Note 148 — Chapter XXIII · PROTAGORAS. (continued 2)

Professor Bain (in his work on the Emotions and the Will, ch. xv. On the Ethical Emotions, pp. 271-3) has given remarks extremely pertinent to the illustration of that doctrine which Plato has here placed under the name of Protagoras.

“The supposed uniformity of moral distinctions resolves itself into the two following particulars. First, the common end of public security, which is also individual preservation, demands certain precautions that are everywhere very much alike, and can in no case be dispensed with. Some sort of constituted authority to control the individual impulses and to protect each man’s person and property, must exist wherever a number of human beings live together. The duties springing out of this necessary arrangement are essentially the same in all societies.… They have a pretty uniform character all over the globe. If the sense of the common safety were not sufficiently strong to constitute the social tie of obedience to some common regulations, society could not exist.… It is no proof of the universal spread of a special innate faculty of moral distinctions, but of a certain rational appreciation of what is necessary for the very existence of every human being living in the company of others: Doubtless, if the sad history of the human race had been preserved in all its details, we should have many examples of tribes that perished from being unequal to the conception of a social system, or to the restraints imposed by it. We know enough of the records of anarchy, to see how difficult it is for human nature to comply in full with the social conditions of security; but if this were not complied with at all, the result would be mutual and swift destruction.… In the second place, mankind have been singularly unanimous in the practice of imposing upon individual members of societies some observances or restraints of purely sentimental origin, having no reference, direct or indirect, to the maintenance of the social tie, with all the safeguards implied in it. Certain maxims founded in taste, liking, aversion, or fancy, have, in every community known to us, been raised to the dignity of authoritative morality; being rendered (so to speak) ‘terms of communion,’ and have been enforced by punishment.… In the rules, founded on men’s sentiments, likings, aversions, and antipathies, there is nothing common but the fact that some one or other of these are carried to the length of public requirement, and mixed up in one code with the imperative duties that hold society together.”

The postulate of the Platonic Protagoras — that δίκη and αἰδὼς must be felt to a certain extent in each man’s bosom, as a condition to the very existence of society — agrees with the first of the two elements here distinguished by Mr. Bain, and does not necessarily go beyond it. But the unsystematic teaching and universal propagandism, which Protagoras describes as the agency whereby virtue is communicated, applies alike to both the two elements distinguished by Mr. Bain: to the factitious exigencies of King Nomos, as well as to his tutelary control. It is this mixed mass that the Sokratic analysis is brought to examine.