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The Church, with that sophistic reversal of ideas of which it is a master, has succeeded in representing this ridiculous piece of vanity as "Christian humility"; and the very men who reject with horror the notion of an animal origin, and count themselves "children of God," love to prate of their "humble sense of servitude."
Yet it found more partisans than Euhemerism and the sophistic school, and this was probably the reason why the police continued to wage war against it longest and most seriously.
Does it require human ingenuity or plausible and sophistic reasoning to make it appear from the scriptures that Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, tasted death for every man; that he gave himself a ransom for all to be testified in due time; that he is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world; that it is the will of God that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth; that he worketh all things after the council of his own will?
The sophistic theories of Athens of old have been renewed in Central Europe the individuum is the ultimate aim of education. A human individuum is of limitless worth, said the German interpreters of the New Testament. Materialistic science, contradicting itself, agreed on that point with modern theology.
We need not then in this connexion consider Socrates himself at all; on the other hand, the play gives a good idea of the popular idea of sophistic.
Towards sophistic he takes a similar, but less sympathetic attitude.
Varro had amassed a vast collection of facts, a formidable array of authorities; Dionysius had spent twenty years in studying the monuments of Rome, and yet had so little intelligence of her past that he made Romulus a philosopher of the Sophistic type! Caesar and Sallust gave true narratives of that which they had themselves known, but they did little more.
To this may further be added the negative point that he never in any of his works made Socrates define his position in regard to the sophistic treatment of the popular religion. In Plato’s later works the case is different. In the construction of the universe described in the Timaeus the gods have a definite and significant place, and in the Laws, Plato’s last work, they play a leading part.
This I should like to combat after the sophistic fashion of Zeno, showing, first, why we lack that desideratum, a strictly national school; secondly, that a strictly national school is not desirable; and thirdly, that we most assuredly have a national school.
Such a point of view, if confronted with the question of the existence of the gods, may very well, according to sophistic methods of reasoning, lead to the conclusion that primitive man was right in so far as the useful, i.e. that which “benefits humanity,” really is an essential feature of the gods, and wrong only in so far as he identified the individual useful objects with the gods.
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