Menes

“ Had I the command of you as well as of myself, Meno, I would not have enquired whether virtue is given by instruction or not, until we had first ascertained 'what it is.' But as you think only of controlling me who am your slave, and never of controlling yourself,—such being your notion of freedom, I must yield to you, for you are irresistible. ”

“ Now that Meno has been made to understand the nature of a general definition, he answers in the spirit of a Greek gentleman, and in the words of a poet, 'that virtue is to delight in things honourable, and to have the power of getting them.' This is a nearer approximation than he has yet made to a complete definition, and, regarded as a piece of proverbial or popular morality, is not far from the truth. ”

“ Meno names the virtues, but is unable to get at the common notion of them. Men. Courage and temperance and wisdom and magnanimity are virtues; and there are many others.
Soc. Yes, Meno; and again we are in the same case: in searching after one virtue we have found many, though not in the same way as before; but we have been unable to find the common virtue which runs through them all.
Men. Why, Socrates, even now I am not able to follow you in the attempt to get at one common notion of virtue as of other things. ”

“ Obviously, there is no aristocracy here. One finds only one of the necessary elements, and that only in the plutocracy, to wit, a truculent egoism. But where is intelligence? Where are ease and surety of manner? Where are enterprise and curiosity? Where, above all, is courage, and in particular, moral courage—the capacity for independent thinking, for difficult problems, for what Nietzsche called the joys of the [Pg 78] labyrinth? ”

“ But in the life of every man there are influences of a far more real and penetrating character than those which come through the medium of schools or teachers. The spirit of the age; the general tone of thought, the prevalent habits of social intercourse, the political tendencies which were moulding the destiny of the nation,--these must have told, more insensibly indeed but more powerfully, on the mind of Seneca than even the lectures of Sotion and of Attalus. ”

“ The chief mark of both epochs was individualism, the discovery of the individual. In Hellenism it was the barriers of race and position which fell; in the Renaissance, the veil, woven of mysticism and delusion, which had obscured mediæval faith, thought, and feeling. Every man recognized himself to be an independent unit of church, state, people, corporation--of all those bodies in which in the Middle Ages he had been entirely merged. ”

“ Any one who would not recognise the beauty of Zi Du must have no eyes. Therefore I say, Men's mouths agree in having the same relishes; their ears agree in enjoying the same sounds; their eyes agree in recognising the same beauty - shall their minds alone be without that which the similarly approve? What is it then of which they similarly approve? It is, I say, the principles of our nature, and the determinations of righteousness. The sages only apprehended before me that of which my mind approves along with other men. ”

“ SOCRATES: My answer is, that all things instrumental, remedial, material, are given to us with a view to generation, and that each generation is relative to, or for the sake of, some being or essence, and that the whole of generation is relative to the whole of essence.
PROTARCHUS: Assuredly.
SOCRATES: Then pleasure, being a generation, must surely be for the sake of some essence? ”

“ It was originally applied to a cringing menial, who was continually bowing before his master; and as in this case, the act was probably performed in a clownish, ungraceful way, the word thus came to signify an awkward, clumsy fellow.
Menial. This adjective is derived from the old French noun ‘mesnie’ (or meny) , which, in the Middle Ages, meant the servants or household of some noble or chieftain taken collectively. A menial occupation was, originally, one performed by some member of the ‘mesnie.’ It is from this last that the English expression ‘a many’ is derived. ”

“ Some define this class, of which I have been speaking, – a class of men who are making progress, – as having escaped the diseases of the mind, but not yet the passions, and as still standing upon slippery ground; because no one is beyond the dangers of evil except him who has cleared himself of it wholly. ”

“ For there must be a virtue of those who obey, as well as of those who command; and the power of command must be justly of not unjustly exercised. Meno is very ready to admit that justice is virtue: 'Would you say virtue or a virtue, for there are other virtues, such as as courage, temperance, and the like ”

“ There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race. ”

“ The Meno goes back to a former state of existence, in which men did and suffered good and evil, and received the reward or punishment of them until their sin was purged away and they were allowed to return to earth. ”

“ Few writers have thrown so much light on the development of the human mind in its social relations. We know now—a hundred disciples have followed in Maine's footsteps and applied his teaching—how slow is the growth of the human intellect in these matters, with what painful steps man learns to generalise, how convulsively he clings in the infancy of civilisation to the formal, the material, the realistic aspects of things, how late he develops such abstractions as "the State." ”

“ Here was a city of living men, each an individual personality, of individual tastes, thoughts, and passions, each a world to himself and monarch of that world. Yet by some abominable trick, it seemed, these individuals were not merely in external matters forced to conform to the Society which they helped to compose, but interiorly too ”

“ Menon enquires, Is virtue teachable? and iterates the science of good and evil. Protagoras makes Pleasure the only good, and Pain the only evil, and defines the science of good and evil as the comparison of pleasures and pains. Gorgias contradicts Protagoras, and sets up Order or Discipline as a final end. Politikus (on Government) repeats the Sokratic ideal of the One Wise man. Philebus makes Good a compound of Pleasure with Intelligence, the last predominating. The Republic assimilates Society to an Individual man, and defines Justice as the balance of the constituent parts of each. ”

“ Now the writings of Seneca show, in their way, a real anxiety among this class to raise the moral tone of mankind around them; a spirit of reform, a zeal for the conversion of souls, which, though it never rose, indeed, under the teaching of the philosophers, to boiling heat, still simmered with genial warmth on the surface of society. ”

“ Warts are not forgotten, whether of the nose or of the immortal soul. The subject, beginning as a political shibboleth or a row of books, gradually takes on all the colors of life, and then begins to move, naturally and freely. ”

“ To help them out he heaved in larger and larger doses of theory—often diverting enough, and sometimes even persuasive, but in the long run a poor substitute for the proper ingredients of character, situation and human passion. ”

“ I shall never forget this mild-mannered man, with his collected demeanour and restrained smile, without sentiment and without fanaticism, resignedly doing his duty without doubts or re­morses, but with no particularly high-pitched enthusiasms of any sort to illumine the path of his life-sacrifice. ”

“ They found that true civilization meant constant conflict between the two—between the dreamer and the man of action, between the artist who builds temples and the soldier who burns them down, between the priest and policeman who insist upon the permanence of laws and customs as they are and the criminal and reformer and conqueror who insist that they be changed. ”

“ In short, run through the list of all these men from the lowest to the highest—this man desires an advocate, [2] this one answers the call, that one is on trial, that one defends him, that one gives sentence; no one asserts his claim to himself, everyone is wasted for the sake of another. Ask about the men whose names are known by heart, and you will see that these are the marks that distinguish them: A cultivates B and B cultivates C; no one is his own master. ”

“ Next, let us consider the goods of the soul: they are temperance, justice, courage, quickness of apprehension, memory, magnanimity, and the like?
Men. Surely.
Soc. And such of these as are not knowledge, but of another sort, are sometimes profitable and sometimes hurtful; as, for example, courage wanting prudence, which is only Meno.
Socrates, Meno. a sort of confidence? When a man has no sense he is harmed by courage, but when he has sense he is profited? ”

“ We cannot, without a pang, see our characteristic types pass and disappear from the gallery of life. The late Master of Trinity possessed, perhaps, a character that appealed more to the older, to the humorous than to the young, the generous, the ardent. ”

“ The slave rebels against hardships and calls his rebellion superiority. Let your superiority be an acceptance of hardships. Let your commanding be an obeying.... Let your highest thought be: 'Man is something to be surpassed.'... I do not advise you to love your neighbor—the nearest human being. I advise you rather to flee from the nearest and love the furthest human being. Higher than love to your neighbor is love to the higher man that is to come in the future.... Propagate yourself upward. Thus live your life. ”

“ My race, my family, my native place, and the peculiar circle in which I was brought up, by diverting me from all material pursuits, and by rendering me unfit for anything except the treatment of things of the mind, had made of me an idealist, shut out from everything else. ”

“ He has discovered the long-sought sure cure for all the sorrows of the world; he has the infallible scheme for putting down injustice, misery, ignorance, suffering, sin; his appeal is not to the rules of a sinister and discreditable game, but to the bursting heart of humanity, the noblest and loftiest sentiments of man. ”

“ I have set down certain human transactions and depicted certain human beings brought face to face with definite conditions, and I have tried to show them meeting these conditions as persons of their sort would meet them in real life. I have endeavored, in brief, to exhibit a scene from life as real people live it. Doubtless, there are lessons to be learned from this scene—lessons that may benefit real men and women if they are ever confronted with the conditions I have described. ”

“ If a minister love what is good, all within the four seas will count 1000 li but a small distance, and will come and lay their good thoughts before him. If he do not love what is good, men will say, "How self-conceited he looks? He is sayinq to himself, I know it." The language and looks of that self-conceit will keep men off at a distance of 1,000 li. When good men stop 1,000 li off, calumniators, flatterers, and sycophants will make their appearance. ”

“ Certain groups of ideas come to us distinctively associated with certain marked ways of life. Many, and for a majority of us, it may be, most of our ancestors were serfs or slaves. And men and women who have had, generation after generation, to adapt themselves to slavery and the rule of a master, develop an idea of goodness very different from that of princes. ”

“ But in what direction may I turn with any hope of finding my particular kind of philosophers themselves, or at least my yearning for new philosophers? In that direction, alone, where a noble attitude of mind prevails, an attitude of mind which believes in slavery and in manifold orders of rank, as the prerequisites of any high degree of culture. ”

“ What race of men was ever more blest than that race? They enjoyed all nature in partnership. Nature sufficed for them, now the guardian, as before she was the parent, of all; and this her gift consisted of the assured possession by each man of the common resources. ”

“ This exclusiveness, from Nietzsche's point of view, seemed ridiculous and pernicious, for a true aristocracy must be ever willing and eager to welcome to its ranks—and to enroll in fact, automatically—all who display those qualities which make a man extraordinarily fit and efficient. ”

“ What is the origin of the so-called double standard of morality? Why are women forbidden to take off their hats in church? What is happiness? Intelligence? Sin? Courage? Virtue? Beauty?
All these are questions of interest and importance to all of us, for their solution would materially improve the accuracy of our outlook upon the world, and with it our mastery of our environment, but the psychologists, 154busily engaged in chasing their tails, leave them unanswered, and, in most cases, even unasked. ”

“ Socrates, Meno.
And now, what is colour? my definition of figure. I define figure to be that in which the solid ends; or, more concisely, the limit of solid. Men. And now, Socrates, what is colour?
Soc. You are outrageous, Meno, in thus plaguing a poor old man to give you an answer, when you will not take the trouble of remembering what is Gorgias' definition of virtue.
Men. When you have told me what I ask, I will tell you, Socrates.
Soc. A man who was blindfolded has only to hear you talking, and he would know that you are a fair creature and have still many lovers. Men. ”