Socrates, with all his singleness of purpose, had been, as Alcibiades suggested, by natural constitution a twofold power, an embodied paradox. The infinitely significant Socrates of Plato, and the quite simple Socrates of Xenophon, may have been indeed the not incompatible oppositions of a nature, from the influence of which, as a matter of fact, there emerged on one hand the Cynic, on the other the Cyrenaic School, embodying respectively those opposed austerities and amenities of character, which, according to the temper of this or that disciple, had seemed to predominate in their common master. And so the courage which declined to act as almost [88] any one else would have acted in that matter of the legal appeal which might have mitigated the penalty of death, bringing to its appropriate end a life whose main power had been an unrivalled independence, was contrasted in Socrates, paradoxically, with a genuine diffidence about his own convictions which explains some peculiarities in his manner of teaching. The irony, the humour, for which he was famous--the unfailing humour which some have found in his very last words--were not merely spontaneous personal traits, or tricks of manner; but an essential part of the dialectical apparatus, as affording a means of escape from responsibility, convenient for one who has scruples about the fitness of his own thoughts for the reception of another, doubts as to the power of words to convey thoughts, such as he thinks cannot after all be properly conveyed to another, but only awakened, or brought to birth in him, out of himself,--who can tell with what distortions in that secret place? For we judge truth not by the intellect exclusively, and on reasons that can be adequately embodied in propositions; but with the whole complex man. Observant therefore of the capricious results of mere teaching, to the last he protests, dissemblingly, and with that irony which is really one phase of the Socratic humour, that in his peculiar function there have been in very deed neither teacher nor learners.