the best, barefooted and dirty as he was, and for his intellectual gifts alone.  Think of such a man being the oracle of a modern salon, either in Paris, London, or New York, with his repulsive appearance, and tantalizing and provoking irony.  But in artistic Athens, at one time, he was all the fashion.  Everybody liked to hear him talk.  Everybody was both amused and instructed.  He provoked no envy, since he affected modesty and ignorance, apparently asking his questions for information, and was so meanly clad, and lived in such a poor way.  Though he provoked animosities, he had many friends.  If his language was sarcastic, his affections were kind.  He was always surrounded by the most gifted men of his time.  The wealthy Crito constantly attended him; Plato and Xenophon were enthusiastic pupils; even Alcibiades was charmed by his conversation; Apollodorus and Antisthenes rarely quitted his side; Cebes and Simonides came from Thebes to hear him; Isocrates and Aristippus followed in his train; Euclid of Megara sought his society, at the risk of his life; the tyrant Critias, and even the Sophist Protagoras, acknowledged his marvellous power.

But I cannot linger longer on the man, with his gifts and peculiarities.  More important things demand our attention.  I propose briefly to show his contributions to philosophy and ethics.

In regard to the first, I will not dwell on his method, which is both subtle and dialectical.  We are not Greeks.  Yet it was his method which revolutionized philosophy.  That was original.  He saw this,—­that the theories of his day were mere opinions; even the lofty speculations of the Ionian philosophers were dreams, and the teachings of the Sophists were mere words.  He despised both dreams and words.  Speculations ended in the indefinite and insoluble; words ended in rhetoric.  Neither dreams nor words revealed the true, the beautiful, and the good,—­which, to his mind, were the only realities, the only sure foundation for a philosophical system.

So he propounded certain questions, which, when answered, produced glaring contradictions, from which disputants shrank.  Their conclusions broke down their assumptions.  They stood convicted of ignorance, to which all his artful and subtle questions tended, and which it was his aim to prove.  He showed that they did not know what they affirmed.  He proved that their definitions were wrong or incomplete, since they logically led to contradictions; and he showed that for purposes of disputation the same meaning must always attach to the same word, since in ordinary language terms have different meanings, partly true and partly false, which produce confusion in argument.  He would be precise and definite, and use the utmost rigor of language, without which inquirers and disputants would not understand each other.  Every definition should include the whole thing, and nothing else; otherwise, people would not know what they were talking about, and would be forced into absurdities.