Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 8 Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Philosophers by ELBERT HUBBARD Memorial Edition New York 1916. CONTENTS SOCRATES SENECA ARISTOTLE MARCUS AURELIUS IMMANUEL KANT SWEDENBORG SPINOZA AUGUSTE COMTE VOLTAIRE HERBERT SPENCER SCHOPENHAUER HENRY D. THOREAU SOCRATES I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods. --_The Republic_ [Illustration: SOCRATES] It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born. He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public office, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp, vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us familiar--his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit of his life--his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith--all these things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting him apart. The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give us Boswellian pictures of the man. Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, we know the man. Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wife Phaenarete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sitting by, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans of Pericles. These workmen didn't know the plans--they were only privates in the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, and while working to assist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Like sailors who love their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on shore will allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenians love their city, and still condemn its rulers--they exercised the laborer's right to damn the man who gives him work. Little did the workmen guess--little did his father guess--that this pug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would also leave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rival that of Phidias and Pericles!