To this agnosticism we owe not only that treatment of religious legend which we have already studied but the poet’s greatest achievement. Socrates, because, as he said, he could not understand metaphysics or astronomy, gave his attention to man. His friend because he despaired of a satisfying theology threw his genius into psychological drama. The centre of his interest is the human heart. Only one fact about destiny can be stated as consistently held by him, namely, that the spring of action and the chief factor in happiness or misery is, not the will of Heaven or dogmatic belief, but the nature (φύσις) of the individual.[841] Because he studies sin, not to condemn but to understand, he has earned that reproach of Aristophanes who rages at his predilection for Phædras and Sthenebœas. What attracted him was not a desire to gloat or even to pardon; it was the fact that the sinners he depicts are so intensely alive. A being dead in virtue engaged his interest less than one who, however evilly, existed with vigour. To this passionate interest in human life can be referred as basis all the other themes on which he spent study. Religion, as we have found, only attracts him because it guides or misleads conduct. His political studies have little concern with ethnology or economics; they are only an expansion to a wider field of this same interest in sheer humanity. Philosophy and natural science are of value for him, as for Lucretius, in that they provide an escape from paralyzing superstition. If they are presented as a refuge from the facts of life, he will have none of them. When Electra[842] seeks in her knowledge of astronomy a far-fetched consolation for self-fostered misery, she strikes us not as heroic but as own kin to the febrile “intellectuals” of Tchekov’s _Cherry Orchard_ or the novels of Dostoevsky.