But I do
know that it is a bad thing to desert one's post and I prefer what may
be good to what I know to be bad."
(2) He insists on the public value of free discussion. "In me you have a
stimulating critic, persistently urging you with persuasion and
reproaches, persistently testing your opinions and trying to show you
that you are really ignorant of what you suppose you know. Daily
discussion of the matters about which you hear me conversing is the
highest good for man. Life that is not tested by such discussion is not
worth living."
Thus in what we may call the earliest justification of liberty of
thought we have two significant claims affirmed: the indefeasible right
of the conscience of the individual --a claim on which later struggles
for liberty were to turn; and the social importance of discussion and
criticism. The former claim is not based on argument but on intuition;
it rests in fact on the assumption
[35] of some sort of superhuman moral principle, and to those who, not
having the same personal experience as Socrates, reject this assumption,
his pleading does not carry weight. The second claim, after the
experience of more than 2,000 years, can be formulated more
comprehensively now with bearings of which he did not dream.
The circumstances of the trial of Socrates illustrate both the tolerance
and the intolerance which prevailed at Athens. His long immunity, the
fact that he was at last indicted from political motives and perhaps
personal also, the large minority in his favour, all show that thought
was normally free, and that the mass of intolerance which existed was
only fitfully invoked, and perhaps most often to serve other purposes.
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