_The crisis of philosophy--Philosophic midwifery--The wisest of men--The gadfly of Athens--Justice, beauty, utility--Virtue is knowledge_ The sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to descend into the practical interests and personal affairs of men, it followed that any further step in philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy, as an analysis of the data of perception or of nature, had issued in a social and moral chaos. Only by brooding on the moral chaos could the spirit of truth evoke a new order; only out of the moral darkness could a new intellectual light be made to shine. The social and personal anarchy seemed to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophy of nature; if ever the philosophy of nature was to be recovered it must be through a revision of the theory of morals. If it could be proved that the doctrine of individualism, of isolation, which the analysis of a Protagoras or a Gorgias had reached, was not only _unlivable_ but unthinkable,--carried the seeds of its own destruction, theoretical as well as practical, within {102} itself,--then the analysis of _perception_, from which this moral individualism issued, might itself be called to submit to revision, and a stable point of support in the moral world might thus become a centre of stability for the intellectual and the physical also. By a perfectly logical process, therefore, the crisis of philosophy produced in Greece through the moral and social chaos of the sophistic teaching had two issues, or perhaps we may call it one issue, carried out on the one side with a less, on the other side with a greater completeness. The less complete reaction from sophistic teaching attempted only such reconstruction of the moral point of view as should recover a law or principle of general and universally cogent character, whereon might be built anew a _moral_ order without attempting to extend the inquiry as to a universal principle into the regions of abstract truth or into physics. The more complete and logical reaction, starting, indeed, from a universal principle in morals, undertook a logical reconstruction on the recovered universal basis all along the line of what was knowable. To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point of stability in the world of morals, and by a system of attack, invented by himself, to deal in such a manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare the way for his successors, when the time was ripe for a more extended exposition of the new point of {103} view. Those who in succession to him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in the world of morals, only were called the _Incomplete Socratics_. Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the knowable, the _Complete Socratics_, were the two giants of philosophy, Plato and Aristotle.