speak; if it did not do them good, must do them considerable harm; could not leave them just as they were. He had not been able in all cases to expand "the better self," as people say, in those he influenced. Some of them had really become very insolent questioners of others, as also of a wholly legitimate authority within themselves; and had but passed from bad to worse. That fatal necessity had been involved of coming to years of discretion. His claim to have been no teacher at all, to be irresponsible in regard to those who had in truth been his very willing disciples, was but humorous or ironical; and as a consequence there was after all a sort of historic justice in his death. The fate of Socrates (says Hegel, in his peculiar manner) is tragic in the essential sense, and not merely in that super- ficial sense of the word according to which every misfortune is called 'tragic.' In the latter sense, one might say of Socrates that because he was condemned to death unjustly his fate was tragic. But in truth innocent suffering of that sort is merely pathetic, not tragic; inasmuch as it is not within the sphere of reason. Now suffering--misfortune--comes within the sphere of reason, only if it is brought about by the free- will of the subject, who must be entirely moral and justifiable; as must be also the power against which that subject proceeds. This power must be no merely natural one, nor the mere will of a tyrant; because it is only in such case that the man is himself, so to speak, guilty of his misfortune. In genuine tragedy, then, they must be powers both alike moral and justifiable, which, from this side and from that, come into collision; and such was the fate of Socrates. His fate therefore is not merely personal, and as it were part of the romance of an individual: [92] it is the general fate, in all its tragedy--the tragedy of Athens, of Greece, which is therein carried out. Two opposed Rights come forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this way, both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified the one towards the other: not as if this were right; that other wrong. On the one side is the religious claim, the unconscious moral habit: the other principle, over against it, is the equally religious claim--the claim of the consciousness, of the reason, creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The latter remains the common principle of philosophy for all time to come. And these are the two principles which come forth over against each other, in the life and in the philosophy of Socrates. Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 102.