Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 8
Little Journeys to the Homes
of Great Philosophers
by
Elbert Hubbard
Memorial Edition
New York
1916.
CONTENTS
SOCRATES
SENECA
ARISTOTLE
MARCUS AURELIUS
IMMANUEL KANT
SWEDENBORG
SPINOZA
AUGUSTE COMTE
VOLTAIRE
HERBERT SPENCER
SCHOPENHAUER
HENRY D. THOREAU
SOCRATES[Pg 9]
I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by aworse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living norwhen dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods.
—The Republic
[Pg 10]
It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born.He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no publicoffice, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp,vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to usfamiliar—his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habitof his life—his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, hisinfinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith—all thesethings are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting himapart.
The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give usBoswellian pictures of the man.
Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, weknow the man.
Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wifePhænarete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sittingby, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans ofPericles. These workmen didn't know the plans—they were only privatesin the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, andwhile working to assist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Likesailors who love[Pg 12] their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on shorewill allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenianslove their city, and still condemn its rulers—they exercised thelaborer's right to damn the man who gives him work.
Little did the workmen guess—little did his father guess—that thispug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would alsoleave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rivalthat of Phidias and Pericles!
Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come ingroups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought andfeeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration—worth thousands ofweekly sermons—and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutti