the practical duties of life.  His great object was the elucidation of morals; and he was the first to teach ethics systematically from the immutable principles of moral obligation.  Moral certitude was the lofty platform from which he surveyed the world, and upon which, as a rock, he rested in the storms of life.  Thus he was a reformer and a moralist.  It was his ethical doctrines which were most antagonistic to the age and the least appreciated.  He was a profoundly religious man, recognized Providence, and believed in the immortality of the soul.  He did not presume to inquire into the Divine essence, yet he believed that the gods were omniscient and omnipresent, that they ruled by the law of goodness, and that in spite of their multiplicity there was unity,—­a supreme Intelligence that governed the world.  Hence he was hated by the Sophists, who denied the certainty of arriving at any knowledge of God.  From the comparative worthlessness of the body he deduced the immortality of the soul.  With him the end of life was reason and intelligence.  He deduced the existence of God from the order and harmony of Nature, belief in which was irresistible.  He endeavored to connect the moral with the religious consciousness, and thus to promote the practical welfare of society.  In this light Socrates stands out the grandest personage of Pagan antiquity,—­as a moralist, as a teacher of ethics, as a man who recognized the Divine.

So far as he was concerned in the development of Greek philosophy proper, he was inferior to some of his disciples, Yet he gave a turning-point to a new period when he awakened the idea of knowledge, and was the founder of the method of scientific inquiry, since he pointed out the legitimate bounds of inquiry, and was thus the precursor of Bacon and Pascal.  He did not attempt to make physics explain metaphysics, nor metaphysics the phenomena of the natural world; and he reasoned only from what was generally assumed to be true and invariable.  He was a great pioneer of philosophy, since he resorted to inductive methods of proof, and gave general definiteness to ideas.  Although he employed induction, it was his aim to withdraw the mind from the contemplation of Nature, and to fix it on its own phenomena,—­to look inward rather than outward; a method carried out admirably by his pupil Plato.  The previous philosophers had given their attention to external nature; Socrates gave up speculations about material phenomena, and directed his inquiries solely to the nature of knowledge.  And as he considered knowledge to be identical with virtue, he speculated on ethical questions mainly, and the method which he taught was that by which alone man could become better and wiser.  To know one’s self,—­in other words, that “the proper study of mankind is man,”—­he proclaimed with Thales.  Cicero said of him, “Socrates brought down philosophy from the heavens to the earth.”  He did not disdain the subjects which chiefly interested the Sophists,—­astronomy, rhetoric, physics,—­but he chiefly discussed moral questions, such as, What is piety?  What is the just and the unjust?  What is temperance?  What is courage?  What is the character fit for a citizen?—­and other ethical points, involving practical human relationships.