Note (return) — Chapter XV

The transitional, skeptical, or sophistical era begins with Protagoras. Poetry and proverbs had ceased to satisfy the reason of man. The awakening intellect had begun to call in question the old maxims and "wise saws," to dispute the arbitrary authority of the poets, and even to arraign the institutions of society. It had already begun to seek for some reasonable foundation of authority for the opinions, customs, laws, and institutions which had descended to them from the past, and to ask why men were obliged to do this or that? The question whether there is at bottom any real difference between truth and error, right and wrong, was now fairly before the human mind. The ultimate standard of all truth and all right, was now the grand object of pursuit. These inquiries were not, however, conducted by the Sophists with the best motives. They were not always prompted by an earnest desire to know the truth, and an earnest purpose to embrace and do the right. They talked and argued for mere effect--to display their dialectic subtilty, or their rhetorical power. They taught virtue for mere emolument and pay. They delighted, as Cicero tells us, to plead the opposite sides of a cause with equal effect. And they found exquisite pleasure in raising difficulties, maintaining paradoxes, and passing off mere tricks of oratory for solid proofs. This is the uniform representation of the sophistical spirit which is given by all the best writers who lived nearest to their times, and who are, therefore, to be presumed to have known them best. Grote 904 has made an elaborate defense of the Sophists; he charges Plato with gross misrepresentation. His portraits of them are denounced as mere caricatures, prompted by a spirit of antagonism; all antiquity is presumed to have been misled by him. No one, however, can read Grant's "Essay on the History of Moral Philosophy in Greece" 905 without feeling that his vindication of Plato is complete and unanswerable: "Plato never represents the Sophists as teaching a lax morality to their disciples. He does not make sophistry to consist in holding wicked opinions; he represents them as only too orthodox in general, 906 but capable of giving utterance to immoral paradoxes for the sake of vanity. Sophistry rather tampers and trifles with the moral convictions than directly attacks them." The Sophists were wanting in deep conviction, in moral earnestness, in sincere love of truth, in reverence for goodness and purity, and therefore their trifling, insincere, and paradoxical teaching was unfavorable to goodness of life. The tendency of their method is forcibly depicted in the words of Plato: "There are certain dogmas relating to what is just and good in which we have been brought up from childhood--obeying and reverencing them. Other opinions recommending pleasure and license we resist, out of respect for the old hereditary maxims. Well, then, a question comes up concerning what is right? He gives some answer such as he has been taught, and straightway is refuted. He tries again, and is again refuted. And, when this has happened pretty often, he is reduced to the opinion that nothing is either right or wrong; and in the same way it happens about the just and the good, and all that before we have held in reverence. On this, he naturally abandons his allegiance to the old principles and takes up with those he before resisted, and so, from being a good citizen, he becomes lawless." 907 And, in point of fact, this was the theoretical landing-place of the Sophists. We do not say they became practically "lawless" and antinomian, but they did arrive at the settled opinion that right and wrong, truth and error, are solely matter of private opinion and conventional usage. Man's own fluctuating opinion is the measure and standard of all things. 908 They who "make the laws, make them for their own advantage." 909 There is no such thing as Eternal Right. "That which appears just and honorable to each city is so for that city, as long as the opinion prevails." 910