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his demon , his natural probity , and his unambitious adoption of the quiet life of a citizen . This kept humanity constantly before him as the proper object of his philosophy , and enabled him to exert so beneficial an influence on all who associated with him ; but to the peculiar efficiency of this influence , his age , his country ,
and the men with whom he lived , also contributed . In any other situation , the citizen-philosopher would have been simply an enlightened and virtuous man , and posterity might , perhaps , have never heard of his name ; since no discovery , no new doctrine peculiar to himself , has he imprinted on the page of time ; it is only by his method of teaching and his mode of life , by the
moral culture which he acquired himself and sought to communicate to others , but more especially by the circumstances of his death , that he has become a pattern to the world . Much , indeed , was required to make a Socrates ; above all , the noble simplicity and fewness of his wants , and that exquisite taste in moral beauty , which he seems to have matured into a kind of instinct .
Meantime , let us not raise this eminently wise and good man above the sphere in which providence itself had placed him . 6 Since his wisdom was confined to the government and economy of his own peculiar life , he trained up few disciples completely worthy of himself ; and his admirable method , in the
mouth of his immediate followers , degenerated into sarcasms and sophisms , as soon as ever the ironical questioner was wanting in the spirit of his master's mind and heart . If we compare impartially even his two greatest disciples , Xenophon and Plato , we shall find that he was , to use his own modest and favourite
expression , but the midwife of their peculiar forms of mind ; and , therefore , he himself appears in so different a light in the representations of these two writers . The difference visible in their writings clearly results from the diversity of their respective habits of thinking ; and the finest tribute of gratitude which they could offer to their beloved instructor , was the endeavour to set forth
his moral image . In every point of view it would have been most desirable , that the spirit of Socrates should have penetrated , through the influence of his disciples , into all the laws and constitutions of Greece ; that this was not the case , the whole of Grecian history shows . His life coincided with the highest point of Athenian civilization , and also occurred just at the crisis of the fiercest struggle between the Grecian states ; neither of these circumstances could fail to draw after it disastrous times and a
general corruption of manners , which not long afterwards terminated in the complete subversion of Grecian freedom . Against the operation of such causes no Socratic wisdom could be of any avail : it was too pure and refined to decide the destinies of nations . Xenophon , the warrior and statesman , delineated bad forms of government which he had not the power to alter . Plato created an ideal republic which nowhere existed , and least of all
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The Philosophy of ike History of Mankind . 177
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No . 63 . o
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 177, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/33/
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