figure John Calvin or any modern theological doctor relaxing his gravity in this region so far; and yet Socrates was as veritable a saint as Calvin, only the men were constitutionally not only different, but adverse; besides, Socrates was a Greek, and, so far as impressibility by mere physical beauty is concerned, this {33} implies much. What the modern Protestant theologian would have thought it a sin to look at in the ancient philosopher might have excited an innocent and pious admiration. But the tolerant universality of large human sympathy in Socrates, however difficult it may be for some men to understand, was in fact much less an anomaly in a severe moralist than the selfish theory of Hobbes is in a man pretending to be a man at all. To explain such a perverse phenomenon we must bear in mind that the love of singularity in some minds is greater than the love of truth; that some men of great intellectual capacity are deficient in some of the finer instincts that stir heroic breasts, and fail to recognise in others what they have no experience of in themselves; that in the common characters whom one meets in daily life an essentially selfish motive can often be traced beneath the gracious surface, where to the public eye only benevolence, philanthropy, humility, and self-denial shine out with genial radiance; that the scientific mind has a peculiar pleasure in tracking out such inconsistencies; that the speculative mind in its eagerness to embrace various phenomena under one law is apt to run a-muck against Nature, delighting, as she does sometimes, more in the compromise of various principles than in the triumph of one; and finally, that men trained principally in the political and legal world often have a tendency to transfer the selfish principles which are most considered in their domain to other spheres of the social system, where more free scope is given to the exercise of the benevolent and unselfish propensities. These considerations may perhaps account for the genesis of such an incomplete moralist as Hobbes,--it is only {34} the common instance of a meagre plant growing up in a bad climate. Socrates, on the other hand, surprises and puzzles us by his sheer redundancy of ethical sensibility; as a tropical vegetation seems sometimes to smother with the exuberance of green life the sober demands of an eye educated in a temperate climate.