Page:Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. 4 (1867).djvu/351

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not available in the Gorgias. The posthumous recompense he only ventures to introduce in the form of a mythe; and the earthly one is opposed to the whole scheme of the dialogue, which represents the virtuous and wise man as, in every existing society, a solitary being, misjudgcd, persecuted, and having no more chance with the Diany against their adulators, than (to use Platds comparison) a physician would have, if indicted before a jury of children by a confectioner for giving them nauseous drugs instead of delicious sweet-meats. It is precisely this picture of the moral hero, still ziewam proposz'ti against the hostility and contempt of the world, which makes the splendor and power of the Gorgias. The Sokrates of the dialogue makes us feel all other evils to be more tolerable than injustice in the soul, not by proving it, but by the sympathy he calls ferth with his own intense feeling of it. He inspires heroism, because he shows himself a hero. And his failures in logic do not prevent the step marked by the Gorgias from being one of the greatest ever made in moral culture—the cultivation of a disinterested preference of duty for its own sake, as a higher state than that of sacrifieing selńsh preferences to a more distant self—interest.

In the Republic, the excellence and inherent felicity of the just life are as impressively insisted on, and enforced by arguments of greater substance. But, as Mr. Grote justly remarks, those arguments, even if conclusive, are addressed to the wrong point; for the life they suppose is not that of the simply just man, but of the philosopher. They are not applicable to the typical just man— to such a person as Aristeides, who