Apart from legendary1 reputations, there is no name in the world’s history more famous than that of Socrates, and in the history of philosophy there is none so famous. The only thinker that approaches him in celebrity2 is his own disciple3 Plato. Every one who has heard of Greece or Athens has heard of him. Every one who has heard of him knows that he was supremely4 good and great. Each successive generation has confirmed the reputed Delphic oracle6 that no man was wiser than Socrates. He, with one or two others, alone came near to realising the ideal of a Stoic7 sage8. Christians10 deem it no irreverence11 to compare him with the Founder12 of their religion. If a few dissentient voices have broken the general unanimity13, they have, whether consciously or not, been inspired by the Socratic principle that we should let no opinion pass unquestioned and unproved. Furthermore, it so happens that this wonderful figure is known even to the multitude by sight as well as by name. Busts14, cameos, and engravings have made all familiar with the Silenus-like physiognomy, the thick lips, upturned nose, and prominent eyes which impressed themselves so strangely on the imagination of a race who are accused of having cared for nothing but physical beauty, because they rightly regarded it as the natural accompaniment of moral loveliness. Those who wish to discover what manner of mind lay hid beneath this uninviting109 exterior15 may easily satisfy their curiosity, for Socrates is personally better known than any other character of antiquity16. Dr. Johnson himself is not a more familiar figure to the student of literature. Alone among classical worthies17 his table-talk has been preserved for us, and the art of memoir-writing seems to have been expressly created for his behoof.79 We can follow him into all sorts of company and test his behaviour in every variety of circumstances. He conversed18 with all classes and on all subjects of human interest, with artisans, artists, generals, statesmen, professors, and professional beauties. We meet him in the armourer’s workshop, in the sculptor21’s studio, in the boudoirs of the demi-monde, in the banqueting-halls of flower-crowned and wine-flushed Athenian youth, combining the self-mastery of an Antisthenes with the plastic grace of an Aristippus; or, in graver moments, cheering his comrades during the disastrous22 retreat from Delium; upholding the sanctity of law, as President of the Assembly, against a delirious23 populace; confronting with invincible24 irony25 the oligarchic26 terrorists who held life and death in their hands; pleading not for himself, but for reason and justice, before a stupid and bigoted27 tribunal; and, in the last sad scene of all, exchanging Attic28 courtesies with the unwilling29 instrument of his death.80
Such a character would, in any case, be remarkable30; it becomes of extraordinary, or rather of unique, interest when we consider that Socrates could be and do so much, not in spite of being a philosopher, but because he was a philosopher, the chief though not the sole originator of a vast intellectual revolution; one who, as a teacher, constituted the supremacy110 of reason, and as an individual made reason his sole guide in life. He at once discovered new principles, popularised them for the benefit of others, and exemplified them in his own conduct; but he did not accomplish these results separately; they were only different aspects of the same systematising process which is identical with philosophy itself. Yet the very success of Socrates in harmonising life and thought makes it the more difficult for us to construct a complete picture of his personality. Different observers have selected from the complex combination that which best suited their own mental predisposition, pushing out of sight the other elements which, with him, served to correct and complete it. The very popularity that has attached itself to his name is a proof of this; for the multitude can seldom appreciate more than one excellence32 at a time, nor is that usually of the highest order. Hegel complains that Socrates has been made the patron-saint of moral twaddle.81 We are fifty years further removed than Hegel from the golden age of platitude33; the twaddle of our own time is half cynical34, half aesthetic35, and wholly unmoral; yet there are no signs of diminution36 in the popular favour with which Socrates has always been regarded. The man of the world, the wit, the viveur, the enthusiastic admirer of youthful beauty, the scornful critic of democracy is welcome to many who have no taste for ethical37 discourses38 and fine-spun arguments.
Nor is it only the personality of Socrates that has been so variously conceived; his philosophy, so far as it can be separated from his life, has equally given occasion to conflicting interpretations39, and it has even been denied that he had, properly speaking, any philosophy at all. These divergent presentations of his teaching, if teaching it can be called, begin with the two disciples41 to whom our knowledge of it is almost entirely42 due. There is, curiously43 enough, much the same inner discrepancy44 between Xenophon’s Memorabilia and those111 Platonic45 dialogues where Socrates is the principal spokesman, as that which distinguishes the Synoptic from the Johannine Gospels. The one gives us a report certainly authentic46, but probably incomplete; the other account is, beyond all doubt, a highly idealised portraiture47, but seems to contain some traits directly copied from the original, which may well have escaped a less philosophical49 observer than Plato. Aristotle also furnishes us with some scanty50 notices which are of use in deciding between the two rival versions, although we cannot be sure that he had access to any better sources of information than are open to ourselves. By variously combining and reasoning from these data modern critics have produced a third Socrates, who is often little more than the embodiment of their own favourite opinions.
In England, the most generally accepted method seems to be that followed by Grote. This consists in taking the Platonic Apologia as a sufficiently51 faithful report of the defence actually made by Socrates on his trial, and piecing it on to the details supplied by Xenophon, or at least to as many of them as can be made to fit, without too obvious an accommodation of their meaning. If, however, we ask on what grounds a greater historical credibility is attributed to the Apologia than to the Republic or the Phaedo, none can be offered except the seemingly transparent52 truthfulness53 of the narrative54 itself, an argument which will not weigh much with those who remember how brilliant was Plato’s talent for fiction, and how unscrupulously it could be employed for purposes of edification. The Phaedo puts an autobiographical statement into the mouth of Socrates which we only know to be imaginary because it involves the acceptance of a theory unknown to the real Socrates. Why, then, may not Plato have thought proper to introduce equally fictitious55 details into the speech delivered by his master before the dicastery, if, indeed, the speech, as we have it, be not a fancy composition from beginning to end?
112
Before we can come to a decision on this point it will be necessary briefly56 to recapitulate57 the statements in question. Socrates is defending himself against a capital charge. He fears that a prejudice respecting him may exist in the minds of the jury, and tries to explain how it arose without any fault of his, as follows:—A certain friend of his had asked the oracle at Delphi whether there was any man wiser than Socrates? The answer was that no man was wiser. Not being conscious of possessing any wisdom, great or small, he felt considerably58 surprised on hearing of this declaration, and thought to convince the god of falsehood by finding out some one wiser than himself. He first went to an eminent59 politician, who, however, proved, on examination, to be utterly60 ignorant, with the further disadvantage that it was impossible to convince him of his ignorance. On applying the same test to others a precisely61 similar result was obtained. It was only the handicraftsmen who could give a satisfactory account of themselves, and their knowledge of one trade made them fancy that they understood everything else equally well. Thus the meaning of the oracle was shown to be that God alone is truly wise, and that of all men he is wisest who, like Socrates, perceives that human wisdom is worth little or nothing. Ever since then, Socrates has made it his business to vindicate62 the divine veracity63 by seeking out and exposing every pretender to knowledge that he can find, a line of conduct which has made him extremely unpopular in Athens, while it has also won him a great reputation for wisdom, as people supposed that the matters on which he convicted others of ignorance were perfectly64 clear to himself.
The first difficulty that strikes one in connexion with this extraordinary story arises out of the oracle on which it all hinges. Had such a declaration been really made by the Pythia, would not Xenophon have eagerly quoted it as a proof of the high favour in which his hero stood with the113 gods?82 And how could Socrates have acquired so great a reputation before entering on the cross-examining career which alone made him conscious of any superiority over other men, and had alone won the admiration65 of his fellow-citizens? Our doubts are still further strengthened when we find that the historical Socrates did not by any means profess20 the sweeping66 scepticism attributed to him by Plato. So far from believing that ignorance was the common and necessary lot of all mankind, himself included, he held that action should, so far as possible, be entirely guided by knowledge;83 that the man who did not always know what he was about resembled a slave; that the various virtues67 were only different forms of knowledge; that he himself possessed69 this knowledge, and was perfectly competent to share it with his friends. We do, indeed, find him very ready to convince ignorant and presumptuous70 persons of their deficiencies, but only that he may lead them, if well disposed, into the path of right understanding. He also thought that there were certain secrets which would remain for ever inaccessible72 to the human intellect, facts connected with the structure of the universe which the gods had reserved for their own exclusive cognisance. This, however, was, according to him, a kind of knowledge which, even if it could be obtained, would not be particularly worth having, and the search after which would leave us no leisure for more useful acquisitions. Nor does the Platonic Socrates seem to have been at the trouble of arguing against natural science. The subjects of his elenchus are the professors of such arts as politics, rhetoric73, and poetry. Further, we have something stronger than a simple inference from the facts recorded by Xenophon; we have his express testimony74 to the fact that Socrates did not114 limit himself to confuting people who fancied they knew everything; here we must either have a direct reference to the Apologia, or to a theory identical with that which it embodies75.I Some stress has been laid on a phrase quoted by Xenophon himself as having been used by Hippias, which at first sight seems to support Plato’s view. The Elian Sophist charges Socrates with practising a continual irony, refuting others and not submitting to be questioned himself;84 an accusation76 which, we may observe in passing, is not borne out by the discussion that subsequently takes place between them. Here, however, we must remember that Socrates used to convey instruction under the form of a series of leading questions, the answers to which showed that his interlocutor understood and assented77 to the doctrine79 propounded80. Such a method might easily give rise to the misconception that he refused to disclose his own particular opinions, and contented81 himself with eliciting82 those held by others. Finally, it is to be noted83 that the idea of fulfilling a religious mission, or exposing human ignorance ad majorem Dei gloriam, on which Grote lays such stress, has no place in Xenophon’s conception of his master, although, had such an idea been really present, one can hardly imagine how it could have been passed over by a writer with whom piety84 amounted to superstition85. It is, on the other hand, an idea which would naturally occur to a great religious reformer who proposed to base his reconstruction86 of society on faith in a supernatural order, and the desire to realise it here below.
So far we have contrasted the Apologia with the Memorabilia. We have now to consider in what relation it stands to Plato’s other writings. The constructive87 dogmatic Socrates, who is a principal spokesman in some of them, differs widely from the sceptical Socrates of the famous Defence, and the difference has been urged as an argument for the historical authenticity88 of the latter.85 Plato, it is implied, would not115 have departed so far from his usual conception of the sage, had he not been desirous of reproducing the actual words spoken on so solemn an occasion. There are, however, several dialogues which seem to have been composed for the express purpose of illustrating89 the negative method supposed to have been described by Socrates to his judges, investigations90 the sole result of which is to upset the theories of other thinkers, or to show that ordinary men act without being able to assign a reason for their conduct. Even the Republic is professedly tentative in its procedure, and only follows out a train of thought which has presented itself almost by accident to the company. Unlike Charles Lamb’s Scotchman, the leading spokesman does not bring, but find, and you are invited to cry halves to whatever turns up in his company.
Plato had, in truth, a conception of science which no knowledge then attained93—perhaps one may add, no knowledge ever attainable—could completely satisfy. Even the rigour of mathematical demonstration94 did not content him, for mathematical truth itself rested on unproved assumptions, as we also, by the way, have lately discovered. Perhaps the Hegelian system would have fulfilled his requirements; perhaps not even that. Moreover, that the new order which he contemplated95 might be established, it was necessary to begin by making a clean sweep of all existing opinions. With the urbanity of an Athenian, the piety of a disciple, and the instinct of a great dramatic artist, he preferred to assume that this indispensable task had already been done by another. And of all preceding thinkers, who was so well qualified96 for the undertaking97 as Socrates? Who else had wielded98 the weapons of negative dialectic with such consummate99 dexterity100? Who had assumed such a critical attitude towards the beliefs of his contemporaries? Who had been so anxious to find a point of attachment101 for every new truth in the minds of his interlocutors? Who therefore could, with such116 plausibility102, be put forward in the guise103 of one who laid claim to no wisdom on his own account? The son of Phaenaretê seemed made to be the Baptist of a Greek Messiah; but Plato, in treating him as such, has drawn104 a discreet105 veil over the whole positive side of his predecessor106’s teaching, and to discover what this was we must place ourselves under the guidance of Xenophon’s more faithful report.
Not that Xenophon is to be taken as a perfectly accurate exponent107 of the Socratic philosophy. His work, it must be remembered, was primarily intended to vindicate Socrates from a charge of impiety108 and immoral109 teaching, not to expound110 a system which he was perhaps incompetent111 to appreciate or understand. We are bound to accept everything that he relates; we are bound to include nothing that he does not relate; but we may fairly readjust the proportions of his sketch112. It is here that a judicious113 use of Plato will furnish us with the most valuable assistance. He grasped Socratism in all its parts and developed it in all directions, so that by following back the lines of his system to their origin we shall be put on the proper track and shall know where to look for the suggestions which were destined114 to be so magnificently worked out.86
117
II.
Before entering on our task of reconstruction, we must turn aside to consider with what success the same enterprise has been attempted by modern German criticism, especially by its chief contemporary representative, the last and most distinguished115 historian of Greek philosophy. The result at which Zeller, following Schleiermacher, arrives is that the great achievement of Socrates was to put forward an adequate idea of knowledge; in other words, to show what true science ought to be, and what, as yet, it had never been, with the addition of a demand that all action should be based on such a scientific knowledge as its only sure foundation.87 To know a thing was to know its essence, its concept, the assemblage of qualities which together constitute its definition, and make it to be what it is. Former thinkers had also sought for knowledge, but not as knowledge, not with a clear notion of what it was that they really wanted. Socrates, on the other hand, required that men should always be prepared to give a strict account of the end which they had in view, and of the means by which they hoped to gain it. Further, it had been customary to single out for exclusive attention that quality of an object by which the observer happened to be most strongly impressed, passing over all the others; the consequence of which was that the philosophers had taken a one-sided view of facts, with the result of falling into hopeless disagreement among themselves; the Sophists had turned these contradictory116 points of view against one another, and thus effected their mutual117 destruction; while the dissolution of objective certainty had led to a corresponding dissolution of moral truth. Socrates accepts the Sophistic scepticism so far as it applies to the existing state of science, but does not push it to the same fatal con118clusion; he grants that current beliefs should be thoroughly118 sifted119 and, if necessary, discarded, but only that more solid convictions may be substituted for them. Here a place is found for his method of self-examination, and for the self-conscious ignorance attributed to him by Plato. Comparing his notions on particular subjects with his idea of what knowledge in general ought to be, he finds that they do not satisfy it; he knows that he knows nothing. He then has recourse to other men who declare that they possess the knowledge of which he is in search, but their pretended certainty vanishes under the application of his dialectic test. This is the famous Socratic irony. Finally, he attempts to come at real knowledge, that is to say, the construction of definitions, by employing that inductive method with the invention of which he is credited by Aristotle. This method consists in bringing together a number of simple and familiar examples from common experience, generalising from them, and correcting the generalisations by comparison with negative instances. The reasons that led Socrates to restrict his enquiries to human interests are rather lightly passed over by Zeller; he seems at a loss how to reconcile the alleged120 reform of scientific method with the complete abandonment of those physical investigations which, we are told, had suffered so severely121 from being cultivated on a different system.
There seem to be three principal points aimed at in the very ingenious theory which we have endeavoured to summarise122 as adequately as space would permit. Zeller apparently123 wishes to bring Socrates into line with the great tradition of early Greek thought, to distinguish him markedly from the Sophists, and to trace back to his initiative the intellectual method of Plato and Aristotle. We cannot admit that the threefold attempt has succeeded. It seems to us that a picture into which so much Platonic colouring has been thrown would for that reason alone, and without any further objection, be open to very grave suspicion. But even accepting the historical accuracy of everything that Plato has119 said, or of as much as may be required, our critic’s inferences are not justified124 by his authorities. Neither the Xenophontic nor the Platonic Socrates seeks knowledge for its own sake, nor does either of them offer a satisfactory definition of knowledge, or, indeed, any definition at all. Aristotle was the first to explain what science meant, and he did so, not by developing the Socratic notion, but by incorporating it with the other methods independently struck out by physical philosophy. What would science be without the study of causation? and was not this ostentatiously neglected by the founder of conceptualism? Again, Plato, in the Theaetêtus, makes his Socrates criticise125 various theories of knowledge, but does not even hint that the critic had himself a better theory than any of them in reserve. The author of the Phaedo and the Republic was less interested in reforming the methods of scientific investigation91 than in directing research towards that which he believed to be alone worth knowing, the eternal ideas which underlie126 phenomena127. The historical Socrates had no suspicion of transcendental realities; but he thought that a knowledge of physics was unattainable, and would be worthless if attained. By knowledge he meant art rather than science, and his method of defining was intended not for the latter but for the former. Those, he said, who can clearly express what they want to do are best secured against failure, and best able to communicate their skill to others. He made out that the various virtues were different kinds of knowledge, not from any extraordinary opinion of its preciousness, but because he thought that knowledge was the variable element in volition128 and that everything else was constant. Zeller dwells strongly on the Socratic identification of cognition with conduct; but how could anyone who fell at the first step into such a confusion of ideas be fitted either to explain what science meant or to come forward as the reformer of its methods? Nor is it correct to say that Socrates approached an object from every point of view, and took note of all its characteristic qualities. On the contrary, one would120 be inclined to charge him with the opposite tendency, with fixing his gaze too exclusively on some one quality, that to him, as a teacher, was the most interesting. His identification of virtue68 with knowledge is an excellent instance of this habit. So also is his identification of beauty with serviceableness, and his general disposition31 to judge of everything by a rather narrow standard of utility. On the other hand, Greek physical speculation130 would have gained nothing by a minute attention to definitions, and most probably would have been mischievously132 hampered133 by it. Aristotle, at any rate, prefers the method of Democritus to the method of Plato; and Aristotle himself is much nearer the truth when he follows on the Ionian or Sicilian track than when he attempts to define what in the then existing state of knowledge could not be satisfactorily defined. To talk about the various elements—earth, air, fire, and water—as things with which everybody was already familiar, may have been a crude unscientific procedure; to analyse them into different combinations of the hot and the cold, the light and the heavy, the dry and the moist, was not only erroneous but fatally misleading; it was arresting enquiry, and doing precisely what the Sophists had been accused of doing, that is, substituting the conceit134 for the reality of wisdom. It was, no doubt, necessary that mathematical terms should be defined; but where are we told that geometricians had to learn this truth from Socrates? The sciences of quantity, which could hardly have advanced a step without the help of exact conceptions, were successfully cultivated before he was born, and his influence was used to discourage rather than to promote their accurate study. With regard to the comprehensive all-sided examination of objects on which Zeller lays so much stress, and which he seems to regard as something peculiar136 to the conceptual method, it had unquestionably been neglected by Parmenides and Heracleitus; but had not the deficiency been already made good by their immediate137 successors? What else is the121 philosophy of Empedocles, the Atomists, and Anaxagoras, but an attempt—we must add, a by no means unsuccessful attempt—to recombine the opposing aspects of Nature which had been too exclusively insisted on at Ephesus and Elea? Again, to say that the Sophists had destroyed physical speculation by setting these partial aspects of truth against one another is, in our opinion, equally erroneous. First of all, Zeller here falls into the old mistake, long ago corrected by Grote, of treating the class in question as if they all held similar views. We have shown in the preceding chapter, if indeed it required to be shown, that the Sophists were divided into two principal schools, of which one was devoted138 to the cultivation139 of physics. Protagoras and Gorgias were the only sceptics; and it was not by setting one theory against another, but by working out a single theory to its last consequences, that their scepticism was reached; with no more effect, be it observed, than was exercised by Pyrrho on the science of his day. For the two great thinkers, with the aid of whose conclusions it was attempted to discredit140 objective reality, were already left far behind at the close of the fifth century; and neither their reasonings nor reasonings based on theirs, could exercise much influence on a generation which had Anaxagoras on Nature and the encyclopaedia141 of Democritus in its hands. There was, however, one critic who really did what the Sophists are charged with doing; who derided142 and denounced physical science on the ground that its professors were hopelessly at issue with one another; and this critic was no other than Socrates himself. He maintained, on purely143 popular and superficial grounds, the same sceptical attitude to which Protagoras gave at least the semblance144 of a psychological justification146. And he wished that attention should be concentrated on the very subjects which Protagoras undertook to teach—namely, ethics147, politics, and dialectics. Once more, to say that Socrates was conscious of not coming up to his own122 standard of true knowledge is inconsistent with Xenophon’s account, where he is represented as quite ready to answer every question put to him, and to offer a definition of everything that he considered worth defining. His scepticism, if it ever existed, was as artificial and short-lived as the scepticism of Descartes.
The truth is that no man who philosophised at all was ever more free from tormenting148 doubts and self-questionings; no man was ever more thoroughly satisfied with himself than Socrates. Let us add that, from a Hellenic point of view, no man had ever more reason for self-satisfaction. None, he observed in his last days, had ever lived a better or a happier life. Naturally possessed of a powerful constitution, he had so strengthened it by habitual149 moderation and constant training that up to the hour of his death, at the age of seventy, he enjoyed perfect bodily and mental health. Neither hardship nor exposure, neither abstinence nor indulgence in what to other men would have been excess, could make any impression on that adamantine frame. We know not how much truth there may be in the story that, at one time, he was remarkable for the violence of his passions; at any rate, when our principal informants knew him he was conspicuous150 for the ease with which he resisted temptation, and for the imperturbable151 sweetness of his temper. His wants, being systematically152 reduced to a minimum, were easily satisfied, and his cheerfulness never failed. He enjoyed Athenian society so much that nothing but military duty could draw him away from it. For Socrates was a veteran who had served through three arduous154 campaigns, and could give lectures on the duties of a general, which so high an authority as Xenophon thought worth reporting. He seems to have been on excellent terms with his fellow-citizens, never having been engaged in a lawsuit155, either as plaintiff or defendant156, until the fatal prosecution157 which brought his career to a close. He could, on that occasion, refuse to prepare a defence, proudly observing that his whole123 life had been a preparation, that no man had ever seen him commit an unjust or impious deed. The anguished159 cries of doubt uttered by Italian and Sicilian thinkers could have no meaning for one who, on principle, abstained161 from ontological speculations162; the uncertainty163 of human destiny which hung like a thunder-cloud over Pindar and the tragic164 poets had melted away under the sunshine of arguments, demonstrating, to his satisfaction, the reality and beneficence of a supernatural Providence165. For he believed that the gods would afford guidance in doubtful conjunctures to all who approached their oracles166 in a reverent167 spirit; while, over and above the Divine counsels accessible to all men, he was personally attended by an oracular voice, a mysterious monitor, which told him what to avoid, though not what to do, a circumstance well worthy168 of note, for it shows that he did not, like Plato, attribute every kind of right action to divine inspiration.
It may be said that all this only proves Socrates to have been, in his own estimation, a good and happy, but not necessarily a wise man. With him, however, the last of these conditions was inseparable from the other two. He was prepared to demonstrate, step by step, that his conduct was regulated by fixed169 and ascertainable170 principles, and was of the kind best adapted to secure happiness both for himself and for others. That there were deficiencies in his ethical theory may readily be admitted. The idea of universal beneficence seems never to have dawned on his horizon; and chastity was to him what sobriety is to us, mainly a self-regarding virtue. We do not find that he ever recommended conjugal172 fidelity173 to husbands; he regarded prostitution very much as it is still, unhappily, regarded by men of the world among ourselves; and in opposing the darker vices174 of his countrymen, it was the excess rather than the perversion175 of appetite which he condemned176. These, however, are points which do not interfere177 with our general contention178 that Socrates adopted the ethical standard of his time, that he adopted it on rational124 grounds, that having adopted he acted up to it, and that in so reasoning and acting179 he satisfied his own ideal of absolute wisdom.
Even as regards physical phenomena, Socrates, so far from professing180 complete ignorance, held a very positive theory which he was quite ready to share with his friends. He taught what is called the doctrine of final causes; and, so far as our knowledge goes, he was either the first to teach it, or, at any rate, the first to prove the existence of divine agencies by its means. The old poets had occasionally attributed the origin of man and other animals to supernatural intelligence, but, apparently, without being led to their conviction by any evidence of design displayed in the structure of organised creatures. Socrates, on the other hand, went through the various external organs of the human body with great minuteness, and showed, to his own satisfaction, that they evinced the workings of a wise and beneficent Artist. We shall have more to say further on about this whole argument; here we only wish to observe that, intrinsically, it does not differ very much from the speculations which its author derided as the fruit of an impertinent curiosity; and that no one who now employed it would, for a single moment, be called an agnostic or a sceptic.
Must we, then, conclude that Socrates was, after all, nothing but a sort of glorified181 Greek Paley, whose principal achievement was to present the popular ideas of his time on morals and politics under the form of a rather grovelling182 utilitarianism; and whose ‘evidences of natural and revealed religion’ bore much the same relation to Greek mythology184 as the corresponding lucubrations of the worthy archdeacon bore to Christian9 theology? Even were this the whole truth, it should be remembered that there was an interval185 of twenty-three centuries between the two teachers, which ought to be taken due account of in estimating their relative importance. Socrates, with his closely-reasoned, vividly186-illustrated187 ethical125 expositions, had gained a tactical advantage over the vague declamations of Gnomic poetry and the isolated189 aphorisms190 of the Seven Sages191, comparable to that possessed by Xenophon and his Ten Thousand in dealing192 with the unwieldy masses of Persian infantry193 and the undisciplined mountaineers of Carduchia; while his idea of a uniformly beneficent Creator marked a still greater advance on the jealous divinities of Herodotus. On the other hand, as against Hume and Bentham, Paley’s pseudo-scientific paraphernalia194 were like the muskets195 and cannon196 of an Asiatic army when confronted by the English conquerors197 of India. Yet had Socrates done no more than contributed to philosophy the idea just alluded198 to, his place in the evolution of thought, though honourable200, would not have been what it is justly held to be—unique.
III.
So far we have been occupied in disputing the views of others; it is now time that our own view should be stated. We maintain, then, that Socrates first brought out the idea, not of knowledge, but of mind in its full significance; that he first studied the whole circle of human interests as affected201 by mind; that, in creating dialectics, he gave this study its proper method, and simultaneously202 gave his method the only subject-matter on which it could be profitably exercised; finally, that by these immortal203 achievements philosophy was constituted, and received a threefold verification—first, from the life of its founder; secondly204, from the success with which his spirit was communicated to a band of followers205; thirdly, from the whole subsequent history of thought. Before substantiating206 these assertions point by point, it will be expedient207 to glance at the external influences which may be supposed to have moulded the great intellect and the great character now under consideration.
Socrates was, before all things, an Athenian. To under126stand him we must first understand what the Athenian character was in itself and independently of disturbing circumstances. Our estimate of that character is too apt to be biassed208 by the totally exceptional position which Athens occupied during the fifth century B.C. The possession of empire developed qualities in her children which they had not exhibited at an earlier period, and which they ceased to exhibit when empire had been lost. Among these must be reckoned military genius, an adventurous209 and romantic spirit, and a high capacity for poetical210 and artistic211 production—qualities displayed, it is true, by every Greek race, but by some for a longer and by others for a shorter period. Now, the tradition of greatness does not seem to have gone very far back with Athens. Her legendary history, what we have of it, is singularly unexciting. The same rather monotonous212 though edifying213 story of shelter accorded to persecuted214 fugitives215, of successful resistance to foreign invasions, and of devoted self-sacrifice to the State, meets us again and again. The Attic drama itself shows how much more stirring was the legendary lore216 of other tribes. One need only look at the few remaining pieces which treat of patriotic217 subjects to appreciate the difference; and an English reader may easily convince himself of it by comparing Mr. Swinburne’s Erechtheus with the same author’s Atalanta. There is a want of vivid individuality perceptible all through. Even Theseus, the great national hero, strikes one as a rather tame sort of personage compared with Perseus, Heraclês, and Jason. No Athenian figures prominently in the Iliad; and on the only two occasions when Pindar was employed to commemorate218 an Athenian victory at the Panhellenic games, he seems unable to associate it with any legendary glories in the past. The circumstances which for a long time made Attic history so barren of incident are the same to which its subsequent importance is due. The relation in which Attica stood to the rest of Greece was somewhat similar to the relation in127 which Tuscany, long afterwards, stood to the rest of Italy. It was the region least disturbed by foreign immigration, and therefore became the seat of a slower but steadier mental development. It was among those to whom war, revolution, colonisation, and commerce brought the most many-sided experience that intellectual activity was most speedily ripened219. Literature, art, and science were cultivated with extraordinary success by the Greek cities of Asia Minor220, and even in some parts of the old country, before Athens had a single man of genius, except Solon, to boast of. But along with the enjoyment221 of undisturbed tranquillity222, habits of self-government, orderliness, and reasonable reflection were establishing themselves, which finally enabled her to inherit all that her predecessors223 in the race had accomplished224, and to add, what alone they still wanted, the crowning consecration225 of self-conscious mind. There had, simultaneously, been growing up an intensely patriotic sentiment, due, in part, to the long-continued independence of Attica; in part, also, we may suppose, to the union, at a very early period, of her different townships into a single city. The same causes had, however, also favoured a certain love of comfort, a jovial226 pleasure-seeking disposition often degenerating227 into coarse sensuality, a thriftiness228, and an inclination229 to grasp at any source of profit, coupled with extreme credulity where hopes of profit were excited, together forming an element of prose-comedy which mingles230 strangely with the tragic grandeur231 of Athens in her imperial age, and emerges into greater prominence232 after her fall, until it becomes the predominant characteristic of her later days. It is, we may observe, the contrast between these two aspects of Athenian life which gives the plays of Aristophanes their unparalleled comic effect, and it is their very awkward conjunction which makes Euripides so unequal and disappointing a poet. We find, then, that the original Athenian character is marked by reasonable reflection, by patriotism233, and by a tendency towards self-seeking128 materialism234. Let us take note of these three qualities, for we shall meet with them again in the philosophy of Socrates.
Empire, when it came to Athens, came almost unsought. The Persian invasions had made her a great naval235 power; the free choice of her allies placed her at the head of a great maritime236 confederacy. The sudden command of vast resources and the tension accumulated during ages of repose237, stimulated238 all her faculties240 into preternatural activity. Her spirit was steeled almost to the Dorian temper, and entered into victorious241 rivalry242 with the Dorian Muse243. Not only did her fleet sweep the sea, but her army, for once, defeated Theban hoplites in the field. The grand choral harmonies of Sicilian song, the Sicyonian recitals244 of epic245 adventure, were rolled back into a framework for the spectacle of individual souls meeting one another in argument, expostulation, entreaty246, and defiance247; a nobler Doric edifice248 rose to confront the Aeginetan temple of Athênê; the strained energy of Aeginetan combatants was relaxed into attitudes of reposing249 power, and the eternal smile on their faces was deepened into the sadness of unfathomable thought. But to the violet-crowned city, Athênê was a giver of wealth and wisdom rather than of prowess; her empire rested on the contributions of unwilling allies, and on a technical proficiency250 which others were sure to equal in time; so that the Corinthian orators251 could say with justice that Athenian skill was more easily acquired than Dorian valour. At once receptive and communicative, Athens absorbed all that Greece could teach her, and then returned it in a more elaborate form, but without the freshness of its earliest inspiration. Yet there was one field that still afforded scope for creative originality253. Habits of analysis, though fatal to spontaneous production, were favourable254, or rather were necessary, to the growth of a new philosophy. After the exhaustion255 of every limited idealism, there remained that highest idealisation which is the reduction of all past experience to a method available for the guidance129 of all future action. To accomplish this last enterprise it was necessary that a single individual should gather up in himself the spirit diffused256 through a whole people, bestowing257 on it by that very concentration the capability258 of an infinitely259 wider extension when its provisional representative should have passed away from the scene.
Socrates represents the popular Athenian character much as Richardson, in a different sphere, represents the English middle-class character—represents it, that is to say, elevated into transcendent genius. Except this elevation260, there was nothing anomalous261 about him. If he was exclusively critical, rationalising, unadventurous, prosaic262; in a word, as the German historians say, something of a Philistine263; so, we may suspect, were the mass of his countrymen. His illustrations were taken from such plebeian264 employments as cattle-breeding, cobbling, weaving, and sailoring. These were his ‘touches of things common’ which at last ‘rose to touch the spheres.’ He both practised and inculcated virtues, the value of which is especially evident in humble265 life—frugality and endurance. But he also represents the Dêmos in its sovereign capacity as legislator and judge. Without aspiring266 to be an orator252 or statesman, he reserves the ultimate power of arbitration267 and election. He submits candidates for office to a severe scrutiny269, and demands from all men an even stricter account of their lives than retiring magistrates270 had to give of their conduct, when in power, to the people. He applies the judicial271 method of cross-examination to the detection of error, and the parliamentary method of joint272 deliberation to the discovery of truth. He follows out the democratic principles of free speech and self-government, by submitting every question that arises to public discussion, and insisting on no conclusion that does not command the willing assent78 of his audience. Finally, his conversation, popular in form, was popular also in this respect, that everybody who chose to listen might have the130 benefit of it gratuitously273. Here we have a great change from the scornful dogmatism of Heracleitus, and the virtually oligarchic exclusiveness of the teachers who demanded high fees for their instruction.
To be free and to rule over freemen were, with Socrates, as with every Athenian, the goals of ambition, only his freedom meant absolute immunity274 from the control of passion or habit; government meant superior knowledge, and government of freemen meant the power of producing intellectual conviction. In his eyes, the possessor of any art was, so far, a ruler, and the only true ruler, being obeyed under severe penalties by all who stood in need of his skill. But the royal art which he himself exercised, without expressly laying claim to it, was that which assigns its proper sphere to every other art, and provides each individual with the employment which his peculiar faculties demand. This is Athenian liberty and Athenian imperialism276 carried into education, but so idealised and purified that they can hardly be recognised at first sight.
The philosophy of Socrates is more obviously related to the practical and religious tendencies of his countrymen. Neither he nor they had any sympathy with the cosmological speculations which seemed to be unconnected with human interests, and to trench277 on matters beyond the reach of human knowledge. The old Attic sentiment was averse278 from adventures of any kind, whether political or intellectual. Yet the new spirit of enquiry awakened279 by Ionian thought could not fail to react powerfully on the most intelligent man among the most intelligent people of Hellas. Above all, one paramount281 idea which went beyond the confines of the old philosophy had been evolved by the differentiation282 of knowledge from its object, and had been presented, although under a materialising form, by Anaxagoras to the Athenian public. Socrates took up this idea, which expressed what was highest and most distinctive283 in the national131 character, and applied284 it to the development of ethical speculation. We have seen, in the last chapter, how an attempt was made to base moral truth on the results of natural philosophy, and how that attempt was combated by the Humanistic school. It could not be doubtful which side Socrates would take in this controversy285. That he paid any attention to the teaching of Protagoras and Gorgias is, indeed, highly problematic, for their names are never mentioned by Xenophon, and the Platonic dialogues in which they figure are evidently fictitious. Nevertheless, he had to a certain extent arrived at the same conclusion with them, although by a different path. He was opposed, on religious grounds, to the theories which an acute psychological analysis had led them to reject. Accordingly, the idea of Nature is almost entirely absent from his conversation, and, like Protagoras, he is guided solely286 by regard for human interests. To the objection that positive laws were always changing, he victoriously287 replied that it was because they were undergoing an incessant288 adaptation to varying needs.88 Like Protagoras, again, he was a habitual student of old Greek literature, and sedulously290 sought out the practical lessons in which it abounded291. To him, as to the early poets and sages, S?phrosynê, or self-knowledge and self-command taken together, was the first and most necessary of all virtues. Unlike them, however, he does not simply accept it from tradition, but gives it a philosophical foundation—the newly-established distinction between mind and body; a distinction not to be confounded with the old Psychism292, although Plato, for his reforming purposes, shortly afterwards linked the two together. The disembodied spirit of mythology was a mere293 shadow or memory, equally destitute294 of solidity and of understanding; with Socrates, mind meant the personal consciousness which retains its continuous identity through every change, and as against every passing impulse. Like132 the Humanists, he made it the seat of knowledge—more than the Humanists, he gave it the control of appetite. In other words, he adds the idea of will to that of intellect; but instead of treating them as distinct faculties or functions, he absolutely identifies them. Mind having come to be first recognised as a knowing power, carried over its association with knowledge into the volitional296 sphere, and the two were first disentangled by Aristotle, though very imperfectly even by him. Yet no thinker helped so much to make the confusion apparent as the one to whom it was due. Socrates deliberately297 insisted that those who knew the good must necessarily be good themselves. He taught that every virtue was a science; courage, for example, was a knowledge of the things which should or should not be feared; temperance, a knowledge of what should or should not be desired, and so forth298. Such an account of virtue would, perhaps, be sufficient if all men did what, in their opinion, they ought to do; and, however strange it may seem, Socrates assumed that such was actually the case.89 The paradox299, even if accepted at the moment by his youthful friends, was sure to be rejected, on examination, by cooler heads, and its rejection300 would prove that the whole doctrine was essentially301 unsound. Various causes prevented Socrates from perceiving what seemed so clear to duller intelligences than his. First of all, he did not separate duty from personal interest. A true Athenian, he recommended temperance and righteousness very largely on account of the material advantages they secured. That the agreeable and the honourable, the expedient and the just, frequently came into collision, was at that time a rhetorical commonplace; and it might be supposed that, if they were shown to coincide, no motive302 to misconduct but ignorance could exist. Then, again, being accustomed to compare conduct of every kind with the practice of such arts as flute-playing, he had come to take knowledge in a rather extended133 sense, just as we do when we say, indifferently, that a man knows geometry and that he knows how to draw. Aristotle himself did not see more clearly than Socrates that moral habits are only to be acquired by incessant practice; only the earlier thinker would have observed that knowledge of every kind is gained by the same laborious303 repetition of particular actions. To the obvious objection that, in this case, morality cannot, like theoretical truth, be imparted by the teacher to his pupils, but must be won by the learner for himself, he would probably have replied that all truth is really evolved by the mind from itself, and that he, for that very reason, disclaimed304 the name of a teacher, and limited himself to the seemingly humbler task of awakening305 dormant306 capacities in others.
An additional influence, not the less potent307 because unacknowledged, was the same craving308 for a principle of unity275 that had impelled309 early Greek thought to seek for the sole substance or cause of physical phenomena in some single material element, whether water, air, or fire; and just as these various principles were finally decomposed311 into the multitudinous atoms of Leucippus, so also, but much more speedily, did the general principle of knowledge tend to decompose310 itself into innumerable cognitions of the partial ends or utilities which action was directed to achieve. The need of a comprehensive generalisation again made itself felt, and all good was summed up under the head of happiness. The same difficulties recurred312 under another form. To define happiness proved not less difficult than to define use or practical knowledge. Three points of view offered themselves, and all three had been more or less anticipated by Socrates. Happiness might mean unmixed pleasure, or the exclusive cultivation of man’s higher nature, or voluntary subordination to a larger whole. The founder of Athenian philosophy used to present each of these, in turn, as an end, without recognising the possibility of a conflict between134 them; and it certainly would be a mistake to represent them as constantly opposed. Yet a truly scientific principle must either prove their identity, or make its choice among them, or discover something better. Plato seems to have taken up the three methods, one after the other, without coming to any very satisfactory conclusion. Aristotle identified the first two, but failed, or rather did not attempt to harmonise them with the third. Succeeding schools tried various combinations, laying more or less stress on different principles at different periods, till the will of an omnipotent313 Creator was substituted for every human standard. With the decline of dogmatic theology we have seen them all come to life again, and the old battle is still being fought out under our eyes. Speaking broadly, it may be said that the method which we have placed first on the list is more particularly represented in England, the second in France, and the last in Germany. Yet they refuse to be separated by any rigid314 line of demarcation, and each tends either to combine with or to pass into one or both of the rival theories. Modern utilitarianism, as constituted by John Stuart Mill, although avowedly315 based on the paramount value of pleasure, in admitting qualitative316 differences among enjoyments317, and in subordinating individual to social good, introduces principles of action which are not, properly speaking, hedonistic. Neither is the idea of the whole by any means free from ambiguity318. We have party, church, nation, order, progress, race, humanity, and the sum total of sensitive beings, all putting in their claims to figure as that entity295. Where the pursuit of any single end gives rise to conflicting pretensions319, a wise man will check them by reference to the other accredited320 standards, and will cherish a not unreasonable321 expectation that the evolution of life is tending to bring them all into ultimate agreement.
Returning to Socrates, we must further note that his identification of virtue with science, though it does not ex135press the whole truth, expresses a considerable part of it, especially as to him conduct was a much more complex problem than it is to some modern teachers. Only those who believe in the existence of intuitive and infallible moral perceptions can consistently maintain that nothing is easier than to know our duty, and nothing harder than to do it. Even then, the intuitions must extend beyond general principles, and also inform us how and where to apply them. That no such inward illumination exists is sufficiently shown by experience; so much so that the mischief322 done by foolish people with good intentions has become proverbial. Modern casuists have, indeed, drawn a distinction between the intention and the act, making us responsible for the purity of the former, not for the consequences of the latter. Though based on the Socratic division between mind and body, this distinction would not have commended itself to Socrates. His object was not to save souls from sin, but to save individuals, families, and states from the ruin which ignorance of fact entails323.
If we enlarge our point of view so as to cover the moral influence of knowledge on society taken collectively, its relative importance will be vastly increased. When Auguste Comte assigns the supreme5 direction of progress to advancing science, and when Buckle324, following Fichte, makes the totality of human action depend on the totality of human knowledge, they are virtually attributing to intellectual education an even more decisive part than it played in the Socratic ethics. Even those who reject the theory, when pushed to such an extreme, will admit that the same quantity of self-devotion must produce a far greater effect when it is guided by deeper insight into the conditions of existence.
The same principle may be extended in a different direction if we substitute for knowledge, in its narrower significance, the more general conception of associated feeling. We shall then see that belief, habit, emotion, and instinct are only136 different stages of the same process—the process by which experience is organised and made subservient325 to vital activity. The simplest reflex and the highest intellectual conviction are alike based on sensori-motor mechanism326, and, so far, differ only through the relative complexity327 and instability of the nervous connexions involved. Knowledge is life in the making, and when it fails to control practice fails only by coming into conflict with passion—that is to say, with the consolidated328 results of an earlier experience. Physiology329 offers another analogy to the Socratic method which must not be overlooked. Socrates recommended the formation of definite conceptions because, among other advantages, they facilitated the diffusion330 of useful knowledge. So, also, the organised associations of feelings are not only serviceable to individuals, but may be transmitted to offspring with a regularity331 proportioned to their definiteness. How naturally these deductions332 follow from the doctrine under consideration, is evident from their having been, to a certain extent, already drawn by Plato. His plan for the systematic153 education of feeling under scientific supervision334 answers to the first; his plan for breeding an improved race of citizens by placing marriage under State control answers to the second. Yet it is doubtful whether Plato’s predecessor would have sanctioned any scheme tending to substitute an external compulsion, whether felt or not, for freedom and individual initiative, and a blind instinct for the self-consciousness which can give an account of its procedure at every step. He would bring us back from social physics and physiology to psychology335, and from psychology to dialectic philosophy.
IV.
To Socrates himself the strongest reason for believing in the identity of conviction and practice was, perhaps, that he had made it a living reality. With him to know the right137 and to do it were the same. In this sense we have already said that his life was the first verification of his philosophy. And just as the results of his ethical teaching can only be ideally separated from their application to his conduct, so also these results themselves cannot be kept apart from the method by which they were reached; nor is the process by which he reached them for himself distinguishable from the process by which he communicated them to his friends. In touching336 on this point, we touch on that which is greatest and most distinctively337 original in the Socratic system, or rather in the Socratic impulse to systematisation of every kind. What it was will be made clearer by reverting338 to the central conception of mind. With Protagoras mind meant an ever-changing stream of feeling; with Gorgias it was a principle of hopeless isolation339, the interchange of thoughts between one consciousness and another, by means of signs, being an illusion. Socrates, on the contrary, attributed to it a steadfast340 control over passion, and a unifying341 function in society through its essentially synthetic342 activity, its need of co-operation and responsive assurance. He saw that the reason which overcomes animal desire tends to draw men together just as sensuality tends to drive them into hostile collision. If he recommended temperance on account of the increased egoistic pleasure which it secures, he recommended it also as making the individual a more efficient instrument for serving the community. If he inculcated obedience343 to the established laws, it was no doubt partly on grounds of enlightened self-interest, but also because union and harmony among citizens were thereby344 secured. And if he insisted on the necessity of forming definite conceptions, it was with the same twofold reference to personal and public advantage. Along with the diffusive345, social character of mind he recognised its essential spontaneity. In a commonwealth346 where all citizens were free and equal, there must also be freedom and equality of reason. Having worked out a theory of life for himself, he138 desired that all other men should, so far as possible, pass through the same bracing347 discipline. Here we have the secret of his famous erotetic method. He did not, like the Sophists, give continuous lectures, nor profess, like some of them, to answer every question that might be put to him. On the contrary, he put a series of questions to all who came in his way, generally in the form of an alternative, one side of which seemed self-evidently true and the other self-evidently false, arranged so as to lead the respondent, step by step, to the conclusion which it was desired that he should accept. Socrates did not invent this method. It had long been practised in the Athenian law-courts as a means for extracting from the opposite party admissions which could not be otherwise obtained, whence it had passed into the tragic drama, and into the discussion of philosophical problems. Nowhere else was the analytical348 power of Greek thought so brilliantly displayed; for before a contested proposition could be subjected to this mode of treatment, it had to be carefully discriminated350 from confusing adjuncts, considered under all the various meanings which it might possibly be made to bear, subdivided351, if it was complex, into two or more distinct assertions, and linked by a minute chain of demonstration to the admission by which its validity was established or overthrown353.
Socrates, then, did not create the cross-examining elenchus, but he gave it two new and very important applications. So far as we can make out, it had hitherto been only used (again, after the example of the law-courts) for the purpose of detecting error or intentional354 deceit. He made it an instrument for introducing his own convictions into the minds of others, but so that his interlocutors seemed to be discovering them for themselves, and were certainly learning how, in their turn, to practise the same didactic interrogation on a future occasion. And he also used it for the purpose of logical self-discipline in a manner which will be139 presently explained. Of course, Socrates also employed the erotetic method as a means of confutation, and, in his hands, it powerfully illustrated what we have called the negative moment of Greek thought. To prepare the ground for new truth it was necessary to clear away the misconceptions which were likely to interfere with its admission; or, if Socrates himself had nothing to impart, he could at any rate purge355 away the false conceit of knowledge from unformed minds, and hold them back from attempting difficult tasks until they were properly qualified for the undertaking. For example, a certain Glauco, a brother of Plato, had attempted to address the public assembly, when he was not yet twenty years of age, and was naturally quite unfitted for the task. At Athens, where every citizen had a voice in his country’s affairs, obstruction356, whether intentional or not, was very summarily dealt with. Speakers who had nothing to say that was worth hearing were forcibly removed from the bêma by the police; and this fate had already more than once befallen the youthful orator, much to the annoyance357 of his friends, who could not prevail on him to refrain from repeating the experiment, when Socrates took the matter in hand. One or two adroit358 compliments on his ambition drew Glauco into a conversation with the veteran dialectician on the aims and duties of a statesman. It was agreed that his first object should be to benefit the country, and that a good way of achieving this end would be to increase its wealth, which, again, could be done either by augmenting359 the receipts or by diminishing the expenditure360. Could Glauco tell what was the present revenue of Athens, and whence it was derived361?—No; he had not studied that question.—Well then, perhaps, he had some useful retrenchments to propose.—No; he had not studied that either. But the State might, he thought, be enriched at the expense of its enemies.—A good idea, if we can be sure of beating them first! Only, to avoid the risk of attacking somebody who is stronger than ourselves, we must140 know what are the enemy’s military resources as compared with our own. To begin with the latter: Can Glauco tell how many ships and soldiers Athens has at her disposal?—No, he does not at this moment remember.—Then, perhaps, he has it all written down somewhere?—He must confess not. So the conversation goes on until Socrates has convicted his ambitious young friend of possessing no accurate information whatever about political questions.90
Xenophon has recorded another dialogue in which a young man named Euthydêmus, who was also in training for a statesman, and who, as he supposed, had learned a great deal more out of books than Socrates could teach him, is brought to see how little he knows about ethical science. He is asked, Can a man be a good citizen without being just? No, he cannot.—Can Euthydêmus tell what acts are just? Yes, certainly, and also what are unjust.—Under which head does he put such actions as lying, deceiving, harming, enslaving?—Under the head of injustice362.—But suppose a hostile people are treated in the various manners specified363, is that unjust?—No, but it was understood that only one’s friends were meant.—Well, if a general encourages his own army by false statements, or a father deceives his child into taking medicine, or your friend seems likely to commit suicide, and you purloin364 a deadly weapon from him, is that unjust?—No, we must add ‘for the purpose of harming’ to our definition. Socrates, however, does not stop here, but goes on cross-examining until the unhappy student is reduced to a state of hopeless bewilderment and shame. He is then brought to perceive the necessity of self-knowledge, which is explained to mean knowledge of one’s own powers. As a further exercise Euthydêmus is put through his facings on the subject of good and evil. Health, wealth, strength, wisdom and beauty are mentioned as unquestionable goods. Socrates shows, in the style long afterwards imitated by Juvenal, that141 they are only means towards an end, and may be productive of harm no less than good.—Happiness at any rate is an unquestionable good.—Yes, unless we make it consist of questionable365 goods like those just enumerated366.91
It is in this last conversation that the historical Socrates most nearly resembles the Socrates of Plato’s Apologia. Instead, however, of leaving Euthydêmus to the consciousness of his ignorance, as the latter would have done, he proceeds, in Xenophon’s account, to direct the young man’s studies according to the simplest and clearest principles; and we have another conversation where religious truths are instilled367 by the same catechetical process.92 Here the erotetic method is evidently a mere didactic artifice368, and Socrates could easily have written out his lesson under the form of a regular demonstration. But there is little doubt that in other cases he used it as a means for giving increased precision to his own ideas, and also for testing their validity, that, in a word, the habit of oral communication gave him a familiarity with logical processes which could not otherwise have been acquired. The same cross-examination that acted as a spur on the mind of the respondent, reacted as a bridle369 on the mind of the interrogator370, obliging him to make sure beforehand of every assertion that he put forward, to study the mutual bearings of his beliefs, to analyse them into their component371 elements, and to examine the relation in which they collectively stood to the opinions generally accepted. It has already been stated that Socrates gave the erotetic method two new applications; we now see in what direction they tended. He made it a vehicle for positive instruction, and he also made it an instrument for self-discipline, a help to fulfilling the Delphic precept372, ‘Know thyself.’ The second application was even more important than the first. With us literary training—that is, the practice of continuous reading and composition—is so widely diffused, that conversation has become142 rather a hindrance373 than a help to the cultivation of argumentative ability. The reverse was true when Socrates lived. Long familiarity with debate was unfavourable to the art of writing; and the speeches in Thucydides show how difficult it was still found to present close reasoning under the form of an uninterrupted exposition. The traditions of conversational374 thrust and parry survived in rhetorical prose; and the crossed swords of tongue-fence were represented by the bristling375 chevaux de frise of a laboured antithetical arrangement where every clause received new strength and point from contrast with its opposing neighbour.
By combining the various considerations here suggested we shall arrive at a clearer understanding of the sceptical attitude commonly attributed to Socrates. There is, first of all, the negative and critical function exercised by him in common with many other constructive thinkers, and intimately associated with a fundamental law of Greek thought. Then there is the Attic courtesy and democratic spirit leading him to avoid any assumption of superiority over those whose opinions he is examining. And, lastly, there is the profound feeling that truth is a common possession, which no individual can appropriate as his peculiar privilege, because it can only be discovered, tested, and preserved by the united efforts of all.
V.
Thus, then, the Socratic dialogue has a double aspect. It is, like all philosophy, a perpetual carrying of life into ideas and of ideas into life. Life is raised to a higher level by thought; thought, when brought into contact with life, gains movement and growth, assimilative and reproductive power. If action is to be harmonised, we must regulate it by universal principles; if our principles are to be efficacious, they must be adopted; if they are to be adopted, we must demonstrate them to the satisfaction of our contemporaries. Language, consisting as143 it does almost entirely of abstract terms, furnishes the materials out of which alone such an ideal union can be framed. But men do not always use the same words, least of all if they are abstract words, in the same sense, and therefore a preliminary agreement must be arrived at in this respect; a fact which Socrates was the first to recognise. Aristotle tells us that he introduced the custom of constructing general definitions into philosophy. The need of accurate verbal explanations is more felt in the discussion of ethical problems than anywhere else, if we take ethics in the only sense that Socrates would have accepted, as covering the whole field of mental activity. It is true that definitions are also employed in the mathematical and physical sciences, but there they are accompanied by illustrations borrowed from sensible experience, and would be unintelligible376 without them. Hence it has been possible for those branches of knowledge to make enormous progress, while the elementary notions on which they rest have not yet been satisfactorily analysed. The case is entirely altered when mental dispositions378 have to be taken into account. Here, abstract terms play much the same part as sensible intuitions elsewhere in steadying our conceptions, but without possessing the same invariable value; the experiences from which those conceptions are derived being exceedingly complex, and, what is more, exceedingly liable to disturbance379 from unforeseen circumstances. Thus, by neglecting a series of minute changes the same name may come to denote groups of phenomena not agreeing in the qualities which alone it originally connoted. More than one example of such a gradual metamorphosis has already presented itself in the course of our investigation, and others will occur in the sequel. Where distinctions of right and wrong are involved, it is of enormous practical importance that a definite meaning should be attached to words, and that they should not be allowed, at least without express agreement, to depart from the recognised acceptation: for such words, connoting as they do the approval or disap144proval of mankind, exercise a powerful influence on conduct, so that their misapplication may lead to disastrous consequences. Where government by written law prevails the importance of defining ethical terms immediately becomes obvious, for, otherwise, personal rule would be restored under the disguise of judicial interpretation40. Roman jurisprudence was the first attempt on a great scale to introduce a rigorous system of definitions into legislation. We have seen, in the preceding chapter, how it tended to put the conclusions of Greek naturalistic philosophy into practical shape. We now see how, on the formal side, its determinations are connected with the principles of Socrates. And we shall not undervalue this obligation if we bear in mind that the accurate wording of legal enactments380 is not less important than the essential justice of their contents. Similarly, the development of Catholic theology required that its fundamental conceptions should be progressively defined. This alone preserved the intellectual character of Catholicism in ages of ignorance and superstition, and helped to keep alive the reason by which superstition was eventually overthrown. Mommsen has called theology the bastard381 child of Religion and Science. It is something that, in the absence of the robuster parent, its features should be recalled and its tradition maintained even by an illegitimate offspring.
So far, we have spoken as if the Socratic definitions were merely verbal; they were, however, a great deal more, and their author did not accurately383 discriminate349 between what at that stage of thought could not well be kept apart—explanations of words, practical reforms, and scientific generalisations. For example, in defining a ruler to be one who knew more than other men, he was departing from the common usages of language, and showing not what was, but what ought to be true.93 And in defining virtue as wisdom, he was putting forward a new theory of his own, instead of formulating384 the145 received connotation of a term. Still, after making every deduction333, we cannot fail to perceive what an immense service was rendered to exact thought by introducing definitions of every kind into that department of enquiry where they were chiefly needed. We may observe also that a general law of Greek intelligence was here realising itself in a new direction. The need of accurate determination had always been felt, but hitherto it had worked under the more elementary forms of time, space, and causality, or, to employ the higher generalisation of modern psychology, under the form of contiguous association. The earlier cosmologies were all processes of circumscription385; they were attempts to fix the limits of the universe, and, accordingly, that element which was supposed to surround the others was also conceived as their producing cause, or else (in the theory of Heracleitus) as typifying the rationale of their continuous transformation386. For this reason Parmenides, when he identified existence with extension, found himself obliged to declare that extension was necessarily limited. Of all the physical thinkers, Anaxagoras, who immediately precedes Socrates, approaches, on the objective side, most nearly to his standpoint. For the governing Nous brings order out of chaos387 by segregating388 the confused elements, by separating the unlike and drawing the like together, which is precisely what definition does for our conceptions. Meanwhile Greek literature had been performing the same task in a more restricted province, first fixing events according to their geographical389 and historical positions, then assigning to each its proper cause, then, as Thucydides does, isolating390 the most important groups of events from their external connexions, and analysing the causes of complex changes into different classes of antecedents. The final revolution effected by Socrates was to substitute arrangement by difference and resemblance for arrangement by contiguity391 in coexistence and succession. To say that by so doing he created science is inexact, for science requires to consider nature under every146 aspect, including those which he systematically neglected; but we may say that he introduced the method which is most particularly applicable to mental phenomena, the method of ideal analysis, classification, and reasoning. For, be it observed that Socrates did not limit himself to searching for the One in the Many, he also, and perhaps more habitually392, sought for the Many in the One. He would take hold of a conception and analyse it into its various notes, laying them, as it were, piecemeal393 before his interlocutor for separate acceptance or rejection. If, for example, they could not agree about the relative merits of two citizens, Socrates would decompose the character of a good citizen into its component parts and bring the comparison down to them. A good citizen, he would say, increases the national resources by his administration of the finances, defeats the enemy abroad, wins allies by his diplomacy394, appeases395 dissension by his eloquence396 at home.94 When the shy and gifted Charmides shrank from addressing a public audience on public questions, Socrates strove to overcome his nervousness by mercilessly subdividing397 the august Ecclêsia into its constituent398 classes. ‘Is it the fullers that you are afraid of?’ he asked, ‘or the leather-cutters, or the masons, or the smiths, or the husbandmen, or the traders, or the lowest class of hucksters?’95 Here the analytical power of Greek thought is manifested with still more searching effect than when it was applied to space and motion by Zeno.
Nor did Socrates only consider the whole conception in relation to its parts, he also grouped conceptions together according to their genera and founded logical classification. To appreciate the bearing of this idea on human interests it will be enough to study the disposition of a code. We shall147 then see how much more easy it becomes to bring individual cases under a general rule, and to retain the whole body of rules in our memory, when we can pass step by step from the most universal to the most particular categories. Now, it was by jurists versed19 in the Stoic philosophy that Roman law was codified399, and it was by Stoicism that the traditions of Socratic philosophy were most faithfully preserved.
Logical division is, however, a process not fully135 represented by any fixed and formal distribution of topics, nor yet is it equivalent to the arrangement of genera and species according to their natural affinities400, as in the admirable systems of Jussieu and Cuvier. It is something much more flexible and subtle, a carrying down into the minutest detail, of that psychological law which requires, as a condition of perfect consciousness, that feelings, conceptions, judgments401, and, generally speaking, all mental modes should be apprehended403 together with their contradictory opposites. Heracleitus had a dim perception of this truth when he taught the identity of antithetical couples, and it is more or less vividly illustrated by all Greek classic literature after him; but Socrates seems to have been the first who transformed it from a law of existence into a law of cognition; with him knowledge and ignorance, reason and passion, freedom and slavery, virtue, and vice129, right and wrong (πολλ?ν ?νομ?των μορφ? μ?α) were apprehended in inseparable connexion, and were employed for mutual elucidation404, not only in broad masses, but also through their last subdivisions, like the delicate adjustments of light and shade on a Venetian canvas. This method of classification by graduated descent and symmetrical contrast, like the whole dialectic system of which it forms a branch, is only suited to the mental phenomena for which it was originally devised; and Hegel committed a fatal error when he applied it to explain the order of external coexistence and succession. We have already touched on the essentially subjective405 character of the Socratic definition, and148 we shall presently have to make a similar restriction406 in dealing with Socratic induction407. With regard to the question last considered, our limits will not permit us, nor, indeed, does it fall within the scope of our present study, to pursue a vein408 of reflection which was never fully worked out either by the Athenian philosophers or by their modern successors, at least not in its only legitimate382 direction.
After definition and division comes reasoning. We arrange objects in classes, that by knowing one or some we may know all. Aristotle attributes to Socrates the first systematic employment of induction as well as of general definitions.96 Nevertheless, his method was not solely inductive, nor did it bear more than a distant resemblance to the induction of modern science. His principles were not gathered from the particular classes of phenomena which they determined409, or were intended to determine, but from others of an analogous410 character which had already been reduced to order. Observing that all handicrafts were practised according to well-defined intelligible377 rules, leading, so far as they went, to satisfactory results, he required that life in its entirety should be similarly systematised. This was not so much reasoning as a demand for the more extended application of reasoning. It was a truly philosophic48 postulate411, for philosophy is not science, but precedes and underlies412 it. Belief and action tend to divide themselves into two provinces, of which the one is more or less organised, the other more or less chaotic413. We philosophise when we try to bring the one into order, and also when we test the foundations on which the order of the other reposes414, fighting both against incoherent mysticism and against traditional routine. Such is the purpose that the most distinguished thinkers of modern times—Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer—however widely they may otherwise differ, have, according to their respective lights, all set themselves to achieve. No doubt, there is149 this vast difference between Socrates and his most recent successors, that physical science is the great type of certainty to the level of which they would raise all speculation, while with him it was the type of a delusion415 and an impossibility. The analogy of artistic production when applied to Nature led him off on a completely false track, the ascription to conscious design of that which is, in truth, a result of mechanical causation.97 But now that the relations between the known and the unknown have been completely transformed, there is no excuse for repeating the fallacies which imposed on his vigorous understanding; and the genuine spirit of Socrates is best represented by those who, starting like him from the data of experience, are led to adopt a diametrically opposite conclusion. We may add, that the Socratic method of analogical reasoning gave a retrospective justification to early Greek thought, of which Socrates was not himself aware. Its daring generalisations were really an inference from the known to the unknown. To interpret all physical processes in terms of matter and motion, is only assuming that the changes to which our senses cannot penetrate416 are homogeneous with the changes which we can feel and see. When Socrates argued that, because the human body is animated417 by a consciousness, the material universe must be similarly animated, Democritus might have answered that the world presents no appearance of being organised like an animal. When he argued that, because statues and pictures are known to be the work of intelligence, the living models from which they are copied must be similarly due to design, Aristodêmus should have answered, that the former are seen to be manufactured, while the others are seen to grow. It might also have been observed, that if our own intelligence requires to be accounted for by a cause like itself, so also does the creative cause, and so on through an infinite regress of antecedents. Teleology418 has been destroyed by the Darwinian theory; but before the Origin of150 Species appeared, the slightest scrutiny might have shown that it was a precarious419 foundation for religious belief. If many thoughtful men are now turning away from theism, ‘natural theology’ may be thanked for the desertion. ‘I believe in God,’ says the German baron420 in Thorndale, ‘until your philosophers demonstrate His existence.’ ‘And then?’ asks a friend. ‘And then—I do not believe the demonstration.’
Whatever may have been the errors into which Socrates fell, he did not commit the fatal mistake of compromising his ethical doctrine by associating it indissolubly with his metaphysical opinions. Religion, with him, instead of being the source and sanction of all duty, simply brought in an additional duty—that of gratitude421 to the gods for their goodness. We shall presently see where he sought for the ultimate foundation of morality, after completing our survey of the dialectic method with which it was so closely connected. The induction of Socrates, when it went beyond that kind of analogical reasoning which we have just been considering, was mainly abstraction, the process by which he obtained those general conceptions or definitions which played so great a part in his philosophy. Thus, on comparing the different virtues, as commonly distinguished, he found that they all agreed in requiring knowledge, which he accordingly concluded to be the essence of virtue. So other moralists have been led to conclude that right actions resemble one another in their felicific quality, and In that alone. Similarly, political economists422 find, or formerly423 found (for we do not wish to be positive on the matter), that a common characteristic of all industrial employments is the desire to secure the maximum of profit with the minimum of trouble. Another comparison shows that value depends on the relation between supply and demand. Aesthetic enjoyments of every kind resemble one another by including an element of ideal emotion. It is a common characteristic of all cognitions that they are151 constructed by association out of elementary feelings. All societies are marked by a more or less developed division of labour. These are given as typical generalisations which have been reached by the Socratic method. They are all taken from the philosophic sciences—that is, the sciences dealing with phenomena which are partly determined by mind, and the systematic treatment of which is so similar that they are frequently studied in combination by a single thinker, and invariably so by the greatest thinkers of any. But were we to examine the history of the physical sciences, we should find that this method of wide comparison and rapid abstraction cannot, as Francis Bacon imagined, be successfully applied to them. The facts with which they deal are not transparent, not directly penetrable424 by thought; hence they must be treated deductively. Instead of a front attack, we must, so to speak, take them in the rear. Bacon never made a more unfortunate observation than when he said that the syllogism425 falls far short of the subtlety426 of Nature. Nature is even simpler than the syllogism, for she accomplishes her results by advancing from equation to equation. That which really does fall far short of her subtlety is precisely the Baconian induction with its superficial comparison of instances. No amount of observation could detect any resemblance between the bursting of a thunderstorm and the attraction of a loadstone, or between the burning of charcoal427 and the rusting428 a nail.
But while philosophers cannot prescribe a method to physical science, they may, to a certain extent, bring it under their cognisance, by disengaging its fundamental conceptions and assumptions, and showing that they are functions of mind; by arranging the special sciences in systematic order for purposes of study; and by investigating the law of their historical evolution. Furthermore, since psychology is the central science of philosophy, and since it is closely connected with physiology, which in turn reposes on the inorganic152 sciences, a certain knowledge of the objective world is indispensable to any knowledge of ourselves. Lastly, since the subjective sphere not only rests, once for all, on the objective, but is also in a continual state of action and reaction with it, no philosophy can be complete which does not take into account the constitution of things as they exist independently of ourselves, in order to ascertain171 how far they are unalterable, and how far they may be modified to our advantage. We see, then, that Socrates, in restricting philosophy to human interests, was guided by a just tact188; that in creating the method of dialectic abstraction, he created an instrument adequate to this investigation, but to this alone; and, finally, that human interests, understood in the largest sense, embrace a number of subsidiary studies which either did not exist when he taught, or which the inevitable429 superstitions430 of his age would not allow him to pursue.
It remains431 to glance at another aspect of the dialectic method first developed on a great scale by Plato, and first fully defined by Aristotle, but already playing a certain part in the Socratic teaching. This is the testing of common assumptions by pushing them to their logical conclusion, and rejecting those which lead to consequences inconsistent with themselves. So understood, dialectic means the complete elimination432 of inconsistency, and has ever since remained the most powerful weapon of philosophical criticism. To take an instance near at hand, it is constantly employed by thinkers so radically434 different as Mr. Herbert Spencer and Professor T. H. Green; while it has been generalised into an objective law of Nature and history, with dazzling though only momentary435 success, by Hegel and his school.
VI.
Consistency433 is, indeed, the one word which, better than any other, expresses the whole character of Socrates, and the whole of philosophy as well. Here the supreme conception153 of mind reappears under its most rigorous, but, at the same time, its most beneficent aspect. It is the temperance which no allurement436 can surprise; the fortitude437 which no terror can break through; the justice which eliminates all personal considerations, egoistic and altruistic438 alike; the truthfulness which, with exactest harmony, fits words to meanings, meanings to thoughts, and thoughts to things; the logic145 which will tolerate no self-contradiction; the conviction which seeks for no acceptance unwon by reason; the liberalism which works through free agencies for freedom; the love which wills another’s good for that other’s sake alone.98 It was the intellectual passion for consistency which made Socrates so great and which fused his life into a flawless whole; but it was an unconscious motive power, and therefore he attributed to mere knowledge what knowledge alone could not supply. A clear perception of right cannot by itself secure the obedience of our will. High principles are not of any value, except to those in whom a discrepancy between practice and profession produces the sharpest anguish160 of which their nature is capable; a feeling like, though immeasurably stronger than, that which women of exquisite439 sensibility experience when they see a candle set crooked440 or a table-cover awry441. How moral laws have come to be established, and why they prescribe or prohibit certain classes of actions, are questions which still divide the schools, though with an increasing consensus442 of authority on the utilitarian183 side: their ultimate sanction—that which, whatever they are, makes obedience to them truly moral—can hardly be sought elsewhere than in the same consciousness of logical stringency443 that determines, or should determine, our abstract beliefs.
Be this as it may, we venture to hope that a principle has154 been here suggested deep and strong enough to reunite the two halves into which historians have hitherto divided the Socratic system, or, rather, the beginning of that universal systematisation called philosophy, which is not yet, and perhaps never will be, completed; a principle which is outwardly revealed in the character of the philosopher himself. With such an one, ethics and dialectics become almost indistinguishable through the intermixture of their processes and the parallelism of their aims. Integrity of conviction enters, both as a means and as an element, into perfect integrity of conduct, nor can it be maintained where any other element of rectitude is wanting. Clearness, consecutiveness444, and coherence445 are the morality of belief; while temperance, justice, and beneficence, taken in their widest sense and taken together, constitute the supreme logic of life.
It has already been observed that the thoughts of Socrates were thrown into shape for and by communication, that they only became definite when brought into vivifying contact with another intelligence. Such was especially the case with his method of ethical dialectic. Instead of tendering his advice in the form of a lecture, as other moralists have at all times been so fond of doing, he sought out some pre-existing sentiment or opinion inconsistent with the conduct of which he disapproved446, and then gradually worked round from point to point, until theory and practice were exhibited in immediate contrast. Here, his reasoning, which is sometimes spoken of as exclusively inductive, was strictly447 syllogistic448, being the application of a general law to a particular instance. With the growing emancipation449 of reason, we may observe a return to the Socratic method of moralisation. Instead of rewards and punishments, which encourage selfish calculation, or examples, which stimulate239 a mischievous131 jealousy450 when they do not create a spirit of servile imitation, the judicious trainer will find his motive power in the pupil’s incipient451 tendency to form moral judgments, which, when reflected on the155 individual’s own actions, become what we call a conscience. It has been mentioned in the preceding chapter that the celebrated452 golden rule of justice was already enunciated453 by Greek moralists in the fourth century B.C. Possibly it may have been first formulated454 by Socrates. In all cases it occurs in the writings of his disciples, and happily expresses the drift of his entire philosophy. This generalising tendency was, indeed, so natural to a noble Greek, that instances of it occur long before philosophy began. We find it in the famous question of Achilles: ‘Did not this whole war begin on account of a woman? Are the Atreidae the only men who love their wives?’99 and in the now not less famous apostrophe to Lycaon, reminding him that an early death is the lot of far worthier455 men than he100—utterances which come on us with the awful effect of lightning flashes, that illuminate457 the whole horizon of existence while they paralyse or destroy an individual victim.
The power which Socrates possessed of rousing other minds to independent activity and apostolic transmission of spiritual gifts was, as we have said, the second verification of his doctrine. Even those who, like Antisthenes and Aristippus, derived their positive theories from the Sophists rather than from him, preferred to be regarded as his followers; and Plato, from whom his ideas received their most splendid development, has acknowledged the debt by making that venerated458 figure the centre of his own immortal Dialogues. A third verification is given by the subjective, practical, dialectic tendency of all subsequent philosophy properly so called. On this point we will content ourselves with mentioning one instance out of many, the recent declaration of Mr. Herbert Spencer that his whole system was constructed for the sake of its ethical conclusion.101
Apart, however, from abstract speculation, the ideal156 method seems to have exercised an immediate and powerful influence on Art, an influence which was anticipated by Socrates himself. In two conversations reported by Xenophon,102 he impresses on Parrhasius, the painter, and Cleito, the sculptor, the importance of so animating459 the faces and figures which they represented as to make them express human feelings, energies, and dispositions, particularly those of the most interesting and elevated type. And such, in fact, was the direction followed by imitative art after Pheidias, though not without degenerating into a sensationalism which Socrates would have severely condemned. Another and still more remarkable proof of the influence exercised on plastic representation by ideal philosophy was, perhaps, not foreseen by its founder. We allude199 to the substitution of abstract and generic460 for historical subjects by Greek sculpture in its later stages, and not by sculpture only, but by dramatic poetry as well. For early art, whether it addressed itself to the eye or to the imagination, and whether its subjects were taken from history or from fiction, had always been historical in this sense, that it exhibited the performance of particular actions by particular persons in a given place and at a given time; the mode of presentment most natural to those whose ideas are mainly determined by contiguous association. The schools which came after Socrates let fall the limitations of concrete reality, and found the unifying principle of their works in association by resemblance, making their figures the personification of a single attribute or group of attributes, and bringing together forms distinguished by the community of their characteristics or the convergence of their functions. Thus Aphroditê no longer figured as the lover of Arês or Anchisês, but as the personification of female beauty; while her statues were grouped together with images of the still more transparent abstractions, Love, Longing461, and Desire. Similarly Apollo became a personification of musical enthusiasm, and Dionysus157 of Bacchic inspiration. So also dramatic art, once completely historical, even with Aristophanes, now chose for its subjects such constantly-recurring types as the ardent462 lover, the stern father, the artful slave, the boastful soldier, and the fawning463 parasite464.103
Nor was this all. Thought, after having, as it would seem, wandered away from reality in search of empty abstractions, by the help of those very abstractions regained465 possession of concrete existence, and acquired a far fuller intelligence of its complex manifestations467. For, each individual character is an assemblage of qualities, and can only be understood when those qualities, after having been separately studied, are finally recombined. Thus, biography is a very late production of literature, and although biographies are the favourite reading of those who most despise philosophy, they could never have been written without its help. Moreover, before characters can be described they must exist. Now, it is partly philosophy which calls character into existence by sedulous289 inculcation of self-knowledge and self-culture, by consolidating468 a man’s individuality into something independent of circumstances, so that it comes to form, not a figure in bas-relief, but what sculptors469 call a figure in the round. Such was Socrates himself, and such were the figures which he taught Xenophon and Plato to recognise and portray470. Character-drawing begins with them, and the Memorabilia in particular is the earliest attempt at a biographical analysis that we possess. From this to Plutarch’s Lives there was still a long journey to be accomplished, but the interval between them is less considerable than that which divides Xenophon from his immediate predecessor, Thucydides. And when we remember how intimately the substance of Christian teaching is connected with the literary form of its first record, we shall still better appreciate the all-penetrating influence of Hellenic thought,158 vying471, as it does, with the forces of nature in subtlety and universal diffusion.
Besides transforming art and literature, the dialectic method helped to revolutionise social life, and the impulse communicated in this direction is still very far from being exhausted472. We allude to its influence on female education. The intellectual blossoming of Athens was aided, in its first development, by a complete separation of the sexes. There were very few of his friends to whom an Athenian gentleman talked so little as to his wife.104 Colonel Mure aptly compares her position to that of an English housekeeper473, with considerably less liberty than is enjoyed by the latter. Yet the union of tender admiration with the need for intelligent sympathy and the desire to awaken280 interest in noble pursuits existed at Athens in full force, and created a field for its exercise. Wilhelm von Humboldt has observed that at this time chivalrous474 love was kept alive by customs which, to us, are intensely repellent. That so valuable a sentiment should be preserved and diverted into a more legitimate channel was an object of the highest importance. The naturalistic method of ethics did much, but it could not do all, for more was required than a return to primitive475 simplicity476. Here the method of mind stepped in and supplied the deficiency. Reciprocity was the soul of dialectic as practised by Socrates, and the dialectic of love demands a reciprocity of passion which can only exist between the sexes. But in a society where the free intercourse478 of modern Europe was not permitted, the modern sentiment could not be reached at a single bound; and those who sought for the conversation of intelligent women had to seek for it among a class of which Aspasia was the highest representative. Such women played a great part in later Athenian society; they attended philosophical lectures, furnished heroines to the New Comedy, and on the whole gave a healthier tone to literature. Their successors, the Delias and Cynthias of159 Roman elegiac poetry, called forth strains of exalted479 affection which need nothing but a worthier object to place them on a level with the noblest expressions of tenderness that have since been heard. Here at least, to understand is to forgive; and we shall be less scandalised than certain critics,105 we shall even refuse to admit that Socrates fell below the dignity of a moralist, when we hear that he once visited a celebrated beauty of this class, Theodotê by name;106 that he engaged her in a playful conversation; and that he taught her to put more mind into her profession; to attract by something deeper than personal charms; to show at least an appearance of interest in the welfare of her lovers; and to stimulate their ardour by a studied reserve, granting no favour that had not been repeatedly and passionately480 sought after.
Xenophon gives the same interest a more edifying direction when he enlivens the dry details of his Cyropaedia with touching episodes of conjugal affection, or presents lessons in domestic economy under the form of conversations between a newly-married couple.107 Plato in some respects transcends481, in others falls short of his less gifted contemporary. For his doctrine of love as an educating process—a true doctrine, all sneers482 and perversions483 notwithstanding—though readily applicable to the relation of the sexes, is not applied to it by him; and his project of a common training for men and women, though suggestive of a great advance on the existing system if rightly carried out, was, from his point of view, a retrograde step towards savage484 or even animal life, an attempt to throw half the burdens incident to a military organisation485 of society on those who had become absolutely incapable486 of bearing them.
Fortunately, the dialectic method proved stronger than its own creators, and, once set going, introduced feelings and ex160periences of which they had never dreamed, within the horizon of philosophic consciousness. It was found that if women had much to learn, much also might be learned from them. Their wishes could not be taken into account without giving a greatly increased prominence in the guidance of conduct to such sentiments as fidelity, purity, and pity; and to that extent the religion which they helped to establish has, at least in principle, left no room for any further progress. On the other hand, it is only by reason that the more exclusively feminine impulses can be freed from their primitive narrowness and elevated into truly human emotions. Love, when left to itself, causes more pain than pleasure, for the words of the old idyl still remain true which associate it with jealousy as cruel as the grave; pity, without prevision, creates more suffering than it relieves; and blind fidelity is instinctively487 opposed even to the most beneficent changes. We are still suffering from the excessive preponderance which Catholicism gave to the ideas of women; but we need not listen to those who tell us that the varied488 experiences of humanity cannot be organised into a rational, consistent, self-supporting whole.
A survey of the Socratic philosophy would be incomplete without some comment on an element in the life of Socrates, which at first sight seems to lie altogether outside philosophy. There is no fact in his history more certain than that he believed himself to be constantly accompanied by a Daemonium, a divine voice often restraining him, even in trifling489 matters, but never prompting to positive action. That it was neither conscience in our sense of the word, nor a supposed familiar spirit, is now generally admitted. Even those who believe in the supernatural origin and authority of our moral feelings do not credit them with a power of divining the accidentally good or evil consequences which may attend on our most trivial and indifferent actions; while, on the other hand, those feelings have a positive no less than a negative161 function, which is exhibited whenever the performance of good deeds becomes a duty. That the Daemonium was not a personal attendant is proved by the invariable use of an indefinite neuter adjective to designate it. How the phenomenon itself should be explained is a question for professional pathologists. We have here to account for the interpretation put upon it by Socrates, and this, in our judgment402, follows quite naturally from his characteristic mode of thought. That the gods should signify their pleasure by visible signs and public oracles was an experience familiar to every Greek. Socrates, conceiving God as a mind diffused through the whole universe, would look for traces of the Divine presence in his own mind, and would readily interpret any inward suggestion, not otherwise to be accounted for, as a manifestation466 of this all-pervading power. Why it should invariably appear under the form of a restraint is less obvious. The only explanation seems to be that, as a matter of fact, such mysterious feelings, whether the product of unconscious experience or not, do habitually operate as deterrents490 rather than as incentives491.
VII.
This Daemonium, whatever it may have been, formed one of the ostensible492 grounds on which its possessor was prosecuted493 and condemned to death for impiety. We might have spared ourselves the trouble of going over the circumstances connected with that tragical494 event, had not various attempts been made in some well-known works to extenuate495 the significance of a singularly atrocious crime. The case stands thus. In the year 399 B.C. Socrates, who was then over seventy, and had never in his life been brought before a law-court, was indicted496 on the threefold charge of introducing new divinities, of denying those already recognised by the State, and of corrupting497 young men. His principal accuser was one Melêtus, a poet, supported by Lycon, a rhetorician,162 and by a much more powerful backer, Anytus, a leading citizen in the restored democracy. The charge was tried before a large popular tribunal, numbering some five hundred members. Socrates regarded the whole affair with profound indifference498. When urged to prepare a defence, he replied, with justice, that he had been preparing it his whole life long. He could not, indeed, have easily foreseen what line the prosecutors499 would take. Our own information on this point is meagre enough, being principally derived from allusions500 made by Xenophon, who was not himself present at the trial. There seems, however, no unfairness in concluding that the charge of irreligion neither was nor could be substantiated501. The evidence of Xenophon is quite sufficient to establish the unimpeachable502 orthodoxy of his friend. If it really was an offence at Athens to believe in gods unrecognised by the State, Socrates was not guilty of that offence, for his Daemonium was not a new divinity, but a revelation from the established divinities, such as individual believers have at all times been permitted to receive even by the most jealous religious communities. The imputation503 of infidelity, commonly and indiscriminately brought against all philosophers, was a particularly unhappy one to fling at the great opponent of physical science, who, besides, was noted for the punctual discharge of his religious duties. That the first two counts of the indictment504 should be so frivolous505 raises a strong prejudice against the third. The charges of corruption506 seem to have come under two heads—alleged encouragement of disrespect to parents, and of disaffection towards democratic institutions. In support of the former some innocent expressions let fall by Socrates seem to have been taken up and cruelly perverted507. By way of stimulating508 his young friends to improve their minds, he had observed that relations were only of value when they could help one another, and that to do so they must be properly educated. This was twisted into an assertion that ignorant parents might properly be placed163 under restraint by their better-informed children. That such an inference could not have been sanctioned by Socrates himself is obvious from his insisting on the respect due even to so intolerable a mother as Xanthippê.108 The political opinions of the defendant presented a more vulnerable point for attack. He thought the custom of choosing magistrates by lot absurd, and did not conceal509 his contempt for it. There is, however, no reason for believing that such purely theoretical criticisms were forbidden by law or usage at Athens. At any rate, much more revolutionary sentiments were tolerated on the stage. That Socrates would be no party to a violent subversion510 of the Constitution, and would regard it with high disapproval511, was abundantly clear both from his life and from the whole tenor512 of his teaching. In opposition513 to Hippias, he defined justice as obedience to the law of the land. The chances of the lot had, on one memorable514 occasion, called him to preside over the deliberations of the Sovereign Assembly. A proposition was made, contrary to law, that the generals who were accused of having abandoned the crews of their sunken ships at Arginusae should be tried in a single batch515. In spite of tremendous popular clamour, Socrates refused to put the question to the vote on the single day for which his office lasted. The just and resolute516 man, who would not yield to the unrighteous demands of a crowd, had shortly afterwards to face the threats of a frowning tyrant517. When the Thirty were installed in power, he publicly, and at the risk of his life, expressed disapproval of their sanguinary proceedings518. The oligarchy520, wishing to involve as many respectable citizens as possible in complicity with their crimes, sent for five persons, of whom Socrates was one, and ordered them to bring a certain Leo from Salamis, that he might be put to death; the others obeyed, but Socrates refused to accompany them on their disgraceful errand. Nevertheless, it told heavily against the philosopher that164 Alcibiades, the most mischievous of demagogues, and Critias, the most savage of aristocrats521, passed for having been educated by him. It was remembered, also, that he was in the habit of quoting a passage from Homer, where Odysseus is described as appealing to the reason of the chiefs, while he brings inferior men to their senses with rough words and rougher chastisement522. In reality, Socrates did not mean that the poor should be treated with brutality523 by the rich, for he would have been the first to suffer had such license524 been permitted, but he meant that where reason failed harsher methods of coercion525 must be applied. Precisely because expressions of opinion let fall in private conversation are so liable to be misunderstood or purposely perverted, to adduce them in support of a capital charge where no overt352 act can be alleged, is the most mischievous form of encroachment526 on individual liberty.
Modern critics, beginning with Hegel,109 have discovered reasons for considering Socrates a dangerous character, which apparently did not occur to Melêtus and his associates. We are told that the whole system of applying dialectics to morality had an unsettling tendency, for if men were once taught that the sacredness of duty rested on their individual conviction they might refuse to be convinced, and act accordingly. And it is further alleged that Socrates first introduced this principle of subjectivity527 into morals. The persecuting528 spirit is so insatiable that in default of acts it attacks opinions, and in default of specific opinions it fastens on general tendencies. We know that Joseph de Maistre was suspected by his ignorant neighbours of being a Revolutionist because most of his time was spent in study; and but the other day a French preacher was sent into exile by his ecclesiastical superiors for daring to support Catholic morality on rational grounds.110 Fortunately Greek society was not165 subject to the rules of the Dominican Order. Never anywhere in Greece, certainly not at Athens, did there exist that solid, all-comprehensive, unquestionable fabric529 of traditional obligation assumed by Hegel; and Zeller is conceding far too much when he defends Socrates, on the sole ground that the recognised standards of right had fallen into universal contempt during the Peloponnesian war, while admitting that he might fairly have been silenced at an earlier period, if indeed his teaching could have been conceived as possible before it actually began.111 For from the first, both in literature and in life, Greek thought is distinguished by an ardent desire to get to the bottom of every question, and to discover arguments of universal applicability for every decision. Even in the youth of Pericles knotty530 ethical problems were eagerly discussed without any interference on the part of the public authorities. Experience had to prove how far-reaching was the effect of ideas before a systematic attempt could be made to control them.
In what terms Socrates replied to his accusers cannot be stated with absolute certainty. Reasons have been already given for believing that the speech put into his mouth by Plato is not entirely historical; and here we may mention as a further reason that the specific charges mentioned by Xenophon are not even alluded to in it. This much, however, is clear, that the defence was of a thoroughly dignified531 character; and that, while the allegations of the prosecution were successfully rebutted532, the defendant stood entirely on his innocence533, and refused to make any of the customary but illegal appeals to the compassion534 of the court. We are assured that he was condemned solely on account of this defiant535 attitude, and by a very small majority. Melêtus had demanded the penalty of death, but by Attic law Socrates had the right of proposing some milder sentence as an alternative. According to Plato, he began by stating that166 the justest return for his entire devotion to the public good would be maintenance at the public expense during the remainder of his life, an honour usually granted to victors at the Olympic games. In default of this he proposed a fine of thirty minae, to be raised by contributions among his friends. According to another account,112 he refused, on the ground of his innocence, to name any alternative penalty. On a second division Socrates was condemned to death by a much larger majority than that which had found him guilty, eighty of those who had voted for his acquittal now voting for his execution.
Such was the transaction which some moderns, Grote among the number, holding Socrates to be one of the best and wisest of men, have endeavoured to excuse. Their argument is that the illustrious victim was jointly536 responsible for his own fate, and that he was really condemned, not for his teaching, but for contempt of court. To us it seems that this is a distinction without a difference. What has been so finely said of space and time may be said also of the Socratic life and the Socratic doctrine; each was contained entire in every point of the other. Such as he appeared to the Dicastery, such also he appeared everywhere, always, and to all men, offering them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If conduct like his was not permissible537 in a court of law, then it was not permissible at all; if justice could not be administered without reticences, evasions538, and disguises, where was sincerity539 ever to be practised? If reason was not to be the paramount arbitress in questions of public interest, what issues could ever be entrusted540 to her decision? Admit every extenuating541 circumstance that the utmost ingenuity542 can devise, and from every point of view one fact will come out clearly, that Socrates was impeached543 as a philosopher, that he defended himself like a philosopher, and that he was condemned to167 death because he was a philosopher. Those who attempt to remove this stain from the character of the Athenian people will find that, like the blood-stain on Bluebeard’s key, when it is rubbed out on one side it reappears on the other. To punish Socrates for his teaching, or for the way in which he defended his teaching, was equally persecution544, and persecution of the worst description, that which attacks not the results of free thought but free thought itself. We cannot then agree with Grote when he says that the condemnation545 of Socrates ‘ought to count as one of the least gloomy items in an essentially gloomy catalogue.’ On the contrary, it is the gloomiest of any, because it reveals a depth of hatred546 for pure reason in vulgar minds which might otherwise have remained unsuspected. There is some excuse for other persecutors, for Caiaphas, and St. Dominic, and Calvin: for the Inquisition, and for the authors of the dragonnades; for the judges of Giordano Bruno, and the judges of Vanini: they were striving to exterminate547 particular opinions, which they believed to be both false and pernicious; there is no such excuse for the Athenian dicasts, least of all for those eighty who, having pronounced Socrates innocent, sentenced him to death because he reasserted his innocence; if, indeed, innocence be not too weak a word to describe his life-long battle against that very irreligion and corruption which were laid to his charge. Here, in this one cause, the great central issue between two abstract principles, the principle of authority and the principle of reason, was cleared from all adventitious548 circumstances, and disputed on its own intrinsic merits with the usual weapons of argument on the one side and brute549 force on the other. On that issue Socrates was finally condemned, and on it his judges must be condemned by us.
Neither can we admit Grote’s further contention, that in no Greek city but Athens would Socrates have been permitted to carry on his cross-examining activity for so long a168 period. On the contrary, we agree with Colonel Mure,113 that in no other state would he have been molested550. Xenophanes and Parmenides, Heracleitus and Democritus, had given utterance456 to far bolder opinions than his, opinions radically destructive of Greek religion, apparently without running the slightest personal risk; while Athens had more than once before shown the same spirit of fanatical intolerance, though without proceeding519 to such a fatal extreme, thanks, probably, to the timely escape of her intended victims. M. Ernest Renan has quite recently contrasted the freedom of thought accorded by Roman despotism with the narrowness of old Greek Republicanism, quoting what he calls the Athenian Inquisition as a sample of the latter. The word inquisition is not too strong, only the lecturer should not have led his audience to believe that Greek Republicanism was in this respect fairly represented by its most brilliant type, for had such been the case very little free thought would have been left for Rome to tolerate.
During the month’s respite551 accidentally allowed him, Socrates had one more opportunity of displaying that stedfast obedience to the law which had been one of his great guiding principles through life. The means of escaping from prison were offered to him, but he refused to avail himself of them, according to Plato, that the implicit477 contract of loyalty552 to which his citizenship553 had bound him might be preserved unbroken. Nor was death unwelcome to him although it is not true that he courted it, any desire to figure as a martyr554 being quite alien from the noble simplicity of his character. But he had reached an age when the daily growth in wisdom which for him alone made life worth living, seemed likely to be exchanged for a gradual and melancholy555 decline. That this past progress was a good in itself he never doubted, whether it was to be continued in other worlds, or succeeded by the happiness of an eternal sleep. And we may be sure that he169 would have held his own highest good to be equally desirable for the whole human race, even with the clear prevision that its collective aspirations556 and efforts cannot be prolonged for ever.
Two philosophers only can be named who, in modern times, have rivalled or approached the moral dignity of Socrates. Like him, Spinoza realised his own ideal of a good and happy life. Like him, Giordano Bruno, without a hope of future recompense, chose death rather than a life unfaithful to the highest truth, and death, too, under its most terrible form, not the painless extinction557 by hemlock558 inflicted559 in a heathen city, but the agonising dissolution intended by Catholic love to serve as a foretaste of everlasting560 fire. Yet with neither can the parallel be extended further; for Spinoza, wisely perhaps, refused to face the storms which a public profession and propagation of his doctrine would have raised; and the wayward career of Giordano Bruno was not in keeping with its heroic end. The complex and distracting conditions in which their lot was cast did not permit them to attain92 that statuesque completeness which marked the classic age of Greek life and thought. Those times developed a wilder energy, a more stubborn endurance, a sweeter purity than any that the ancient world had known. But until the scattered561 elements are recombined in a still loftier harmony, our sleepless562 thirst for perfection can be satisfied at one spring alone. Pericles must remain the ideal of statesmanship, Pheidias of artistic production, and Socrates of philosophic power.
Before the ideas which we have passed in review could go forth on their world-conquering mission, it was necessary, not only that Socrates should die, but that his philosophy should die also, by being absorbed into the more splendid generalisations of Plato’s system. That system has, for some time past, been made an object of close study in our most famous seats of learning, and a certain acquaintance with it has almost become part of a liberal education in England. No170 better source of inspiration, combined with discipline, could be found; but we shall understand and appreciate Plato still better by first extricating563 the nucleus564 round which his speculations have gathered in successive deposits, and this we can only do with the help of Xenophon, whose little work also well deserves attention for the sake of its own chaste565 and candid268 beauty. The relation in which it stands to the Platonic writings may be symbolised by an example familiar to the experience of every traveller. As sometimes, in visiting a Gothic cathedral, we are led through the wonders of the more modern edifice—under soaring arches, over tesselated pavements, and between long rows of clustered columns, past frescoed566 walls, storied windows, carven pulpits, and sepulchral567 monuments, with their endless wealth of mythologic568 imagery—down into the oldest portion of any, the bare stern crypt, severe with the simplicity of early art, resting on pillars taken from an ancient temple, and enclosing the tomb of some martyred saint, to whose glorified spirit an office of perpetual intercession before the mercy-seat is assigned, and in whose honour all that external magnificence has been piled up; so also we pass through the manifold and marvellous constructions of Plato’s imagination to that austere569 memorial where Xenophon has enshrined with pious158 care, under the great primary divisions of old Hellenic virtue, an authentic reliquary of one standing71 foremost among those who, having worked out their own deliverance from the powers of error and evil, would not be saved alone, but published the secret of redemption though death were the penalty of its disclosure; and who, by their transmitted influence, even more than by their eternal example, are still contributing to the progressive development of all that is most rational, most consistent, most social, and therefore most truly human in ourselves.
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1 legendary | |
adj.传奇(中)的,闻名遐迩的;n.传奇(文学) | |
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2 celebrity | |
n.名人,名流;著名,名声,名望 | |
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3 disciple | |
n.信徒,门徒,追随者 | |
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4 supremely | |
adv.无上地,崇高地 | |
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5 supreme | |
adj.极度的,最重要的;至高的,最高的 | |
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6 oracle | |
n.神谕,神谕处,预言 | |
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7 stoic | |
n.坚忍克己之人,禁欲主义者 | |
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8 sage | |
n.圣人,哲人;adj.贤明的,明智的 | |
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9 Christian | |
adj.基督教徒的;n.基督教徒 | |
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10 Christians | |
n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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11 irreverence | |
n.不尊敬 | |
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12 Founder | |
n.创始者,缔造者 | |
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13 unanimity | |
n.全体一致,一致同意 | |
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14 busts | |
半身雕塑像( bust的名词复数 ); 妇女的胸部; 胸围; 突击搜捕 | |
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15 exterior | |
adj.外部的,外在的;表面的 | |
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16 antiquity | |
n.古老;高龄;古物,古迹 | |
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17 worthies | |
应得某事物( worthy的名词复数 ); 值得做某事; 可尊敬的; 有(某人或事物)的典型特征 | |
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18 conversed | |
v.交谈,谈话( converse的过去式 ) | |
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19 versed | |
adj. 精通,熟练 | |
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20 profess | |
v.声称,冒称,以...为业,正式接受入教,表明信仰 | |
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21 sculptor | |
n.雕刻家,雕刻家 | |
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22 disastrous | |
adj.灾难性的,造成灾害的;极坏的,很糟的 | |
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23 delirious | |
adj.不省人事的,神智昏迷的 | |
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24 invincible | |
adj.不可征服的,难以制服的 | |
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25 irony | |
n.反语,冷嘲;具有讽刺意味的事,嘲弄 | |
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26 oligarchic | |
adj.寡头政治的,主张寡头政治的 | |
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27 bigoted | |
adj.固执己见的,心胸狭窄的 | |
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28 attic | |
n.顶楼,屋顶室 | |
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29 unwilling | |
adj.不情愿的 | |
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30 remarkable | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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31 disposition | |
n.性情,性格;意向,倾向;排列,部署 | |
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32 excellence | |
n.优秀,杰出,(pl.)优点,美德 | |
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33 platitude | |
n.老生常谈,陈词滥调 | |
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34 cynical | |
adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的,不信世道向善的 | |
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35 aesthetic | |
adj.美学的,审美的,有美感 | |
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36 diminution | |
n.减少;变小 | |
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37 ethical | |
adj.伦理的,道德的,合乎道德的 | |
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38 discourses | |
论文( discourse的名词复数 ); 演说; 讲道; 话语 | |
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39 interpretations | |
n.解释( interpretation的名词复数 );表演;演绎;理解 | |
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40 interpretation | |
n.解释,说明,描述;艺术处理 | |
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41 disciples | |
n.信徒( disciple的名词复数 );门徒;耶稣的信徒;(尤指)耶稣十二门徒之一 | |
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42 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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43 curiously | |
adv.有求知欲地;好问地;奇特地 | |
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44 discrepancy | |
n.不同;不符;差异;矛盾 | |
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45 platonic | |
adj.精神的;柏拉图(哲学)的 | |
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46 authentic | |
a.真的,真正的;可靠的,可信的,有根据的 | |
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47 portraiture | |
n.肖像画法 | |
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48 philosophic | |
adj.哲学的,贤明的 | |
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49 philosophical | |
adj.哲学家的,哲学上的,达观的 | |
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50 scanty | |
adj.缺乏的,仅有的,节省的,狭小的,不够的 | |
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51 sufficiently | |
adv.足够地,充分地 | |
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52 transparent | |
adj.明显的,无疑的;透明的 | |
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53 truthfulness | |
n. 符合实际 | |
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54 narrative | |
n.叙述,故事;adj.叙事的,故事体的 | |
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55 fictitious | |
adj.虚构的,假设的;空头的 | |
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56 briefly | |
adv.简单地,简短地 | |
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57 recapitulate | |
v.节述要旨,择要说明 | |
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58 considerably | |
adv.极大地;相当大地;在很大程度上 | |
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59 eminent | |
adj.显赫的,杰出的,有名的,优良的 | |
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60 utterly | |
adv.完全地,绝对地 | |
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61 precisely | |
adv.恰好,正好,精确地,细致地 | |
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62 vindicate | |
v.为…辩护或辩解,辩明;证明…正确 | |
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63 veracity | |
n.诚实 | |
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64 perfectly | |
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地 | |
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65 admiration | |
n.钦佩,赞美,羡慕 | |
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66 sweeping | |
adj.范围广大的,一扫无遗的 | |
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67 virtues | |
美德( virtue的名词复数 ); 德行; 优点; 长处 | |
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68 virtue | |
n.德行,美德;贞操;优点;功效,效力 | |
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69 possessed | |
adj.疯狂的;拥有的,占有的 | |
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70 presumptuous | |
adj.胆大妄为的,放肆的,冒昧的,冒失的 | |
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71 standing | |
n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的 | |
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72 inaccessible | |
adj.达不到的,难接近的 | |
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73 rhetoric | |
n.修辞学,浮夸之言语 | |
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74 testimony | |
n.证词;见证,证明 | |
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75 embodies | |
v.表现( embody的第三人称单数 );象征;包括;包含 | |
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76 accusation | |
n.控告,指责,谴责 | |
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77 assented | |
同意,赞成( assent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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78 assent | |
v.批准,认可;n.批准,认可 | |
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79 doctrine | |
n.教义;主义;学说 | |
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80 propounded | |
v.提出(问题、计划等)供考虑[讨论],提议( propound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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81 contented | |
adj.满意的,安心的,知足的 | |
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82 eliciting | |
n. 诱发, 引出 动词elicit的现在分词形式 | |
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83 noted | |
adj.著名的,知名的 | |
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84 piety | |
n.虔诚,虔敬 | |
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85 superstition | |
n.迷信,迷信行为 | |
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86 reconstruction | |
n.重建,再现,复原 | |
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87 constructive | |
adj.建设的,建设性的 | |
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88 authenticity | |
n.真实性 | |
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89 illustrating | |
给…加插图( illustrate的现在分词 ); 说明; 表明; (用示例、图画等)说明 | |
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90 investigations | |
(正式的)调查( investigation的名词复数 ); 侦查; 科学研究; 学术研究 | |
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91 investigation | |
n.调查,调查研究 | |
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92 attain | |
vt.达到,获得,完成 | |
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93 attained | |
(通常经过努力)实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 ); 达到; 获得; 达到(某年龄、水平、状况) | |
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94 demonstration | |
n.表明,示范,论证,示威 | |
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95 contemplated | |
adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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96 qualified | |
adj.合格的,有资格的,胜任的,有限制的 | |
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97 undertaking | |
n.保证,许诺,事业 | |
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98 wielded | |
手持着使用(武器、工具等)( wield的过去式和过去分词 ); 具有; 运用(权力); 施加(影响) | |
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99 consummate | |
adj.完美的;v.成婚;使完美 [反]baffle | |
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100 dexterity | |
n.(手的)灵巧,灵活 | |
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101 attachment | |
n.附属物,附件;依恋;依附 | |
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102 plausibility | |
n. 似有道理, 能言善辩 | |
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103 guise | |
n.外表,伪装的姿态 | |
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104 drawn | |
v.拖,拉,拔出;adj.憔悴的,紧张的 | |
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105 discreet | |
adj.(言行)谨慎的;慎重的;有判断力的 | |
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106 predecessor | |
n.前辈,前任 | |
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107 exponent | |
n.倡导者,拥护者;代表人物;指数,幂 | |
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108 impiety | |
n.不敬;不孝 | |
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109 immoral | |
adj.不道德的,淫荡的,荒淫的,有伤风化的 | |
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110 expound | |
v.详述;解释;阐述 | |
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111 incompetent | |
adj.无能力的,不能胜任的 | |
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112 sketch | |
n.草图;梗概;素描;v.素描;概述 | |
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113 judicious | |
adj.明智的,明断的,能作出明智决定的 | |
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114 destined | |
adj.命中注定的;(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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115 distinguished | |
adj.卓越的,杰出的,著名的 | |
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116 contradictory | |
adj.反驳的,反对的,抗辩的;n.正反对,矛盾对立 | |
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117 mutual | |
adj.相互的,彼此的;共同的,共有的 | |
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118 thoroughly | |
adv.完全地,彻底地,十足地 | |
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119 sifted | |
v.筛( sift的过去式和过去分词 );筛滤;细查;详审 | |
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120 alleged | |
a.被指控的,嫌疑的 | |
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121 severely | |
adv.严格地;严厉地;非常恶劣地 | |
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122 summarise | |
vt.概括,总结 | |
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123 apparently | |
adv.显然地;表面上,似乎 | |
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124 justified | |
a.正当的,有理的 | |
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125 criticise | |
v.批评,评论;非难 | |
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126 underlie | |
v.位于...之下,成为...的基础 | |
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127 phenomena | |
n.现象 | |
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128 volition | |
n.意志;决意 | |
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129 vice | |
n.坏事;恶习;[pl.]台钳,老虎钳;adj.副的 | |
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130 speculation | |
n.思索,沉思;猜测;投机 | |
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131 mischievous | |
adj.调皮的,恶作剧的,有害的,伤人的 | |
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132 mischievously | |
adv.有害地;淘气地 | |
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133 hampered | |
妨碍,束缚,限制( hamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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134 conceit | |
n.自负,自高自大 | |
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135 fully | |
adv.完全地,全部地,彻底地;充分地 | |
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136 peculiar | |
adj.古怪的,异常的;特殊的,特有的 | |
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137 immediate | |
adj.立即的;直接的,最接近的;紧靠的 | |
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138 devoted | |
adj.忠诚的,忠实的,热心的,献身于...的 | |
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139 cultivation | |
n.耕作,培养,栽培(法),养成 | |
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140 discredit | |
vt.使不可置信;n.丧失信义;不信,怀疑 | |
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141 encyclopaedia | |
n.百科全书 | |
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142 derided | |
v.取笑,嘲笑( deride的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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143 purely | |
adv.纯粹地,完全地 | |
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144 semblance | |
n.外貌,外表 | |
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145 logic | |
n.逻辑(学);逻辑性 | |
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146 justification | |
n.正当的理由;辩解的理由 | |
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147 ethics | |
n.伦理学;伦理观,道德标准 | |
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148 tormenting | |
使痛苦的,使苦恼的 | |
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149 habitual | |
adj.习惯性的;通常的,惯常的 | |
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150 conspicuous | |
adj.明眼的,惹人注目的;炫耀的,摆阔气的 | |
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151 imperturbable | |
adj.镇静的 | |
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152 systematically | |
adv.有系统地 | |
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153 systematic | |
adj.有系统的,有计划的,有方法的 | |
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154 arduous | |
adj.艰苦的,费力的,陡峭的 | |
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155 lawsuit | |
n.诉讼,控诉 | |
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156 defendant | |
n.被告;adj.处于被告地位的 | |
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157 prosecution | |
n.起诉,告发,检举,执行,经营 | |
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158 pious | |
adj.虔诚的;道貌岸然的 | |
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159 anguished | |
adj.极其痛苦的v.使极度痛苦(anguish的过去式) | |
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160 anguish | |
n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦,烦恼 | |
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161 abstained | |
v.戒(尤指酒),戒除( abstain的过去式和过去分词 );弃权(不投票) | |
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162 speculations | |
n.投机买卖( speculation的名词复数 );思考;投机活动;推断 | |
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163 uncertainty | |
n.易变,靠不住,不确知,不确定的事物 | |
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164 tragic | |
adj.悲剧的,悲剧性的,悲惨的 | |
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165 providence | |
n.深谋远虑,天道,天意;远见;节约;上帝 | |
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166 oracles | |
神示所( oracle的名词复数 ); 神谕; 圣贤; 哲人 | |
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167 reverent | |
adj.恭敬的,虔诚的 | |
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168 worthy | |
adj.(of)值得的,配得上的;有价值的 | |
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169 fixed | |
adj.固定的,不变的,准备好的;(计算机)固定的 | |
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170 ascertainable | |
adj.可确定(探知),可发现的 | |
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171 ascertain | |
vt.发现,确定,查明,弄清 | |
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172 conjugal | |
adj.婚姻的,婚姻性的 | |
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173 fidelity | |
n.忠诚,忠实;精确 | |
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174 vices | |
缺陷( vice的名词复数 ); 恶习; 不道德行为; 台钳 | |
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175 perversion | |
n.曲解;堕落;反常 | |
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176 condemned | |
adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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177 interfere | |
v.(in)干涉,干预;(with)妨碍,打扰 | |
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178 contention | |
n.争论,争辩,论战;论点,主张 | |
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179 acting | |
n.演戏,行为,假装;adj.代理的,临时的,演出用的 | |
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180 professing | |
声称( profess的现在分词 ); 宣称; 公开表明; 信奉 | |
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181 glorified | |
美其名的,变荣耀的 | |
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182 grovelling | |
adj.卑下的,奴颜婢膝的v.卑躬屈节,奴颜婢膝( grovel的现在分词 );趴 | |
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183 utilitarian | |
adj.实用的,功利的 | |
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184 mythology | |
n.神话,神话学,神话集 | |
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185 interval | |
n.间隔,间距;幕间休息,中场休息 | |
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186 vividly | |
adv.清楚地,鲜明地,生动地 | |
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187 illustrated | |
adj. 有插图的,列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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188 tact | |
n.机敏,圆滑,得体 | |
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189 isolated | |
adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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190 aphorisms | |
格言,警句( aphorism的名词复数 ) | |
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191 sages | |
n.圣人( sage的名词复数 );智者;哲人;鼠尾草(可用作调料) | |
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192 dealing | |
n.经商方法,待人态度 | |
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193 infantry | |
n.[总称]步兵(部队) | |
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194 paraphernalia | |
n.装备;随身用品 | |
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195 muskets | |
n.火枪,(尤指)滑膛枪( musket的名词复数 ) | |
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196 cannon | |
n.大炮,火炮;飞机上的机关炮 | |
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197 conquerors | |
征服者,占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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198 alluded | |
提及,暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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199 allude | |
v.提及,暗指 | |
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200 honourable | |
adj.可敬的;荣誉的,光荣的 | |
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201 affected | |
adj.不自然的,假装的 | |
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202 simultaneously | |
adv.同时发生地,同时进行地 | |
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203 immortal | |
adj.不朽的;永生的,不死的;神的 | |
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204 secondly | |
adv.第二,其次 | |
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205 followers | |
追随者( follower的名词复数 ); 用户; 契据的附面; 从动件 | |
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206 substantiating | |
v.用事实支持(某主张、说法等),证明,证实( substantiate的现在分词 ) | |
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207 expedient | |
adj.有用的,有利的;n.紧急的办法,权宜之计 | |
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208 biassed | |
(统计试验中)结果偏倚的,有偏的 | |
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209 adventurous | |
adj.爱冒险的;惊心动魄的,惊险的,刺激的 | |
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210 poetical | |
adj.似诗人的;诗一般的;韵文的;富有诗意的 | |
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211 artistic | |
adj.艺术(家)的,美术(家)的;善于艺术创作的 | |
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212 monotonous | |
adj.单调的,一成不变的,使人厌倦的 | |
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213 edifying | |
adj.有教训意味的,教训性的,有益的v.开导,启发( edify的现在分词 ) | |
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214 persecuted | |
(尤指宗教或政治信仰的)迫害(~sb. for sth.)( persecute的过去式和过去分词 ); 烦扰,困扰或骚扰某人 | |
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215 fugitives | |
n.亡命者,逃命者( fugitive的名词复数 ) | |
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216 lore | |
n.传说;学问,经验,知识 | |
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217 patriotic | |
adj.爱国的,有爱国心的 | |
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218 commemorate | |
vt.纪念,庆祝 | |
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219 ripened | |
v.成熟,使熟( ripen的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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220 minor | |
adj.较小(少)的,较次要的;n.辅修学科;vi.辅修 | |
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221 enjoyment | |
n.乐趣;享有;享用 | |
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222 tranquillity | |
n. 平静, 安静 | |
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223 predecessors | |
n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 );前辈;(被取代的)原有事物;前身 | |
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224 accomplished | |
adj.有才艺的;有造诣的;达到了的 | |
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225 consecration | |
n.供献,奉献,献祭仪式 | |
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226 jovial | |
adj.快乐的,好交际的 | |
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227 degenerating | |
衰退,堕落,退化( degenerate的现在分词 ) | |
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228 thriftiness | |
节俭,节约 | |
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229 inclination | |
n.倾斜;点头;弯腰;斜坡;倾度;倾向;爱好 | |
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230 mingles | |
混合,混入( mingle的第三人称单数 ); 混进,与…交往[联系] | |
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231 grandeur | |
n.伟大,崇高,宏伟,庄严,豪华 | |
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232 prominence | |
n.突出;显著;杰出;重要 | |
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233 patriotism | |
n.爱国精神,爱国心,爱国主义 | |
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234 materialism | |
n.[哲]唯物主义,唯物论;物质至上 | |
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235 naval | |
adj.海军的,军舰的,船的 | |
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236 maritime | |
adj.海的,海事的,航海的,近海的,沿海的 | |
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237 repose | |
v.(使)休息;n.安息 | |
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238 stimulated | |
a.刺激的 | |
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239 stimulate | |
vt.刺激,使兴奋;激励,使…振奋 | |
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240 faculties | |
n.能力( faculty的名词复数 );全体教职员;技巧;院 | |
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241 victorious | |
adj.胜利的,得胜的 | |
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242 rivalry | |
n.竞争,竞赛,对抗 | |
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243 muse | |
n.缪斯(希腊神话中的女神),创作灵感 | |
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244 recitals | |
n.独唱会( recital的名词复数 );独奏会;小型音乐会、舞蹈表演会等;一系列事件等的详述 | |
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245 epic | |
n.史诗,叙事诗;adj.史诗般的,壮丽的 | |
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246 entreaty | |
n.恳求,哀求 | |
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247 defiance | |
n.挑战,挑衅,蔑视,违抗 | |
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248 edifice | |
n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿,教室) | |
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249 reposing | |
v.将(手臂等)靠在某人(某物)上( repose的现在分词 ) | |
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250 proficiency | |
n.精通,熟练,精练 | |
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251 orators | |
n.演说者,演讲家( orator的名词复数 ) | |
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252 orator | |
n.演说者,演讲者,雄辩家 | |
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253 originality | |
n.创造力,独创性;新颖 | |
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254 favourable | |
adj.赞成的,称赞的,有利的,良好的,顺利的 | |
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255 exhaustion | |
n.耗尽枯竭,疲惫,筋疲力尽,竭尽,详尽无遗的论述 | |
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256 diffused | |
散布的,普及的,扩散的 | |
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257 bestowing | |
砖窑中砖堆上层已烧透的砖 | |
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258 capability | |
n.能力;才能;(pl)可发展的能力或特性等 | |
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259 infinitely | |
adv.无限地,无穷地 | |
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260 elevation | |
n.高度;海拔;高地;上升;提高 | |
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261 anomalous | |
adj.反常的;不规则的 | |
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262 prosaic | |
adj.单调的,无趣的 | |
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263 philistine | |
n.庸俗的人;adj.市侩的,庸俗的 | |
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264 plebeian | |
adj.粗俗的;平民的;n.平民;庶民 | |
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265 humble | |
adj.谦卑的,恭顺的;地位低下的;v.降低,贬低 | |
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266 aspiring | |
adj.有志气的;有抱负的;高耸的v.渴望;追求 | |
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267 arbitration | |
n.调停,仲裁 | |
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268 candid | |
adj.公正的,正直的;坦率的 | |
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269 scrutiny | |
n.详细检查,仔细观察 | |
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270 magistrates | |
地方法官,治安官( magistrate的名词复数 ) | |
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271 judicial | |
adj.司法的,法庭的,审判的,明断的,公正的 | |
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272 joint | |
adj.联合的,共同的;n.关节,接合处;v.连接,贴合 | |
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273 gratuitously | |
平白 | |
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274 immunity | |
n.优惠;免除;豁免,豁免权 | |
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275 unity | |
n.团结,联合,统一;和睦,协调 | |
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276 imperialism | |
n.帝国主义,帝国主义政策 | |
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277 trench | |
n./v.(挖)沟,(挖)战壕 | |
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278 averse | |
adj.厌恶的;反对的,不乐意的 | |
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279 awakened | |
v.(使)醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 );(使)觉醒;弄醒;(使)意识到 | |
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280 awaken | |
vi.醒,觉醒;vt.唤醒,使觉醒,唤起,激起 | |
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281 paramount | |
a.最重要的,最高权力的 | |
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282 differentiation | |
n.区别,区分 | |
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283 distinctive | |
adj.特别的,有特色的,与众不同的 | |
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284 applied | |
adj.应用的;v.应用,适用 | |
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285 controversy | |
n.争论,辩论,争吵 | |
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286 solely | |
adv.仅仅,唯一地 | |
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287 victoriously | |
adv.获胜地,胜利地 | |
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288 incessant | |
adj.不停的,连续的 | |
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289 sedulous | |
adj.勤勉的,努力的 | |
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290 sedulously | |
ad.孜孜不倦地 | |
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291 abounded | |
v.大量存在,充满,富于( abound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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292 psychism | |
心灵论 | |
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293 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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294 destitute | |
adj.缺乏的;穷困的 | |
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295 entity | |
n.实体,独立存在体,实际存在物 | |
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296 volitional | |
adj.意志的,凭意志的,有意志的 | |
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297 deliberately | |
adv.审慎地;蓄意地;故意地 | |
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298 forth | |
adv.向前;向外,往外 | |
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299 paradox | |
n.似乎矛盾却正确的说法;自相矛盾的人(物) | |
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300 rejection | |
n.拒绝,被拒,抛弃,被弃 | |
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301 essentially | |
adv.本质上,实质上,基本上 | |
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302 motive | |
n.动机,目的;adv.发动的,运动的 | |
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303 laborious | |
adj.吃力的,努力的,不流畅 | |
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304 disclaimed | |
v.否认( disclaim的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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305 awakening | |
n.觉醒,醒悟 adj.觉醒中的;唤醒的 | |
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306 dormant | |
adj.暂停活动的;休眠的;潜伏的 | |
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307 potent | |
adj.强有力的,有权势的;有效力的 | |
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308 craving | |
n.渴望,热望 | |
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309 impelled | |
v.推动、推进或敦促某人做某事( impel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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310 decompose | |
vi.分解;vt.(使)腐败,(使)腐烂 | |
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311 decomposed | |
已分解的,已腐烂的 | |
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312 recurred | |
再发生,复发( recur的过去式和过去分词 ); 治愈 | |
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313 omnipotent | |
adj.全能的,万能的 | |
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314 rigid | |
adj.严格的,死板的;刚硬的,僵硬的 | |
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315 avowedly | |
adv.公然地 | |
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316 qualitative | |
adj.性质上的,质的,定性的 | |
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317 enjoyments | |
愉快( enjoyment的名词复数 ); 令人愉快的事物; 享有; 享受 | |
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318 ambiguity | |
n.模棱两可;意义不明确 | |
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319 pretensions | |
自称( pretension的名词复数 ); 自命不凡; 要求; 权力 | |
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320 accredited | |
adj.可接受的;可信任的;公认的;质量合格的v.相信( accredit的过去式和过去分词 );委托;委任;把…归结于 | |
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321 unreasonable | |
adj.不讲道理的,不合情理的,过度的 | |
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322 mischief | |
n.损害,伤害,危害;恶作剧,捣蛋,胡闹 | |
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323 entails | |
使…成为必要( entail的第三人称单数 ); 需要; 限定继承; 使必需 | |
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324 buckle | |
n.扣子,带扣;v.把...扣住,由于压力而弯曲 | |
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325 subservient | |
adj.卑屈的,阿谀的 | |
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326 mechanism | |
n.机械装置;机构,结构 | |
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327 complexity | |
n.复杂(性),复杂的事物 | |
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328 consolidated | |
a.联合的 | |
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329 physiology | |
n.生理学,生理机能 | |
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330 diffusion | |
n.流布;普及;散漫 | |
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331 regularity | |
n.规律性,规则性;匀称,整齐 | |
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332 deductions | |
扣除( deduction的名词复数 ); 结论; 扣除的量; 推演 | |
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333 deduction | |
n.减除,扣除,减除额;推论,推理,演绎 | |
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334 supervision | |
n.监督,管理 | |
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335 psychology | |
n.心理,心理学,心理状态 | |
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336 touching | |
adj.动人的,使人感伤的 | |
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337 distinctively | |
adv.特殊地,区别地 | |
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338 reverting | |
恢复( revert的现在分词 ); 重提; 回到…上; 归还 | |
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339 isolation | |
n.隔离,孤立,分解,分离 | |
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340 steadfast | |
adj.固定的,不变的,不动摇的;忠实的;坚贞不移的 | |
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341 unifying | |
使联合( unify的现在分词 ); 使相同; 使一致; 统一 | |
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342 synthetic | |
adj.合成的,人工的;综合的;n.人工制品 | |
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343 obedience | |
n.服从,顺从 | |
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344 thereby | |
adv.因此,从而 | |
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345 diffusive | |
adj.散布性的,扩及的,普及的 | |
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346 commonwealth | |
n.共和国,联邦,共同体 | |
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347 bracing | |
adj.令人振奋的 | |
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348 analytical | |
adj.分析的;用分析法的 | |
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349 discriminate | |
v.区别,辨别,区分;有区别地对待 | |
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350 discriminated | |
分别,辨别,区分( discriminate的过去式和过去分词 ); 歧视,有差别地对待 | |
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351 subdivided | |
再分,细分( subdivide的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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352 overt | |
adj.公开的,明显的,公然的 | |
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353 overthrown | |
adj. 打翻的,推倒的,倾覆的 动词overthrow的过去分词 | |
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354 intentional | |
adj.故意的,有意(识)的 | |
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355 purge | |
n.整肃,清除,泻药,净化;vt.净化,清除,摆脱;vi.清除,通便,腹泻,变得清洁 | |
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356 obstruction | |
n.阻塞,堵塞;障碍物 | |
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357 annoyance | |
n.恼怒,生气,烦恼 | |
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358 adroit | |
adj.熟练的,灵巧的 | |
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359 augmenting | |
使扩张 | |
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360 expenditure | |
n.(时间、劳力、金钱等)支出;使用,消耗 | |
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361 derived | |
vi.起源;由来;衍生;导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 );(从…中)得到获得;源于;(从…中)提取 | |
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362 injustice | |
n.非正义,不公正,不公平,侵犯(别人的)权利 | |
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363 specified | |
adj.特定的 | |
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364 purloin | |
v.偷窃 | |
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365 questionable | |
adj.可疑的,有问题的 | |
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366 enumerated | |
v.列举,枚举,数( enumerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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367 instilled | |
v.逐渐使某人获得(某种可取的品质),逐步灌输( instill的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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368 artifice | |
n.妙计,高明的手段;狡诈,诡计 | |
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369 bridle | |
n.笼头,束缚;vt.抑制,约束;动怒 | |
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370 interrogator | |
n.讯问者;审问者;质问者;询问器 | |
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371 component | |
n.组成部分,成分,元件;adj.组成的,合成的 | |
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372 precept | |
n.戒律;格言 | |
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373 hindrance | |
n.妨碍,障碍 | |
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374 conversational | |
adj.对话的,会话的 | |
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375 bristling | |
a.竖立的 | |
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376 unintelligible | |
adj.无法了解的,难解的,莫明其妙的 | |
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377 intelligible | |
adj.可理解的,明白易懂的,清楚的 | |
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378 dispositions | |
安排( disposition的名词复数 ); 倾向; (财产、金钱的)处置; 气质 | |
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379 disturbance | |
n.动乱,骚动;打扰,干扰;(身心)失调 | |
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380 enactments | |
n.演出( enactment的名词复数 );展现;规定;通过 | |
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381 bastard | |
n.坏蛋,混蛋;私生子 | |
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382 legitimate | |
adj.合法的,合理的,合乎逻辑的;v.使合法 | |
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383 accurately | |
adv.准确地,精确地 | |
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384 formulating | |
v.构想出( formulate的现在分词 );规划;确切地阐述;用公式表示 | |
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385 circumscription | |
n.界限;限界 | |
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386 transformation | |
n.变化;改造;转变 | |
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387 chaos | |
n.混乱,无秩序 | |
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388 segregating | |
(使)分开( segregate的现在分词 ); 分离; 隔离; 隔离并区别对待(不同种族、宗教或性别的人) | |
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389 geographical | |
adj.地理的;地区(性)的 | |
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390 isolating | |
adj.孤立的,绝缘的v.使隔离( isolate的现在分词 );将…剔出(以便看清和单独处理);使(某物质、细胞等)分离;使离析 | |
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391 contiguity | |
n.邻近,接壤 | |
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392 habitually | |
ad.习惯地,通常地 | |
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393 piecemeal | |
adj.零碎的;n.片,块;adv.逐渐地;v.弄成碎块 | |
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394 diplomacy | |
n.外交;外交手腕,交际手腕 | |
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395 appeases | |
安抚,抚慰( appease的第三人称单数 ); 绥靖(满足另一国的要求以避免战争) | |
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396 eloquence | |
n.雄辩;口才,修辞 | |
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397 subdividing | |
再分,细分( subdivide的现在分词 ) | |
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398 constituent | |
n.选民;成分,组分;adj.组成的,构成的 | |
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399 codified | |
v.把(法律)编成法典( codify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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400 affinities | |
n.密切关系( affinity的名词复数 );亲近;(生性)喜爱;类同 | |
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401 judgments | |
判断( judgment的名词复数 ); 鉴定; 评价; 审判 | |
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402 judgment | |
n.审判;判断力,识别力,看法,意见 | |
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403 apprehended | |
逮捕,拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 ); 理解 | |
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404 elucidation | |
n.说明,阐明 | |
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405 subjective | |
a.主观(上)的,个人的 | |
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406 restriction | |
n.限制,约束 | |
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407 induction | |
n.感应,感应现象 | |
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408 vein | |
n.血管,静脉;叶脉,纹理;情绪;vt.使成脉络 | |
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409 determined | |
adj.坚定的;有决心的 | |
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410 analogous | |
adj.相似的;类似的 | |
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411 postulate | |
n.假定,基本条件;vt.要求,假定 | |
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412 underlies | |
v.位于或存在于(某物)之下( underlie的第三人称单数 );构成…的基础(或起因),引起 | |
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413 chaotic | |
adj.混沌的,一片混乱的,一团糟的 | |
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414 reposes | |
v.将(手臂等)靠在某人(某物)上( repose的第三人称单数 ) | |
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415 delusion | |
n.谬见,欺骗,幻觉,迷惑 | |
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416 penetrate | |
v.透(渗)入;刺入,刺穿;洞察,了解 | |
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417 animated | |
adj.生气勃勃的,活跃的,愉快的 | |
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418 teleology | |
n.目的论 | |
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419 precarious | |
adj.不安定的,靠不住的;根据不足的 | |
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420 baron | |
n.男爵;(商业界等)巨头,大王 | |
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421 gratitude | |
adj.感激,感谢 | |
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422 economists | |
n.经济学家,经济专家( economist的名词复数 ) | |
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423 formerly | |
adv.从前,以前 | |
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424 penetrable | |
adj.可穿透的 | |
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425 syllogism | |
n.演绎法,三段论法 | |
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426 subtlety | |
n.微妙,敏锐,精巧;微妙之处,细微的区别 | |
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427 charcoal | |
n.炭,木炭,生物炭 | |
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428 rusting | |
n.生锈v.(使)生锈( rust的现在分词 ) | |
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429 inevitable | |
adj.不可避免的,必然发生的 | |
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430 superstitions | |
迷信,迷信行为( superstition的名词复数 ) | |
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431 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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432 elimination | |
n.排除,消除,消灭 | |
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433 consistency | |
n.一贯性,前后一致,稳定性;(液体的)浓度 | |
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434 radically | |
ad.根本地,本质地 | |
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435 momentary | |
adj.片刻的,瞬息的;短暂的 | |
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436 allurement | |
n.诱惑物 | |
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437 fortitude | |
n.坚忍不拔;刚毅 | |
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438 altruistic | |
adj.无私的,为他人着想的 | |
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439 exquisite | |
adj.精美的;敏锐的;剧烈的,感觉强烈的 | |
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440 crooked | |
adj.弯曲的;不诚实的,狡猾的,不正当的 | |
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441 awry | |
adj.扭曲的,错的 | |
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442 consensus | |
n.(意见等的)一致,一致同意,共识 | |
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443 stringency | |
n.严格,紧迫,说服力;严格性;强度 | |
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444 consecutiveness | |
Consecutiveness | |
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445 coherence | |
n.紧凑;连贯;一致性 | |
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446 disapproved | |
v.不赞成( disapprove的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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447 strictly | |
adv.严厉地,严格地;严密地 | |
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448 syllogistic | |
adj.三段论法的,演绎的,演绎性的 | |
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449 emancipation | |
n.(从束缚、支配下)解放 | |
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450 jealousy | |
n.妒忌,嫉妒,猜忌 | |
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451 incipient | |
adj.起初的,发端的,初期的 | |
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452 celebrated | |
adj.有名的,声誉卓著的 | |
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453 enunciated | |
v.(清晰地)发音( enunciate的过去式和过去分词 );确切地说明 | |
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454 formulated | |
v.构想出( formulate的过去式和过去分词 );规划;确切地阐述;用公式表示 | |
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455 worthier | |
应得某事物( worthy的比较级 ); 值得做某事; 可尊敬的; 有(某人或事物)的典型特征 | |
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456 utterance | |
n.用言语表达,话语,言语 | |
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457 illuminate | |
vt.照亮,照明;用灯光装饰;说明,阐释 | |
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458 venerated | |
敬重(某人或某事物),崇敬( venerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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459 animating | |
v.使有生气( animate的现在分词 );驱动;使栩栩如生地动作;赋予…以生命 | |
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460 generic | |
adj.一般的,普通的,共有的 | |
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461 longing | |
n.(for)渴望 | |
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462 ardent | |
adj.热情的,热烈的,强烈的,烈性的 | |
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463 fawning | |
adj.乞怜的,奉承的v.(尤指狗等)跳过来往人身上蹭以示亲热( fawn的现在分词 );巴结;讨好 | |
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464 parasite | |
n.寄生虫;寄生菌;食客 | |
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465 regained | |
复得( regain的过去式和过去分词 ); 赢回; 重回; 复至某地 | |
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466 manifestation | |
n.表现形式;表明;现象 | |
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467 manifestations | |
n.表示,显示(manifestation的复数形式) | |
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468 consolidating | |
v.(使)巩固, (使)加强( consolidate的现在分词 );(使)合并 | |
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469 sculptors | |
雕刻家,雕塑家( sculptor的名词复数 ); [天]玉夫座 | |
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470 portray | |
v.描写,描述;画(人物、景象等) | |
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471 vying | |
adj.竞争的;比赛的 | |
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472 exhausted | |
adj.极其疲惫的,精疲力尽的 | |
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473 housekeeper | |
n.管理家务的主妇,女管家 | |
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474 chivalrous | |
adj.武士精神的;对女人彬彬有礼的 | |
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475 primitive | |
adj.原始的;简单的;n.原(始)人,原始事物 | |
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476 simplicity | |
n.简单,简易;朴素;直率,单纯 | |
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477 implicit | |
a.暗示的,含蓄的,不明晰的,绝对的 | |
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478 intercourse | |
n.性交;交流,交往,交际 | |
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479 exalted | |
adj.(地位等)高的,崇高的;尊贵的,高尚的 | |
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480 passionately | |
ad.热烈地,激烈地 | |
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481 transcends | |
超出或超越(经验、信念、描写能力等)的范围( transcend的第三人称单数 ); 优于或胜过… | |
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482 sneers | |
讥笑的表情(言语)( sneer的名词复数 ) | |
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483 perversions | |
n.歪曲( perversion的名词复数 );变坏;变态心理 | |
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484 savage | |
adj.野蛮的;凶恶的,残暴的;n.未开化的人 | |
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485 organisation | |
n.组织,安排,团体,有机休 | |
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486 incapable | |
adj.无能力的,不能做某事的 | |
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487 instinctively | |
adv.本能地 | |
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488 varied | |
adj.多样的,多变化的 | |
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489 trifling | |
adj.微不足道的;没什么价值的 | |
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490 deterrents | |
制止物( deterrent的名词复数 ) | |
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491 incentives | |
激励某人做某事的事物( incentive的名词复数 ); 刺激; 诱因; 动机 | |
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492 ostensible | |
adj.(指理由)表面的,假装的 | |
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493 prosecuted | |
a.被起诉的 | |
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494 tragical | |
adj. 悲剧的, 悲剧性的 | |
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495 extenuate | |
v.减轻,使人原谅 | |
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496 indicted | |
控告,起诉( indict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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497 corrupting | |
(使)败坏( corrupt的现在分词 ); (使)腐化; 引起(计算机文件等的)错误; 破坏 | |
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498 indifference | |
n.不感兴趣,不关心,冷淡,不在乎 | |
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499 prosecutors | |
检举人( prosecutor的名词复数 ); 告发人; 起诉人; 公诉人 | |
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500 allusions | |
暗指,间接提到( allusion的名词复数 ) | |
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501 substantiated | |
v.用事实支持(某主张、说法等),证明,证实( substantiate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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502 unimpeachable | |
adj.无可指责的;adv.无可怀疑地 | |
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503 imputation | |
n.归罪,责难 | |
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504 indictment | |
n.起诉;诉状 | |
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505 frivolous | |
adj.轻薄的;轻率的 | |
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506 corruption | |
n.腐败,堕落,贪污 | |
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507 perverted | |
adj.不正当的v.滥用( pervert的过去式和过去分词 );腐蚀;败坏;使堕落 | |
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508 stimulating | |
adj.有启发性的,能激发人思考的 | |
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509 conceal | |
v.隐藏,隐瞒,隐蔽 | |
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510 subversion | |
n.颠覆,破坏 | |
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511 disapproval | |
n.反对,不赞成 | |
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512 tenor | |
n.男高音(歌手),次中音(乐器),要旨,大意 | |
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513 opposition | |
n.反对,敌对 | |
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514 memorable | |
adj.值得回忆的,难忘的,特别的,显著的 | |
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515 batch | |
n.一批(组,群);一批生产量 | |
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516 resolute | |
adj.坚决的,果敢的 | |
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517 tyrant | |
n.暴君,专制的君主,残暴的人 | |
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518 proceedings | |
n.进程,过程,议程;诉讼(程序);公报 | |
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519 proceeding | |
n.行动,进行,(pl.)会议录,学报 | |
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520 oligarchy | |
n.寡头政治 | |
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521 aristocrats | |
n.贵族( aristocrat的名词复数 ) | |
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522 chastisement | |
n.惩罚 | |
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523 brutality | |
n.野蛮的行为,残忍,野蛮 | |
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524 license | |
n.执照,许可证,特许;v.许可,特许 | |
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525 coercion | |
n.强制,高压统治 | |
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526 encroachment | |
n.侵入,蚕食 | |
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527 subjectivity | |
n.主观性(主观主义) | |
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528 persecuting | |
(尤指宗教或政治信仰的)迫害(~sb. for sth.)( persecute的现在分词 ); 烦扰,困扰或骚扰某人 | |
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529 fabric | |
n.织物,织品,布;构造,结构,组织 | |
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530 knotty | |
adj.有结的,多节的,多瘤的,棘手的 | |
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531 dignified | |
a.可敬的,高贵的 | |
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532 rebutted | |
v.反驳,驳回( rebut的过去式和过去分词 );击退 | |
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533 innocence | |
n.无罪;天真;无害 | |
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534 compassion | |
n.同情,怜悯 | |
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535 defiant | |
adj.无礼的,挑战的 | |
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536 jointly | |
ad.联合地,共同地 | |
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537 permissible | |
adj.可允许的,许可的 | |
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538 evasions | |
逃避( evasion的名词复数 ); 回避; 遁辞; 借口 | |
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539 sincerity | |
n.真诚,诚意;真实 | |
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540 entrusted | |
v.委托,托付( entrust的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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541 extenuating | |
adj.使减轻的,情有可原的v.(用偏袒的辩解或借口)减轻( extenuate的现在分词 );低估,藐视 | |
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542 ingenuity | |
n.别出心裁;善于发明创造 | |
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543 impeached | |
v.控告(某人)犯罪( impeach的过去式和过去分词 );弹劾;对(某事物)怀疑;提出异议 | |
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544 persecution | |
n. 迫害,烦扰 | |
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545 condemnation | |
n.谴责; 定罪 | |
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546 hatred | |
n.憎恶,憎恨,仇恨 | |
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547 exterminate | |
v.扑灭,消灭,根绝 | |
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548 adventitious | |
adj.偶然的 | |
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549 brute | |
n.野兽,兽性 | |
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550 molested | |
v.骚扰( molest的过去式和过去分词 );干扰;调戏;猥亵 | |
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551 respite | |
n.休息,中止,暂缓 | |
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552 loyalty | |
n.忠诚,忠心 | |
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553 citizenship | |
n.市民权,公民权,国民的义务(身份) | |
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554 martyr | |
n.烈士,殉难者;vt.杀害,折磨,牺牲 | |
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555 melancholy | |
n.忧郁,愁思;adj.令人感伤(沮丧)的,忧郁的 | |
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556 aspirations | |
强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 ); 志向; 发送气音; 发 h 音 | |
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557 extinction | |
n.熄灭,消亡,消灭,灭绝,绝种 | |
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558 hemlock | |
n.毒胡萝卜,铁杉 | |
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559 inflicted | |
把…强加给,使承受,遭受( inflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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560 everlasting | |
adj.永恒的,持久的,无止境的 | |
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561 scattered | |
adj.分散的,稀疏的;散步的;疏疏落落的 | |
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562 sleepless | |
adj.不睡眠的,睡不著的,不休息的 | |
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563 extricating | |
v.使摆脱困难,脱身( extricate的现在分词 ) | |
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564 nucleus | |
n.核,核心,原子核 | |
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565 chaste | |
adj.贞洁的;有道德的;善良的;简朴的 | |
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566 frescoed | |
壁画( fresco的名词复数 ); 温壁画技法,湿壁画 | |
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567 sepulchral | |
adj.坟墓的,阴深的 | |
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568 mythologic | |
神话学的,神话的,虚构的 | |
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569 austere | |
adj.艰苦的;朴素的,朴实无华的;严峻的 | |
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