
 VII 
 
 It is generally agreed that these views can hardly be primitive, and 
 that the observances of the mortuary cult (to, vofii^Sfieva), which we 
 find practised at Athens and elsewhere, really bear witness to a far 
 earlier stratum of belief. They show that at one time the yjrvxri 
 was supposed to dwell with the body in the grave, where it had to be 
 supported by the offerings of the survivors, especially by libations 
 (XoaO poured over the tomb. It has been fairly inferred that the 
 immunity of the Homeric world from ghosts had a good deal to do 
 with the substitution of cremation for burial. When the body is 
 burnt the yfrvxrj has no longer a foothold in this life. At any rate, 
 the early Athenian ghost was by no means so feeble and helpless 
 a thing as the Homeric. If a man^s murder went unavenged, or if 
 the offerings at his grave were neglected, his ghost could ^ walk % 
 and the feast of the Anthesteria preserved the memory of a time 
 when departed souls were believed to revisit their old homes once 
 a year. There is no trace of anything here that can be called 
 ancestor- worship. It is something much more primitive than that. 
 Though less helpless, and therefore more formidable, than the 
 Homeric ^ shade ^, the early Athenian ghost is dependent on the 
 offerings of the survivors, and they make these offerings, partly, no 
 doubt, from feelings of natural piety, but mainly to keep the ghost 
 quiet. That is hardly to be called worship. 
 
 It is plain, on the other hand, that these beliefs were mere survivals 
 in the Athens of the fifth century b. c. We should know next to 
 nothing about them were it not that the mortuary observances 
 become of legal importance in cases of homicide and inheritance, 
 so that the orators had to treat them seriously, and, moreover, they 
 went on quite comfortably side by side with the wholly inconsistent 
 belief that departed souls all went to a place of their own. We know- 
 now that Lucian^s picture of Charon and his boat faithfully repro- 
 duces the imagery of the sixth century b. c. ; for it agrees exactly 
 with the representation on a recently discovered piece of black 
 figured pottery.^ There we see the souls — miserable little creatures 
 with wings — weeping on the bank and praying to be taken aboard, 
 while Charon sits in the stern and makes all he has room for work 
 their passage by rowdng. The people who decorated a piece of 
 pottery, obviously intended for use in the mortuary cult, with such 
 a scene had evidently no living belief in the continued existence 
 
 * Furtwangler, Charon, eine altattische Malerei (Archiv fiir Religionswissen- 
 schaft, viii (1906), pp. 191 sqq.). 
 
 s 
 
'J 
 
 16 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 of the soul within the grave. We find the same contradiction in 
 Egypt, but there both beliefs were taken seriously. The Egyptians 
 were a business-like people, and got out of the difl&culty by assuming 
 two souls, one of which (the ka) remains in the tomb while the other 
 (the ba) departs to the place of the dead. Similar devices were 
 adopted elsewhere, but the Greeks felt no need for anything of the sort. 
 We may safely infer that the old belief had lost its hold upon them. 
 
 Whichever way we take it, the traditional Athenian beliefs about 
 the soul were cheerless enough, and we cannot wonder at the popu- 
 larity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised a better lot of some 
 sort to the initiated after death. It does not appear, however, that 
 this was at all clearly conceived. The obligation of secrecy referred 
 to the ritual alone, and we should hear something more definite as to 
 the future life, if the Mysteries had been explicit about it. As it is, 
 the chorus in the Frogs of Aristophanes probably tell us all there was 
 to tell, and that only amounts to a vision of meadows and feasting — 
 a sort of glorified picnic. Of one thing we may be quite sure, namely, 
 that no new view of the soul was revealed in the Mysteries ; for in 
 that case we should certainly find some trace of it in Aeschylus. As 
 a matter of fact, he tells us nothing about the soul, and hardly ever 
 mentions it. To him, as to most of his contemporaries, thought 
 belongs to the body ; it is the blood round the heart, and that ceases 
 to think at death. The life to come has no place in his scheme of 
 things, and that is just why he is so preoccupied with the problem of 
 the fathers' sins being visited on the children. Justice must be done 
 on earth or not at all. 
 
 In any case, the promises held out in the Mysteries are quite as 
 inconsistent with the beliefs implied by the mortuary cult as are 
 Charon and his boat, and the fact that the Eleusinia had been taken 
 over by the state as part of the public religion shows once more how 
 little hold such beliefs had on the ordinary Athenian. I do not mean 
 that he actively disbelieved them, but I should suppose he thought 
 very little about them. After all, the Athenians were brought up on 
 Homer, and their everyday working beliefs were derived from that 
 source. Besides, [Homer was already beginning to be interpreted 
 allegorically, and the prevailing notion in the time of Socrates cer- 
 tainly was that the souls of the dead were absorbed by the upper air, 
 just as their bodies were by the earthfl In the Suppliants Euripides 
 gives us the formula * Earth to earth and air to air *, and that is no 
 heresy of his own.^ It was so much a matter of course that it had 
 
 * Eur. Suppl, 533 — Trvtvfia fifv vrphs aWepOy 
 
 TO (Tco/xa 6' €S yrjv. 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 
 
 been embodied in the official epitaph on those who had fallen ar 
 Potidaea some years earlier (432 b.c.).^ There is nothing remarkable 
 in that There was no room in the public religion for any doctrine 
 of immortality. [The gods alone are immortal, and it would be shock- 
 ing to suggest that human beings might be so tooj The dead are 
 just the dead, and how can the dead be deathless ? In the heroic age, 
 indeed, some human beings had attained immortality by being turned 
 into gods and heroes, but such things were not expected to happen 
 now. The heroic honours paid to Brasidas at Amphipolis had 
 a political motive, and were hardly taken seriously. 
 
 VIII 
 
 So far I have been dealing with the beliefs of the ordinary citizen 
 and with the official religion of Athens, but it would have been easy 
 to find people there who held very different views about the soul. 
 There were the members of Orphic societies in the first place, and 
 there were also the votaries of Ionian science, who had become fairly 
 numerous since Anaxagoras first introduced it to the Athenians. On 
 the whole, the Orphics would be found chiefly among the humbler 
 classes, and the adherents of Ionian science chiefly among the en- 
 lightened aristocracy. Even in the absence of direct testimony we 
 should be bound to assume that Socrates, who was interested in every- 
 thing and tested everything, did not pass by the two most remarkable 
 movements which took place at Athens in his own generation, and if 
 we wish to replace him among the surroundings of his own time we 
 must certainly take account of these. The religious movement was 
 the earlier in date, and claims our attention first. 
 
 The most striking feature of Orphic belief is that it is based on the 
 denial of what we have just seen to be the cardinal doctrine of Greek 
 religion, namely, that thejce is an impassable, or almost impassable, gulf 
 between gods and men.ljThe Orphics held, on the contrary, that every 
 soul is a fallen god, shut up in the prisonhouse of the body as a penalty 
 for antenatal sin. The aim of their religion as practised was to secure 
 the release (Xvai?) of the soul from its bondage by means of certain 
 observances directed to cleansing and purging it of original sin 
 (KaOapnoi), Those souls which were sufficiently purged returned 
 once more to the gods and took their old place among ihem^ 
 
 That is certainly not primitive belief but theological speculation, 
 such as we find among the Hindus and, in a cruder form, among the 
 
 • 
 
 ^ a I. A. i. 442— 
 
 r 
 
 / 
 
SECOxND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 Egyptians. The trouble was till recently that there seemed to be no 
 room for an age of such speculation within the limits of Greek history 
 as we knew it, and many modern scholars have followed the lead of 
 Herodotus in holding that it came from the ^barbarians', and in 
 particular from Egypt. On the other hand, Orphicism was closely 
 bound up with the worship of Dionysus, which seems to have come 
 from Thrace, and we can hardly credit the Thracians with a gift for 
 mystical theology. If, however, we take a wider view, we shall find 
 that doctrines of a similar character are to be found in many places 
 which have nothing to do with Thrace. Zielinski has shown strong 
 groui?ds for believing that the Hermetic theology, which became 
 important in later days, originated in Arcadia, and especially in 
 Mantinea, the home of the prophetess Diotima, who is certainly not 
 to be regarded as a fictitious personage.^ There were mystical elements 
 in the worship of the Cretan Zeus, and a book of prophecies was 
 extant in later days composed in the dialect of Cyprus, which is 
 practically identical with the Arcadian.^ The geographical distribution 
 of the doctrine strongly suggests that we have really to do with 
 a survival from the Aegean Age, and that the period of theological 
 speculation we seem bound to assume was just the time of the power 
 of Cnossus. If that is so, the priests of Heliopolis in the Delta may 
 quite as well have borrowed from Crete as vice versa, if there was 
 any borrowing at all. There is no need to look for remote origins. 
 
 However that may be, it is certain that such doctrines flourished 
 exceedingly in the sixth century B.C., and that their influence on the 
 higher thought of Greece was by no means negligible. We must, 
 however, be careful to avoid exaggeration here ; for, while it is certain 
 that the Orphics attached an importance to the ' soul ' which went far 
 beyond anything recognized in the public or private religion of the 
 Greek states, it is by no means so clear that they went much^ beyond 
 primitive spiritism in the account they gave of its nature. Qn so far 
 as the soul was supposed to reveal its true nature in ' ecstasy \ which 
 might be artificially produced by drugs or dancing, that is obvious ; 
 but, even in its higher manifestations, the doctrine still bears traces 
 of its primitive origin. The earliest statement in literature of the 
 unique divine origin of the soul is to be found in a fragment of one 
 of Pindar's Dirges,^ but even there it is called an ' image of life ' 
 
 ^ Archiv fiir Religionswissenschaft, ix (1906), p. 43. 
 
 ^ On Euklos the Cyprian see M. Schmidt in Kuhns Zeitschrift, ix (1860), 
 pp. 361 sqq. The identity of the Arcadian and Cypriote dialects is the most 
 certain and fundamental fact with regard to the Aegean Age. 
 
 » Pindar, fr. 131 Bergk. 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRLNE OF THE SOUL 19 
 
 (ai&vo9 udayXov) surviving after death, much in the Homeric way, 
 and we are expressly told that it ' sleeps when the limbs are active * 
 {€v8€i Se irpaa-aovTcov /leXicoy) and shows its prophetic nature only in 
 dreams. In fact, as Adam said, it is rather like what has been called 
 ' the subliminal self ' in modern times, and is quite dissociated from 
 the normal waking consciousness.^ It may be divine and immortal, 
 but it is really no concern of ours except in sleep and at the moment 
 of death. It is not identified with what we call ^ I C\ 
 
 IX 
 
 The word yjrvxv had also been used by the^cientific schools of 
 loni^in quite another than the popular and traditional sense. This 
 appears to have originated in the doctrine of Anaximenes, that ' air ' 
 (drip), the primary substance, was the life of the world, just as the 
 breath was the life of the body. That doctrine was being taught at 
 Athens by Diogenes of Apollonia in the early manhood of Socrates, 
 who is represented as an adherent of it in the Clouds of Aristophanes. 
 The emphasis lies entirely on the cosmical side, however. There is 
 no special interest in (the individual human soul, which is just that 
 portion of the boundless air which happens to be shut up in our body 
 for the time being, and which accounts for our life and consciousnes^ 
 There is a great advance on primitive views here in so far as the 
 ^vxv is identified for the first time with the normal waking con- 
 sciousness, and not with the dream-consciousness. Thii point is \ 
 specially emphasized in the system of Heraclitus, which was based - 
 precisely on the opposition between waking and sleeping, life and ' 
 death.* The waking soul is that in which the elemental fire burns bright 
 and dry; ^sleep and death are due to its partial or total extinctionTV On 
 the other hand, the soul is in a state of flux just as much as thetody. 
 It, too, is a river into which you cannot step twice ; there is nothing 
 you can speak of as ^ I ^ or even ' this \ Anaxagoras preferred to 
 call the source of motion he was obliged to postulate uovs instead of 
 yjrvxTJ, but for our present purpose he meant much the same thing. 
 The common feature in all these theories is that our conscious life 
 comes to us 'from out of doors' (BvpaOev), as Aristotle puts it, 
 employing a term elsewhere used in describing respiration. Its 
 existence is of a temporary and accidental character, depending solely 
 on the fact that for the moment a portion of the primary substance is 
 
 * Adam, The Doctrine of the Celestial Origin of the Soul (CsLmhridge Praelections, 
 1906). Adam pointed out (p. 32) that Myers chose the Pindaric fragment as the 
 heading of his chapter on Sleep {Human Personality, vol. i, p. 121). 
 
 * See my Greek Philosophy, Part I, Tholes to Plato, § 41. 
 
 / 
 
«0 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 
 
 21 
 
 enclosed in a particular body. It will be seen that this fits in well 
 enough with the view commonly accepted at Athens and expressed in 
 the formula ' Earth to earth and air to air \ That is why no one was 
 shocked by the scientific view. The ' sophists ^ were accused of almost 
 everything, but I do not remember any place where they are blamed 
 for failing to ^ think nobly of the soul \ There was no doctrine of 
 soul in the received religion, or none worth talking about, and there 
 could therefore be no impiety in what the sophi^ taught. The 
 Orphic doctrine was far more likely to offend current prejudices. 
 
 ^The Pythagoreans) might, perhaps, have developed a more adequate 
 doctrine of the soul; for they shared the religious interest of the 
 Orphics and the scientific interests of the lonians. As it happened, 
 however, their musical and medical studies led them to[regard it as 
 a ^ blend ^ (/cpao-iy) or ' attunement ' (dpfiovia) of the elements which 
 compose the body, of which, therefore, it is merely a function.^ 
 Democritus went so far, indeed, as to distinguish the pleasures of the 
 soul as more ' divine * than those of the ^ tabernacle * {(TKrjvo^) or body ; 
 but, since he held the soul to be corporeal, that was only a difference 
 of degree^ On the whole, we must conclude that neither religion or 
 philosophy in the fifth century B.C. knew anything of the Soul. 
 What they called by that name was something extrinsic and dis- 
 sociated from the normal personality, which was altogether dependent 
 on the body. 
 
 X 
 
 In the Athenian literature of the fifth century the idea of soul 
 is still more unknown. We might have expected that the Orphic, if 
 not the scientific theory, would have left some trace, but even that did 
 not happen. In a matter of this kind vague general impressions are 
 useless, and the observations I am about to make are based on what 
 I believe to be a complete enumeration of all instances of the word 
 ylfvxrj in the extant Athenian literature of the fifth century, including 
 Herodotus, who wrote mainly for Athenians. I was much surprised 
 by the result of this inquiry, which showed that, down to the very 
 close of the century, there is hardly an instance of the word in any 
 other than a purely traditional sense. 
 
 In the first place, as I have said before, it often means ' high 
 spirit ' or courage, but that does not concern us for the present. In 
 a certain number of passages it means ^ ghost ', but ghosts are not 
 often mentioned. In a larger number of places it may be translated 
 ' life ^, and that is where possible misunderstandings begin. It has 
 
 1 See ib. § 75. * See ib. § 155. 
 
 not, in fact, been sufficiently observed that ^x^> ^^ ^^^ literature of 
 this period, never means the life of a man except when he is dying or 
 in danger of death, or, in other words, that the Attic usage is so far the 
 same as the Homeric. You may lose or ' give up ' your ^t^x^ or you 
 may save it ; you may risk it or fight or speak in its defence ; you may 
 sacrifice it like Alcestis or cling ignobly to it like Admetus. To 
 ^ love one's ylrvxrj ' is to shrink from death, and (pL\oy^v\ta is a com- 
 mon word for cowardice. In the same sense you may say that 
 a thing is dear as ^ dear life ^. As for the y^^ai of other people, you 
 may mourn them or avenge them, in which case >/ri;x^ clearly means 
 lost life, and may just as well be rendered ^ death ' as ^ life ^. The 
 one thing you cannot do with a y^v^^rj is to live by it. When 
 Theseus in Euripides ^ bids Amphitryon ^ do violence to his soul ^, 
 he means ^ Force yourself to live % and the literal sense of his words 
 is ^Hold in the breath of life by force* and do not let it escape. 
 ^ Refuse to give up the ghost * comes near it. Similarly, the expression 
 ^ Collect your >/ri;x'7 ^ ^ properly means ^ Make an effort not to swoon % 
 and implies the same idea of holding one's breath. You will search 
 the Athenian writers of the fifth century in vain for a single instance 
 of y^v)(ri meaning ^life% except in connexion with swooning or 
 death. 
 
 The "^vxri is also spoken of in the tragedians as the seat of certain 
 feelings, in which case we naturally render it by ^ heart *. What has 
 not been observed is that these feelings are always of a very special 
 kind. We saw that Pindar thought of the '^v\ri as a sort of ^ subli- 
 minal self ' which * sleeps when the limbs are active \ but has prophetic 
 visions when the body is asleep. In Attic tragedy this function is 
 generally attributed to the heart and not the ^ soul ^, but there is one 
 place at least where '^vyjj seems definitely to mean the ^ subconscious *. 
 In the Troades the infant Astyanax, when about to die, is pitied for 
 having had no conscious experience of the privileges of royalty. 
 * Thou sawest them and didst mark them in thy yltv\TJy but thou 
 knowest them not.* ^ This seems to be the only place where know- 
 ledge of any kind is ever ascribed to the yjrvxV} and it is expressly 
 denied to be knowledge. It is only thej vague awareness of early 
 childhood which leaves no trace in the memory. We note the same 
 idea in another place where something is said to strike upon the 
 
 * Eur. Here. 1366 ^l^vx^v ^idCov. Wilamowitz's interpretation of this is 
 singularly perverse. 
 
 * Eur. Here. 626 avWoyov V^x^^ ^a^« I rpofiov re navaai. Cf. Phoen. 850 oKXa 
 avWf^op aOivos I Koi Tvvfvfi aBpoiaov. 
 
 « Eur. Tro. 1171. See B. H. Kennedy in Tyrrell's note. 
 
22 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 
 
 23 
 
 yjtvxv ^8 familiar, that is, to awaken dormant memories.^ That 
 explains further how the ylrvxrj may be made to * smart * by being 
 touched on the raw, and also why certain griefs are said to ^ reach ' 
 the ylrv)(rj. We still speak of a ^ touching ^ spectacle or an appeal 
 that ^reaches * the heart, though we have forgotten the primitive 
 psychology on which the phrases are based. 
 
 If we follow up this clue we find that the feelings referred to the 
 ylrvxTJ are always those which belong to that obscure part of us which 
 has most affinity with the dream-consciousness. Such are all strange 
 yearnings and forebodings and grief ^ too great for words *, as we say. 
 Such, too, is the sense of oppression and gloom which accompanies the 
 feelings of horror and despair, and which is spoken of as a weight of 
 which we seek to lighten our ylrvxrj. Anxiety and depression — what 
 we call ^ low spirits ^ — have their seat in the yjrvxVy and so have all un- 
 reasoning terrors and dreads. Strange, overmastering passion, like 
 the love of Phaedra, is once or twice said to attack the ylrvxv*^ 
 Twice in Sophocles it is the seat of kindly feeling (c^rota), but that 
 goes rather beyond its ordinary range.^ It is safe to say that the 
 ylrvxv is never regarded as having anything to do with clear perception 
 or knowledge, or even with articulate emotion. It remains something 
 mysterious and uncanny, quite apart from our normal consciousness. 
 The gift of prophecy and magical skill are once or twice referred 
 to it, but never thought or character. It is still, therefore, essentially 
 the ^ double ^ of primitive belief, and that is just why it can address us 
 or be addressed by us as if it were something distinct from us. That, 
 of course, became a mannerism or figure of speech, but it was not so 
 at first. The * soul ' of the Watchman in the Antigone, which tries to 
 dissuade him from making his report to Creon, can claim kindred with 
 the ^consciences of Launcelot Gobbo in Shakespeare's Merchant. 
 
 We shall now be able to see the bearings of some special uses 
 of the word ylrvxrj. It is spoken of, for instance, as the seat of 
 a guilty conscience. That is brought out clearly by a remarkable 
 passage in Antipho,* where he is making his client argue that he 
 would never have come to Athens if he had been conscious of guilt. 
 ^ A guiltless ylrvxv will often,' he says, ^preserve both itself and 
 an exhausted body, but a guilty one will leave even a vigorous body 
 in the lurch.^ It is from the same point of view that the law of 
 homicide demands the forfeiture of the guilty ^ soul ' (^ Spdaaaa 
 or PovXevaaaa V/'f X'7)>* ^ phrase in which the use of yjrvxv as the seat 
 
 » Soph. El. 902. « Eur. Hipp. 604, 626. 
 
 ' Soph. 0, a 498, fr. 98. * De caede Herodis, § 93. 
 
 ' Antipho, Tetr. T. a, 7. Cf. Plato, Laws, 873 a, 1. 
 
 of conscience is combined with its meaning of life as a thing to be 
 lost. Several passages of the tragedians are to be interpreted in the 
 light of this. Aeschylus, indeed, makes the conscience reside in the 
 heart, as was to be expected, but he is emphatic in referring it to the 
 dream-consciousness. It is ^in the night season * that the sore of 
 remorse breaks out.^ Even the placid Cephalus of Plato's Republic 
 is wakened once and again from his sleep by the fear that he may have 
 some sin against gods or men on his conscience. 
 
 Another mysterious feeling closely associated with the subconscious 
 element in our life is the sentiment of kinship, what the French call 
 la voix du sang. The Greeks, too, usually spoke of blood in this con- 
 nexion, but Clytemnestra in Sophocles addresses Electra as ^ born of 
 my ^vx'^ ^^ ^"^ occasionally near kinsmen are spoken of as having 
 ' one soul ' instead of * one blood '. 
 
 Finally, we must notice a curious and particularly instructive use 
 of the word, which we know to have been derived from popular 
 language. The "^vx^ is the seat of wayward moods and appetites, 
 and especially of those unaccountable longings for certain kinds of 
 food and drink which sometimes emerge fr9m the more irrational 
 and uncontrolled part of our nature. The Cyclops in Euripides, 
 who has not tasted human flesh for ever so long, says he will do his 
 '^vxfi a good turn by eating Odysseus up.^ Even Aeschylus does 
 not disdain to make the ghost of Darius advise the Persian elders 
 to ^give their souls some pleasure day by day'.* Just so the 
 Romans said animo or genio indulgere, and spoke of acting animi 
 causa. It is a quaint piece of primitive psychology, and it is cer- 
 tainly convenient to make a ^ double ', for which you are not strictly 
 responsible, the source of those strange yearnings for good living 
 to which the best of us are subject now and then. The Egyptian 
 ka had similar tendencies. Looked at in this way, the y\rvx'n is 
 the merely * animal ' element of our nature. 
 
 I have now covered practically all the uses of the word y^vx'H in 
 the Athenian literature of the fifth century. Even in Lysias, who 
 belongs to the fourth, there is only one instance of the word in any 
 but a traditional sense, which is the more remarkable as he had 
 belonged to the fringe at least of the Socratic circle. The few 
 exceptions I have noted are all of the kind that proves the rule. 
 When Herodotus is discussing the supposed Egyptian origin of the 
 belief in immortality, he naturally uses y^vx^ in the Orphic sense.* 
 
 * See Headlam, AgamemnoTif p. 186. 
 » Eur. CycL 340. 
 
 » Herod, ii. 123. 
 
 « Soph. EL 776. 
 * Aesch. Pers. 840. 
 
 \ 
 
 -i 
 
24 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 
 
 25 
 
 Hippolytus in Euripides speaks of a ^ virgin soul ^, but he is really an 
 Orphic figure.^ Otherwise the word is used by Euripides in a purely 
 traditional manner, even in the Bacchae, Aeschylus employs it very 
 seldom, and then quite simply. Sophocles, as might be expected, 
 is rather subtler, but I cannot find more than two passages where 
 he really goes beyond the limits I have indicated, and they both 
 occur in one of his latest plays, the Philoctetes, Odysseus tells 
 Neoptolemus that he is to * entrap the '^vyji of Philoctetes with 
 words *,* which seems to imply that it is the seat of knowledge, and 
 Philoctetes speaks of ^the mean soul of Odysseus peering through 
 crannies \^ which seems to imply that it i s the seat of character. 
 These instances belong to the very close of the century and anticipate 
 the usage of the next. There is no other place where it is even 
 suggested that the ^soul' has anything to do with knowledge or 
 ignorance, goodness or badness, and to Socrates that was the most 
 important thing about it. 
 
 Now, if even the higher poetry observed these limits, we may be 
 sure that popular language did so even more strictly. When urged 
 to * care for his soul \ the plain man at Athens might suppose he 
 was being advised to have a prudent regard for his personal safety, 
 to ^ take care of his skin ^ as we say, or even that he was being 
 recommended to have what is called ^ a good time \ If we can trust 
 Aristophanes, the words would suggest to him that he was to ^ mind 
 his ghost ^. The Birds tell us how Pisander came to Socrates 
 ' wanting to see the y^vx-q that had deserted him while still alive \ 
 where there is a play on the double meaning ^ courage * and ^ ghost *. 
 Socrates is recognized as the authority on y^vyat, who ^ calls spirits ' 
 {y^v\ay(i)yd) from the deep.* The inmates of his thought-factory 
 (^povTiaTTJpLov) are derisively called ^wise ylrvx<ii' in the Clouds,^ 
 It is true that once in Aristophanes we hear of ^crafty souls ^ (SoXiai 
 yjrvxaO} which reminds us of the Philoctetes ; but the speaker is an 
 oracle-monger from Oreos, so that is another exception that proves 
 the rule.^ We may, I think, realize the bewilderment which the 
 teaching of Socrates would produce, if we think of the uncomfortable 
 feeling often aroused by the English words ^ ghost ' and ^ ghostly ' 
 in their old sense of ^ spirit ^ and ^ spiritual \ There is something not 
 altogether reassuring in the phrase ' ghostly admonition \ 
 
 » Eur. Hipp. 1006. 
 » Soph. Phil. 1013. 
 * Arist. Ciouds 94. 
 
 « Soph. PhiL 65. 
 
 * Arist. Birds 1665 sqq. 
 
 « Arist. Peace 1068. 
 
 XI 
 
 The novelty of this Socratic use of the word yjtvxri is also indi-; 
 cated by the curiously tentative phrases he is sometimes made to( 
 substitute for it, phrases like ' Whatever it is in us that has know- 
 ledge or ignorance, goodness or badness \^ On the same principle 
 I should explain the reference of Alcibiades in the Symposium to 
 ^the heart or soul or whatever we ought to call it\2 Such fine 
 historical touches are much in Plato's way, and the hesitation of 
 Alcibiades is natural if Socrates was the first to use the word like 
 this. ^ He denied, if I am not mistaken, that the soul was any sort 
 of mysterious second self, and identified it frankly with our ordinary 
 consciousness ; but, on the other hand, he held it to be more than 
 it seemed to be, and therefore to require all the ^care' that the 
 votaries of Orpheus bade men give to the fallen god within them. 
 No doubt it is open to any one to maintain that, even so, Socrates 
 was not really original. \He only combined the Orphic doctrine of 
 the purification of the fallen soul with the scientific view of the soul 
 as the waking consciousnesi^ That is a favourite device of those 
 who make it their business to depreciate the originality of great men. 
 Against it it maybe urged that the power of transfusing the apparently 
 disparate is exactly what is meant by originality. The religious 
 and the scientific view might have gone on indefinitely side by side, 
 as we find them in fact simply juxtaposed in Empedocles. It took 
 a Socrates to see that they were complementary, and by uniting them 
 to reach the idea best rendered in English by the old word ^ spirit \ 
 In that sense and to that extent he was the founder of philosophy .j 
 
 From the Apology alone it may, I feel sure, be inferred that to 
 Socrates the immortality of the soul followed as a necessary corollary 
 from this view of its nature, but the important thing to notice is that 
 this was not the point from which he started nor that upon which 
 he chiefly dwelt. If, for a moment, I may go beyond the Apology 
 and Crito for a negative argument, it is not a little remarkable that, 
 both in the Phaedo ^ and the Republic *, Plato represents the closest 
 intimates of Socrates as startled by his profession of belief in immor- 
 tality. It does not seem, then, that this formed the ordinary theme 
 of his discourse. What he did preach as the one thing needful for 
 the soul was that it should strive after wisdom and goodness. 
 
 * Cf. Crito 47 e, 8 ^rt ttot' eWi rSiv r)ii(rip<dVy Trepi 6 i? re ahiKia Ka\ rj diKaioarvvtj 
 
 >-ri 
 
 €ariv. 
 
 * Symp. 218 a, 3 rr}v Kaphiav yap rj ylrvxqv ff on Btl avro oi/o/iao-ai ktX. 
 » Plato, Phaed. 70a, 1 sqq. * ''^'**" ^""^ ^^"^ 
 
 Plato, Rep, 608 d, 3. 
 
26 SECOND ANNUAL PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURE 
 
 THE SOCRATIC DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL 27 
 
 Of course, Maier is compelled by the evidence he admits as valid 
 to recognize that Socrates called his work in life ^ philosophy ', but 
 he holds that this philosophy consisted solely in the application of 
 the dialectical method to moral exhortation. That is why he says 
 Socrates was no philosopher in the strict sense of the word. If he 
 only means that he did not expound a system in a course of lectures, 
 that is doubtless true ; but, even at the worst of times, philosophy 
 never meant merely that to the Greeks. It is not correct either to 
 say that the wisdom of which Socrates is made to speak in the 
 Apology and Crito was merely practical wisdom. At this point 
 Maier makes a bad mistake by importing the Aristotelian distinction 
 between (f>p6vq<TLs and ao<j>La into the discussion. No doubt that 
 distinction has its value, but at this date (fipovrjai^ and (To(l>ta were 
 completely synonymous terms, and they continued to be used quite 
 promiscuously by Plato. It is wisdom and truth ((Pp6urjai9 koI 
 dXrjO^La) that the soul is to aim at, and it is an anachronism to intro- 
 duce the Aristotelian idea of ^ practical truth \ If the word (Ppourjais 
 is on the whole preferred to (ro(f>La, it is only because the latter had 
 rather bad associations, like our * cleverness \ It is hardly worth 
 while, however, to waste words on this point; for the Socratic 
 doctrine that Goodness is knowledge amounts to a denial that there 
 is any ultimate distinction between theory and practice. 
 
 XII 
 
 The conditions of our experiment did not allow us to admit much 
 evidence, and that seemed at first rather unpromising. Nevertheless, 
 we have been able to reach a result of the first importance, which 
 must now be stated precisely. We have found that, if the Apology 
 
 I is to be trusted in a matter of the kind, Socrates was in the habit 
 of exhorting his fellow-citizens to ^care for their souls ^ That is 
 I admitted by Maier. We have seen further that such an exhortation 
 implies a use of the word y^v^^r} and a view of the soul's nature 
 quite unheard of before the time of Socrates. The Orphics, indeed, 
 had insisted on the need of purging the soul, but for them the soul 
 was not the normal personality ; ^ it was a stranger from another 
 world that dwelt in us for a time. The Ionian cosmologists had 
 certainly identified the soul with our waking consciousness, but that 
 too came to us from outside. As Diogenes of Apollonia put it, 
 
 * The doctrine of TraXtyyevco-ta or transmigration, in its usual form, implies 
 this dissociation of the ' soul ' from the rest of the personality. For this 
 reason, I do not believe that Socrates accepted it in that sense. 
 
 it was a ^ small fragment of god V by which he meant a portion of the 
 cosmical ^air^ which happens for the time being to animate our 
 bodies. Socrates, so far as we could see, was the first to say that 
 the normal consciousness was the true self, and that it deserved all 
 the care bestowed on the body^s mysterious tenant by the religious. 
 The jests of Aristophanes made it plain that Socrates was known as 
 a man who spoke strangely of the soul before 423 b. c, and this 
 takes us back to a time when Plato was not five years old, so that 
 there can be no question of him as the author of the view he ascribes 
 to Socrates. We may fairly conclude, I think, that the' wisdom^ 
 which so impressed the boy Alcibiades and the impulsive Chaerepho, 
 was just this. 
 
 I promised not to go beyond the evidence allowed by Maier, 
 and I must therefore stop on the threshold of the Socratic philosophy. 
 I cannot, however, refrain from suggesting the lines on which further 
 investigation would proceed. In a dialogue written thirty years after 
 the death of Socrates, the Theaetetus, Plato makes him describe his 
 method of bringing thoug hts to birth in language derived from his 
 mother's calling, and we can prove this to be genuinely Socratic from 
 the evidence of Aristophanes who had made fun of it more than 
 half a century before.^ The maieutic method in turn involves the 
 theory of knowledge mythically expressed in the doctrine of Remini- 
 scence. The doctrine of Love, which Socrates in the Symposium 
 professes to have learnt from Diotima, is only an extension of the 
 same line of thought, and it may be added that it furnishes the 
 natural explanation of his mission. If Socrates really held that 
 the soul was irresistibly driven to go beyond itself in the manner 
 there described, there was no need of an oracle from Delphi to make 
 him take up the task of converting the Athenians. That, however, 
 is transgressing the limits I had imposed on myself, and I do not 
 wish to prejudice what I believe to be the solid result we have 
 reached. That in itself is enough to show that it is of very little 
 consequence whether we call Socrates a philosopher in the proper 
 sense or not ; for we now see how it is due to him that, in Julian's 
 words, ' all who find salvation in philosophy are being saved even 
 now.' That is the problem we set out to solve. I only wished to 
 throw out a few hints to show that Maier would have to write 
 another 600 pages at least to exhaust the implications of his own 
 admissions. Some of us will prefer to think it has been better done 
 already by Plato. 
 
 * A. 19. Diels, fiitcpov p.6piov rov Btov. 
 
 Arist. Clouds 137. 
 
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