Our happiness or well-being, then, depends directly on the good ness or badness of the soul. It is no happiness to possess health, or strength, or wealth, unless we know how to use these advan tages rightly. If we use them wrongly, they will only be so many means to misery. The reason why hardly any one achieves happiness is not that men do not wish to be happy. No one ever wishes for anything but true good, that is, true happiness, but men miss their happiness, in spite of the universal wish for it, because they do not know what it is. They mistake for real good things which are not really good (e.g., unlimited wealth or power). In this sense, "all wrong-doing is involuntary." The first and fundamental requisite for happiness, then, is that men should know true good and not confuse it with anything else. The good state of the soul is precisely that state in which it never makes the mistake of taking anything to be good when it is not really good. To "make one's soul as good as possible" thus means to attain the knowledge of good which will prevent us from using strength, health, wealth, opportunity, wrongly. If a man has this knowledge, he will always act on it, since to do otherwise would be to prefer known misery to known happiness, and this is impossible. "All the virtues are one thing," knowledge of good, and all "vice" is one thing, ignorance of true good.
"Popular" goodness—what passes current as virtue—is mostly illusory, because it is mainly a matter of habit, not of assured conviction about good. It breaks down under temptation ; but if a man really knew that, e:g., to commit a crime is worse than to suffer loss or pain, or death, no fear of these things would lead him to commit the crime. The professional "sophist," again, claims to be able to teach "goodness," but the claim is shown to be unfounded by the very fact that the sophist treats "goodness" as though it were a neutral "accomplishment" which can be con veyed by mere instructions. Now an accomplishment, or "art," can always be put to either of two uses, a good or a bad, as the physician, for instance, can use his professional knowledge to cure or to kill.
Knowledge of good is the one knowledge of which it is im possible to make an ill use; the possession of it is a guarantee that it will always be used aright. Thus Socrates becomes, as against the relativism of Protagoras, the founder of the doctrine of an absolute morality based on the conception of a felicity which is the good, not of Athenians or Spartans, or even of Greeks, but of man as man. It is not in virtue of our allegiance to a particular city, nor even of our place in a particular his torical civilization, but in virtue of our universal humanity, that we have the task of "making the soul as good as possible," or, as Socrates also said, in language influenced by Pythagoreanism, "making it like God."
Politics, from this point of view, does not differ in principle from ethics. The business of the statesman also is the "tendance" of souls, though his task is to aim at making, not only his own soul, but the souls of all his fellow-citizens "as good as possible." The knowledge of good is also the "royal" science or science of governing, the foundation of all statesmanship. The radical vice of ancient democracy, according to Socrates, is that of not de manding evidence of any special knowledge in its leaders ; it suf fers the destinies of society to be in the hands of men without true insight. Partly this means that by not demanding intellectual qualifications for office, democracy surrenders the control of affairs into the hands of men with no adequate expert knowledge. But this is only a minor part of Socrates' indictment. His main criticism is that though in some departments, at least, the democ racy refuses to take the advice of any one but a qualified expert, on the question of the morality and justice of a proposed policy it treats any one citizen's opinion as of equal value with another's.
Even a Themistocles or a Pericles plainly had no knowledge of true statesmanship, as we see from the fact that they neither taught the principles of it to their sons, nor had them taught these principles by others, and if we look at the actual achievements of these men we can see that they were, so to say, good "body servants" of the Demos, they gave it the things which tickled its taste, such as a navy and a commerce; they were no "physicians of the body politic," for they did not promote "righteousness and temperance," the spiritual health of the community. That is, they measured national greatness by wealth and empire, not by char acter. According to Plato, Socrates maintained that he himself, who abstained all through from active politics, was the one Athenian of the time who deserved the name of statesman. He de served it because he understood, as the men of action did not, that national, like individual felicity, depends on the knowledge of good which inevitably leads, where it is possessed, to the action which makes the soul "as good as possible." The well-known Platonic Republic may fairly be said to be, on its political side, a picture of the life of a society in which the whole system of social and economic life is based on this Socratic conviction that "politics" is the application to the community at large of the principle that knowledge of the absolutely good is the necessary and sufficient condition of well-being. How far any of the special regulations of Plato's Utopia embody actual convic tions of Socrates is more than we can say, though it is significant that the Aspasia of Aeschines represented Socrates as maintaining one of Plato's "paradoxes," the capacity of women for war and politics.