The two first questions to be asked with regard to any great moral or political reformer are--What had he to reform? and then, In the work of reform who were his antagonists? The first of these questions is answered intelligibly and plainly enough in {16} the current knowledge of every schoolboy, that Socrates brought down philosophy from heaven to earth, or, as Cicero has it more fully in the Tusculan questions, “_Socrates primus philosophiam devocavit e cœlo, et in urbibus collocavit, et in domos etiam introduxit, et coegit de vitâ et moribus, rebusque bonis et mails quœrere_.” Now there cannot be any doubt that, both relatively to the time and place where he taught, and absolutely for all times and all places, Socrates by this step did one of the highest services to human progress. By a natural vice of the human imagination we are led to seek in the misty distance for some pleasant excitement to thought, while neglecting the direct lessons of familiar wisdom from things under our eyes, which appear contemptible only because they are common. We attempt ambitiously to measure the remote movement of the spheres, and to note their imagined music, before we have brought any order or harmony into the daily course of our own lives; we climb all the highest mountains in Europe for a fine prospect, when there is likely a much better one to be enjoyed not five miles from our own door. In obedience to this tendency of the human mind the early philosophy of Greece was occupied principally (not altogether certainly, for Pythagoras was a great moralist) with cosmical and metaphysical speculations which amused the fancy and raised interesting and puzzling problems for thought, without any valuable practical result. When Thales, for one, said that the first principle of all things was water, he enunciated a great truth; it is true that wherever there is life there must be humidity; with dryness dwells only dust and death and frost. But this was a truth {17} leading to no applications; it could neither purify the wells nor improve the wines; no man would be the better in his body or his soul for formulating a cosmical generality of this kind. And if Heraclitus, the sombre sage of Ephesus, advanced a step further in a true generalization, when he said that fire or heat is the fundamental force which makes water possible, as modern chemistry has amply demonstrated, this doctrine did not advance human nature one step either towards outward comfort or inward satisfaction. And of what avail was it to tell men, as he did, that “all things are in a perpetual flux,” if he did not teach them how to regulate that flux in the flow of their own lives, and to prevent the tidal currents of their soul from getting into a plash and jabble of conflicting waters in the navigation of which no seamancraft could avail against miserable shipwreck? More useless still was it to assert, as Anaxagoras is reported to have done, that the sun is a large mass of