was dawning upon them; and on the other hand the growing importance of oratory and the immense stimulus to ambition held out, in a state like Athens, to those who were of a more practical turn of mind, we shall not be surprised if there was much curiosity to learn the opinions of the most advanced thinkers, and much eagerness to acquire the argumentative power by which a Zeno could make the worse cause appear the better. The enlightened men who came forward to supply this demand called themselves by the name of Sophists, or professors of wisdom. They were the first who made a profession of the higher education, and some of them amassed considerable fortunes by their lectures on rhetoric, the art of speaking, which was also made to include instruction in regard to political and social life. The speculative interest of the older philosophers was in them changed into a predominantly practical interest, Ist, as to how to acquire wealth and notoriety for themselves, and 2ndly, as a means to this, to attract by omniscient pretensions, by brilliant declamation and startling paradox, clever and ambitious young men of the richer classes; and then to secure their continued discipleship by careful training with a view to the attainment of political power'. Protagoras of Abdera (B.C. 490-415) and Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily (B.C. 480-375) are the earliest of the so-called Sophists. Protagoras taught in Sicily and at Athens, from which latter place he was banished on a 1 The general features of the Sophistic period are photographed in the Clouds of Aristophanes, and in Thucydides' chapters on the Plague of Athens and the Corcyrean revolution, and his speeches generally. charge of impiety in consequence of his treatise on Theology, in which he declared his inability to arrive at any conclusion as to the nature or even the very existence of the Gods'. His treatise on Truth began with the famous sentence, 'Man is the measure of all things;' meaning that truth is relative, not absolute, that what each man holds to be true is true to him; and similarly in regard to conduct, that it is impossible to pronounce universally that one kind of conduct is right, another wrong: right and wrong depend upon opinion; what is generally thought right is right generally; what each thinks right is right for him, just as each man's sensations are true for him, though perhaps not for another; there is therefore no more reason for one general assertion than for another, perhaps an opposite assertion. It is plain that this was a sort of conciliation-theory naturally springing from the fact of the opposition of philosophical schools: 'each of you are equally right relatively, equally wrong absolutely; there is no need for quarrel.' Protagoras also wrote on Grammar and Philology. Gorgias is said to have first come to Athens in B.C. 427, and afterwards to have travelled about giving lectures from town to town. He devoted himself mainly to the cultivation of rhetoric, but also wrote a treatise πepì púσews, in which he maintained 1st 'that nothing exists' (i. e. doubtless 'in the absolute Eleatic sense'); 2nd that, if anything did exist, still it could not be known; 3rd that, even if it could be known, the knowledge of it could not be communicated to others. Hippias of Elis and Prodicus of Ceos 1 περὶ μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰδέναι, οὔθ ̓ ὡς εἰσὶν οὔθ ̓ ὡς οὐκ εἰσίν· πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ κωλύοντα εἰδέναι, ἡ τε ἀδηλότης καὶ βραχὺς ὧν ὁ βίος Tоû ȧvůρúπov. Diog. L. IX. 51. The were some twenty years younger than Protagoras. former was best known for his scientific attainments: he is said to have given utterance to the revolutionary sentiment of the age in the phrase, 'Law is a tyrant over men, forcing them to do many things contrary to nature.' Prodicus is famed for his moral apologue on the Choice of Hercules narrated by Xenophon. He is reported to have considered the Gods of the popular religion to be merely deified utilities, Bacchus wine, Ceres corn, &c. But the extreme effects of the disintegration of established beliefs were not seen in the teachers, but in some of their pupils who were less dependent on public opinion, young aristocrats who fretted under democratic rule, and were eager to take advantage of the disorganized state of society in order to grasp at power for themselves. Such was the Callicles of the Gorgias, such Critias and Alcibiades, both disciples of Socrates, of whom we have now to speak. Socrates was born at Athens 470 B.C.; he was the son of Sophroniscus a sculptor, and Phaenarete a midwife. While sharing the general scepticism as to the possibility of arriving at certainty in regard to the Natural Philosophy which had formed the almost exclusive subject of earlier speculation, he maintained, in opposition to most of the popular teachers of his time, the certainty of moral distinctions, and laid down a method for the discovery of error on the one side, and the establishment of objective truth on the other. The main lines of his philosophy are given in three famous sentences: (1) that of Cicero, that he brought down philosophy from heaven to earth'; (2) his own assertion that he practised in regard to the soul the art of midwifery (paιevTIK) which his mother had practised in regard to the body, bringing to birth and consciousness truths before held unconsciously; (3) Aristotle's statement that Socrates was the first to introduce inductive reasoning and general definitions3. But more important than any innovation in regard to method was the immense personal influence of Socrates. His force of will, his indifference to conventionalities, his intense earnestness, both moral and intellectual, contrasting so strongly with the dilettanteism of ordinary teachers, and yet combined with such universal interest and sympathy in all varieties of life and character, his warm and genial nature, his humour, his irony, his extraordinary conversational powers, these formed a whole unique in the history of the world; and we can well believe that they acted like an electric shock on the more susceptible minds of his time. For we must remember that Socrates did not, like earlier philosophers, content himself with imparting the results of solitary meditation to a few favoured disciples: nor did he, like the Sophists, lecture to a paying audience on a set subject; but obeying, as he believed, a divine call, he mixed with men of every class wherever they were to be found, crossquestioning them as to the grounds of their beliefs, and endeavouring to awaken in them a consciousness of their ignorance and a desire for real knowledge. His own account of his call is as follows: one of his disciples was 1 Cic. Tusc. V. 10. 2 Plat. Theaet. p. 149 foll. 8 Δύο γάρ ἐστιν ἅ τις ἂν ἀποδοίη Σωκράτει δικαίως, τούς τ' ἐπακτικοὺς λόγους καὶ τὸ ὁρίζεσθαι καθόλου. Arist. Met. M. 4. told by the Oracle at Delphi that Socrates was the wisest of men. Socrates could not conceive how this should be, as he was conscious only of ignorance; but he determined to question some of those who had the highest repute for wisdom; accordingly he went to statesmen and poets and orators, and last of all to craftsmen, but everywhere met with the same response: none really knew what were the true ends of life, but each one fancied that he knew, and most were angry when Socrates attempted to disturb their illusion of knowledge. Thus he arrived at the conclusion that what the oracle meant was that the first step to knowledge was the consciousness of ignorance, and he believed, in consequence of other divine warnings, that it was his special mission to bring men to this consciousness. The next step on the way to knowledge was to get clear general notions, by comparing a number of specific cases in which the same general term was employed; or, according to the phraseology of ancient philosophy, to see the One (the kind or genus, the general principle, the law, the idea,) in the Many (the subordinate species or individuals, the particulars, the phenomena, the facts) and conversely to rise from the Many to the One. The process of doing this he called Dialectic, i. e. discourse, since it was by question and answer that he believed the proposed definition could be best tested, and the universal idea which was latent in each individual could be brought to light. Truth and right were the same for all: it was only ignorance, mistake, confusion which made them seem different to different men. And similarly it is ignorance which leads men to commit vicious actions: no one willingly does wrong, since to do right is the |