the sentence of death. This was delayed thirty days on account of the sacrifice at Delos. Even then Socrates could have easily escaped from jail. But he refused to do the law a wrong, and drank the hemlock in May, 399 B. C. Professor G. H. Palmer points out the irony that characterizes the life and death of Socrates. He stands for the harmony of opposite qualities. He devoted himself to the good of Athens, and yet Athens put him to death. In the service of the eternal was he sacrificed. His own personality is an exemplification of this irony. In appearance his un-Greek physical ugliness is in contrast with his beautiful Greek soul; he was the most austere and yet the most sensitive of men; he was always a serious moralist and yet always a jester; he was scarcely out of Athens and yet he was a world’s man; he was the world’s philosopher and yet he had no system of thought and left no writings. =Socrates and the Sophists.= _In his point of departure_ Socrates is in entire agreement with the Sophists. He is a critical philosopher. Criticism is the starting-point of his philosophy as a whole, and he begins each particular argument afresh with a critical examination of its grounds. This means that he, like the Sophists, turns to the individual reason as the final court of appeal. Like them he refused to accept any traditional dogma unexamined, and he commenced a critical inquiry into all kinds of conceptions. Socrates and the Sophists are one in the spirit of the Greek illumination in their critical attack upon intellectual problems. Socrates’ famous saying that “virtue is knowledge” could equally well be put into the mouth of Protagoras; and the doctrine of Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things” could be ascribed to Socrates without inconsistency. _In his conclusions in one respect_ Socrates arrives at the same point as the Sophists,――but in only one respect. He agrees with them as to the worthlessness of the results of natural science. Natural science cannot be worth while, because it does not lead to moral excellence. The meagre results of the Cosmologists show the worthlessness of natural science to man. In this one respect Socrates’ criticism leads him to skepticism like the Sophists,――to a skepticism of natural science.