He had indeed the excuse that the myth-rationalizers of the time after Hekataios, following the line of least psychic resistance, like those of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, explained away myths by reducing them to hypothetical history, thus asking credence for something no better verified than the myth itself. But the rationalizers were on a path by which men might conceivably have journeyed to a truer science; and Sokrates, by refusing to undertake any such exploration, [653] left his countrymen to that darkening belief in tradition which made possible his own execution. There was in his cast of mind, indeed--if we can at all accept Plato's presentment of him--something unfavourable to steady conviction. He cannot have had any real faith in the current religion; yet he never explicitly dissented. In the Republic he accepts the new festival to the Thracian Goddess Bendis; and there he is made by Plato to inculcate a quite orthodox acceptance of the Delphic oracle as the source of all religious practice. But it is impossible to say how much of the teaching of the Platonic Sokrates is Sokratic. And as to Plato there remains the problem of how far his conformities were prudential, after the execution of Sokrates for blasphemy. The long-debated issue as to the real personality of Sokrates is still open. It is energetically and systematically handled by Prof. August Döring in Die Lehre des Sokrates als sociales Reformsystem (1895), and by Dr. Hubert Röck in Der unverfälschte Sokrates (1903). See, in particular, Döring, pp. 51-79, and Röck, pp. 357-96. From all attempts to arrive at a conception of a consistent Sokrates there emerges the impression that the real Sokrates, despite a strong critical bent of mind, had no clearly established body of opinions, but was swayed in different directions by the itch for contradiction which was the driving power of his dialectic. For the so-called Sokratic "method" is much less a method for attaining truth than one for disturbing prejudice. And if in Plato's hands Sokrates seldom reaches a conclusion that his own method might not overthrow, we are not entitled to refuse to believe that this was characteristic of the man.