It will take a wise courage to accept the Socratic
challenge, -- such courage as battle-fields and
senate-chambers are not wont to show. But un-
less that wise courage comes to us our civilization
will go as other civilizations have come and gone,
"kindled and put out like a flame in the night."

NOTE. -- From a book whose interesting defence of
the Socratic ethic from the standpoint of psychoanalysis
was brought to the writer's attention after the comple-
tion of the foregoing essay: "The Freudian ethics is
a literal and concrete justification of the Socratic teach-
ing. Truth is the sole moral sanction, and discrimina-
tion of hitherto unrealized facts is the one way out of
every moral dilemma. . . . Virtue is wisdom." Prac-
tical morality is "the establishment, through discrimi-
nation, of consistent, and not contradictory (mutually
suppressive), courses of action toward phenomena.
The moral sanction lies always in facts presented by the
phenomena; morality in the discrimination of those
facts." Moral development is "the progressive, life-
long integration of experience." -- The Freudian Wish
and Its Place in Ethics, by Edwin B. Holt, New York,
1915, pp. 141, 145, 148.

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