Who is this man of singular ugliness, with a face like a Silenus, with a body enduring hunger and impervious to heat and cold, who for thirty years frequents from morning to night the agora, the streets, the porticoes of Athens; who can drain the wine-cup through the night, and with reason unimpaired discuss philosophy through the following day; never alone, ready to converse with all in whom he discerned the germ of inquiry; who neither courts the high nor despises the low, but beside whom may be found the reckless beauty of Alcibiades and the staid gravity of Nicias, the admiring gaze of Plato even in youth majestic, and the sober homage of plainer Xenophon? Who is this, the man most social of men where the whole population is a club, the club of Athenian citizenship; whose tongue arrests the most volatile and inconstant of peoples; whose reason attracts and by turns draws out or silences the most opposite of characters; whose whole life is publicity; of spirit at once homely and subtle, simple and critical, parent both of philosophic certitude and philosophic scepticism? This is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, to whom Greek philosophy will look back as on one that had given its bent and directed its course during a thousand years, until the last of its defenders(338) will fight a hopeless battle with triumphant Christianity, as the gods of Greece vanish, never more to return, and the lurid star of a false prophet teaching a false monotheism appears above the horizon, and takes the place, which they have left vacant, to be chief foe of the Christian name. The special principle of Socrates is thus described to us by an historian of Greek philosophy.(339) “It is not merely an already existing mode of thought which was further developed by Socrates, but an essentially new principle and proceeding which were introduced into philosophy. Whilst all preceding philosophy had been directed immediately on the object, so that the question of the essence and grounds of natural appearances is in it the radical question, on which all others depend, Socrates was the first to give utterance to the conviction that nothing can be known respecting anything which meets our thought, before its general essence, its conception, be determined: that accordingly the trial of our own representations by the standard of the conception is philosophical self-cognition, the beginning and the condition of all true knowing: whilst those who preceded him had arrived through the consideration of things only to distinguishing between the representation of things and the knowing of them, he, reversing this, makes all cognition of things dependent on the right view of the nature of knowledge.”