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ESSAY III.

ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF THE SECT OF SOPHISTS IN GREECE.

Η ὅδος κατὰ.

The road downward.

HERACLIT. Fragment.

As Pythagoras, (584 A. c.) declining the title of the wise man, is said to have first named himself PHILOSOPHER, or lover of wisdom, so Protagoras, followed by Gorgias, Prodicus, &c. (444 A. C.) found even the former word too narrow for his own opinion of himself, and first assumed the title of SOPHIST: this word originally signifying one who professes the power of making others wise, a wholesale and retail dealer in wisdom-a wisdom-monger, in the same sense as we say, an ironmonger. In this and not in their abuse of the arts of reasoning, have Plato and Aristotle

placed the essential of the sophistic character. Their sophisms were indeed its natural products and accompaniments, but must yet be distinguished from it, as the fruits from the tree. Εμπορος τις, κάπηλος, αυτοπώλης πέρι τὰ τῆς ψύχης μadhuara a vender, a market-man, in moral and intellectual knowledges (connoissances)— one who hires himself out or puts himself up at auction, as a carpenter and upholsterer to the heads and hearts of. his customers-such are the phrases, by which Plato at once describes and satirizes the proper sophist. Nor does the Stagyrite fall short of his great master and rival in the reprobation of these professors of wisdom, or differ from him in the grounds of it. He too gives the baseness of the motives joined with the impudence and delusive nature of the pretence as the generic character.

Next to this pretence of selling wisdom and eloquence, they were distinguished by their itinerancy. Athens was, indeed, their great emporium and place of rendezvous; but by no means their domicile. Such were Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Polus, Callicles, Thrasy machus, and a whole host of sophists VOL. III.

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minorum gentium: and though many of the tribe, like the Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus so dramatically portrayed by Plato, were mere empty disputants, sleight-of-word jugglers, this was far from being their common character. Both Plato and Aristotle repeatedly admit the brilliancy of their talents and the extent of their acquirements. The following passage from the Timæus of the former will be my best commentary as well as authority. "The race of sophists, again, I acknowledge for men of no common powers, and of eminent skill and experience in many and various kinds of knowledge, and these too not seldom truly fair and ornamental of our nature; but I fear that somehow, as being itinerants from city to city, loose from all permanent ties of house and home, and everywhere aliens, they shoot wide of the proper aim of man whether as philosopher or as citizen." The few remains of Zeno the Eleatic, his paradoxes against the reality of motion, are mere identical propositions spun out into a sort of whimsical conundrums, as in the celebrated paradox entitled Achilles and the Tortoise, the whole plausibility of which

rests on the trick of assuming a minimum of time while no minimum is allowed to space, joined with that of exacting from Intelligibilia (Népeva) the conditions peculiar to objects of the senses (pavóueva). The passages still extant from the works of Gorgias, on the other hand, want nothing but the form * of a premise to undermine by a legitimate deductio ad absurdum all the philosophic systems that had been hitherto advanced with the exception of the Heraclitic, and of that too as it was generally understood and interpreted. Yet Zeno's name was and ever will be held in reverence by philosophers; for his object was as grand as his motives were honorable-that of assigning the limits to the claims of the senses, and of subordinating them to the pure reason: while Gorgias will ever be cited as an instance of prostituted genius from the immoral nature of

• Viz. If either the world itself as an animated whole, according to the Italian school; or if atoms, according. to Democritus; or any one primal element, as water or fire, according to Thales or Empedocles, or if a nous, as explained by Anaxagoras; be assumed as the absolutely first; then, &c.

his object and the baseness of his motives. These and not his sophisms constituted him a sophist, a sophist whose eloquence and logical skill rendered him only the more pernicious.

Soon after the repulse of the Persian invaders, and as a heavy counter-balance to the glories of Marathon and Platea, we may date the commencement of that corruption first in private and next in public life, which displayed itself more or less in all the free states and communities of Greece, but most of all in Athens. The causes are obvious, and such as in popular republics have always followed, and are themselves the effects of, that passion for military glory and political preponderance, which may well be called the bastard and the parricide of liberty. In reference to the fervid but light and sensitive Athenians, we may enumerate, as the most operative, the giddiness of sudden aggrandizement; the more intimate connection and frequent intercourse with the Asiatic states; the intrigues with the court of Persia; the intoxication of the citizens at large, sustained and increased by the continued allusions to their recent exploits, in the flatteries of

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