Was Socrates at all conscious that with the bringing back of the moral to that which is rationally pleasurable he builds the road only a short way further, and stops exactly at the point where the real difficulty makes its appearance, viz. that of defining the most general content of the moral as given by reason? Or was he so simple as to regard the general formula he had arrived at as the solution of the difficulty? The confidence which he displays in all his public life leads us to suppose the latter. In his unaffected simplicity lies his strength. In that perilous hour when Western thought comes to the point of having to philosophize about the moral in order to arrest the dissolution of Greek society which has been begun by a body of unstable and disputatious teachers, the wise man of Athens shatters all scepticism by the mighty earnestness of his conviction that what is moral can be determined by thought. Beyond that general statement he does not go, but he is the source of that serious spirit in which antiquity after his day busied itself with the problem. What would that ancient world have become without him? Characteristic for this prologue to Western philosophizing about the moral is the indifference with which Socrates stands outside the philosophic efforts to reach a complete world-view. He troubles himself neither about the results of natural science, nor about inquiries into the nature of knowledge, but is busied simply with man in his relation to himself and to society. Lao-tse, Confucius, the Indian philosophers, the Jewish prophets, and Jesus seek to comprehend ethics as somehow or other derived from, or [pg 035] forming part of, a world-view. Socrates gives them no foundation but themselves. On this stage, which has no scenery to form a background, there will appear in succession to him the utilitarians of every age. And here a remarkable prospect opens to us. To all efforts to determine the content of the moral more help is afforded by the ethic which keeps clear of all connexion with a complete world-view than by any other. Such an ethic is the most practical. And yet this isolation is unnatural. The idea that ethics are rooted in a complete world-view, or must find their completion in one—that is, the idea that one’s relations to one’s fellow-men and to society are in the last resort rooted in some relation to the world—never loses its natural claim. Hence again and again—already in Plato, then in Epicurus and in the Stoic philosophy—ethics feel the need of again connecting themselves with world-view, and the same process continues in modern thought. But the practical search for the content of the ethical remains the prerogative of those who are busied with ethics in themselves. In Socrates the ethical mysticism of devotion to the inner voice takes the place of the complete world-view, which was in future to be the foundation of the ethical determination of mankind. Epicureanism and Stoicism. The Ethic of Resignation