In the first place, nothing that has been said here in endeavouring shortly to epitomize the leading idea of Socrates with regard to practical reason and acted truth, assumes to settle definitively that much-vexed question, _How far is a man at any time, from any motive, and for any object, entitled to tell or to enact {45} a lie?_ In a dialogue of considerable length, which Socrates holds with Euthydemus, a raw and conceited young Athenian, who, because he possessed a great library, imagined himself to possess much wisdom, the philosopher is represented as puzzling the young gentleman with such questions as the following: Whether is it lawful for a general, with the view of raising the drooping spirits of his soldiers, to give out an unfounded report that friends are coming up to help them? Whether, if a father, whose sick son refuses to take a necessary medicine, shall disguise this medicine under the aspect of food, and by the ministry of this drugged aliment restore his son to health, this act of deceit is right or wrong? Or again, if a friend whom we love is given to fits of melancholy, and may be apt in an evil moment to meditate suicide, is it an act of culpable theft privately to purloin or forcibly to abstract the sword or other lethal instrument of which he may avail himself to commit the fatal act? In such and similar cases, though the point is rather raised than settled, Socrates plainly seems to imply that lies are both natural and beneficial, and therefore ought to be tolerated. And in truth, though the extreme dogmatism of certain of the Church Fathers lays down the doctrine that the obligation of truth-speaking and truth-doing is absolute, and admits of no exception, yet the common sense of mankind, and the universal practice of saints and sinners in all ages and in all countries, goes along with Socrates (and we may add Plato here, _Rep_. ii.) in the assertion, that where violence is done to Nature in one way by an unnatural overwhelming force, such as occurs in war, then Nature defends herself by a {46} violence to her habitual principles in an opposite direction; that is to say, it will be justifiable, on certain occasions, and within certain limits, to defeat force by fraud; or, as Lysander the captor of Athens used to say, where a man may not show the lion’s hide he must wrap himself in the fox’s skin. But the very suspicion with which the general moral sentiment guards the extension of this motive, which in extreme cases it allows, shows that all deviation from truth is looked upon as the result of a force upon Nature; and, if it may in certain cases be excused or even imperatively commanded, it never brings with it the natural aliment of our better nature, which breathes freely only in the wide and pure atmosphere of truth. The general obligation of truth, therefore, according to the doctrine of Socrates, is not at all weakened by the occasional necessity of deceit; for while the one rests firmly on the