not only by the obscurity of the thing itself, but by the shortness of the human life." In another writing he develops his doctrine concerning knowing or not-knowing. Starting from the Heraclitic position that every thing is in a constant flow, and applying this preeminently to the thinking subject, he taught that the man is the measure of all things, who determines in respect of being that it may be, and of not-being that it may not be, i. e. that is true for the perceiving subject which he, in the constant movement of things and of himself, at every moment perceives and is sensible of-and hence he has theoretically no other relation to the external world than the sensuous apprehension, and practically no other than the sensuous desire. But now, since perception and sensation are as diverse as the subjects themselves, and are in the highest degree variable in the very same subject, there follows the farther result that nothing has an objective validity and determination, that contradictory affirmations in reference to the same object must be received as alike true, and that error and contradiction cannot be. Protagoras does not seem to have made any efforts to give these frivolous propositions a practical and logical application. According to the testimony of the ancients, a personal character worthy of esteem, cannot be denied him; and even Plato, in the dialogue which bears his name, goes no farther than to object to his complete obscurity respecting the nature of morality, while, in his Gorgias and Philebus, he charges the later Sophists with affirming the principles of immorality and moral baseness.

Next to Protagoras, the most famous Sophist was Gorgias. During the Peloponnesian war (426 B. c.), he came from Leontium to Athens in order to gain assistance for his native city against the encroachments of Syracuse. After the successful accomplishment of his errand he still abode for some time in Athens, but resided the latter part of his life in Thessaly, where he died about the same time with Socrates. The pompous ostentation of his external appearance is often ridiculed by Plato, and the discourses through which he was wont to exhibit himself display the same character, attempting, through poetical ornament, and florid

metaphors, and uncommon words, and a mass of hitherto unheard of figures of speech, to dazzle and delude the mind. As a philosopher he adhered to the Eleatics, especially to Zeno, and attempts to prove upon the basis of their dialectic schematism, that universally nothing is, or if there could be a being, it would not be cognizable, or if cognizable it would not be communicable. Hence his writing bore characteristically enough the title-" Concerning Not-being or Nature." The proof of the first proposition that universally nothing is, since it can be established neither as being nor as not-being, nor yet as at the same time both being and not-being, rests entirely upon the position that all existence. is a space-filling existence (has place and body), and is in fact the final consequence which overturns itself, in other words the self-destruction of the hitherto physical method of philosophizing.

The later Sophists with reckless daring carried their conclusions far beyond Gorgias and Protagoras. They were for the most part free thinkers, who pulled to the ground the religion, laws, and customs of their birth. Among these should be named, prominently, the tyrant Critias, Polus, Callicles, and Thrasymachus. The two latter openly taught the right of the stronger as the law of nature, the unbridled satisfaction of desire as the natural right of the stronger, and the setting up of restraining laws as a crafty invention of the weaker; and Critias, the most talented but the most abandoned of the thirty tyrants, wrote a poem, in which he represented the faith in the gods as an invention of crafty statesmen. Hippias of Elis, a man of great knowledge, bore an honorable character, although he did not fall behind the rest in bombast and boasting; but before all, was Prodicus, in reference to whom it became a proverb to say-" as wise as Prodicus,” and concerning whom Plato himself and even Aristophanes never spoke without veneration. Especially famous among the ancients were his parenetical (persuasive) lectures concerning the choice of a mode of life (Xenophon's Memorabilia, II. 1), concerning external good and its use, concerning life and death, &c., discourses in which he manifests a refined moral feeling, and his observation of life; although through the want of a higher ethical

and scientific principle, he must be placed behind Socrates, whose forerunner he has been called. The later generations of Sophists, as they are shown in the Euthydemus of Plato, sink to a common level of buffoonery and disgraceful strife for gain, and comprise their whole dialectic art in certain formulæ for entangling fallacies.

6. TRANSITION TO SOCRATES AND CHARACTERISTIC OF THE FOLLOWING PERIOD.-That which is true in the Sophistic philosophy is the truth of the subjectivity, of the self-consciousness, i. e. the demand that every thing which I am to admit must be shown as rational before my own consciousness-that which is false in it is its apprehension of this subjectivity as nothing farther than finite, empirical egoistic subjectivity, i. e. the demand that my accidental will and opinion should determine what is rational; its truth is that it set up the principle of freedom, of self-certainty; its untruth is that it established the accidental will and notion of the individual upon the throne. To carry out now the principle of freedom and self-consciousness to its truth, to gain a true world of objective thought with a real and distinct content, by the same means of reflection which the Sophists had only used to destroy it, to establish the objective will, the rational thinking, the absolute or ideal in the place of the empirical subjectivity was the problem of the next advent in philosophy, the problem which Socrates took up and solved. To make the absolute or ideal subjectivity instead of the empirical for a principle, is to affirm that the true measure of all things is not my (i. e. the individual person's) opinion, fancy and will; that what is true, right and good, does not depend upon my caprice and arbitrary determination, or upon that of any other empirical subject; but while it is my thinking, it is my thinking, the rational within me, which has to decide upon all these points. But my thinking, my reason, is not something specially belonging to me, but something common to every rational being; something universal, and in so far as I am a rational and thinking being, is my subjectivity a universal one. But every thinking individual has the consciousness that what he holds as right, as duty, as good or evil, does not appear as such to him alone but

to every rational being, and that consequently his thinking has the character of universality, of universal validity, in a word—of objectivity. This then in opposition to the Sophistic philosophy is the stand-point of Socrates, and therefore with him the philosophy of objective thought begins. What Socrates could do in opposition to the Sophists was to show that reflection led to the same results as faith or obedience, hitherto without reflection, had done, and that the thinking man guided by his free consciousness and his own conviction, would learn to form the same judgments and take the same course to which life and custom had already and unconsciously induced the ordinary man. The position, that while the man is the measure of all things, it is the man as universal, as thinking, as rational, is the fundamental thought of the Socratic philosophy, which is, by virtue of this thought, the positive complement of the Sophistic principle.

With Socrates begins the second period of the Grecian philosophy. This period contains three philosophical systems, whose authors, standing to each other in the personal relation of teacher and pupil, represent three successive generations,-SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE.

SECTION XII.

SOCRATES.

1. HIS PERSONAL CHARACTER.-The new philosophical principle appears in the personal character of Socrates. His philosophy is his mode of acting as an individual; his life and doctrine cannot be separated. His biography, therefore, forms the only complete representation of his philosophy, and what the narrative of Xenophon presents us as the definite doctrine of Socrates, is consequently nothing but an abstract of his inward character, as

* The article on Socrates, from page 52 to page 64, was translated by Prof. N. G. Clark, of the University of Vermont.

it found expression from time to time in his conversation. Plato yet more regarded his master as such an archetypal personality, and a luminous exhibition of the historical Socrates is the special object of his later and maturer dialogues, and of these again, the Symposium is the most brilliant apotheosis of the Eros incarnated in the person of Socrates, of the philosophical impulse transformed into character.

Socrates was born in the year 469 B. C., the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and Phænarete, a midwife. In his youth he was trained by his father to follow his own profession, and in this he is said not to have been without skill. Three draped figures of the Graces, called the work of Socrates, were seen by Pausanias, upon the Akropolis. Little farther is known of his education. He may have profited by the instruction of Prodicus and the musician, Damon, but he stood in no personal connection with the proper philosophers, who flourished before, or cotemporaneously with him. He became what he was by himself alone, and just for this reason does he form an era in the old philosophy. If the ancients call him a scholar of Anaxagoras, or of the natural philosopher, Archelaus, the first is demonstrably false, and the second, to say the least, is altogether improbable. He never sought other means of culture than those afforded in his native city. With the exception of one journey to a public festival, the military campaigns which led him as far as Potidæa, Delion, and Amphipolis, he never left Athens.

The period when Socrates first began to devote himself to the education of youth, can be determined only approximately from the time of the first representation of the Clouds of Aristophanes, which was in the year 423. The date of the Delphic oracle, which pronounced him the wisest of men, is not known. But in the traditions of his followers, he is almost uniformly represented as an old, or as a gray-headed man. His mode of instruction, wholly different from the pedantry and boastful ostentation of the Sophists, was altogether unconstrained, conversational, popular, starting from objects lying nearest at hand and the most insignificant, and deriving the necessary illustrations and