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Updated: June 1, 2025
To Prodicus it was evidently the conception of utility that mattered: if these objects came to be regarded as gods it was because they “benefited humanity.” This too is a genuinely sophistic view, characteristically deviating from that of the naturalist Democritus in its limitation to the human and social aspect of the question.
SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS. We may just mention the very celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to us that of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked was its predilection for polemics; and that of Elis, which appears to have been well versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of Elea and of Gorgias.
There are those among the uninitiate vulgar and those, too, who carry under the philosophic cloak hearts still uninitiate who revile such interpretations as merely the sophistic and arbitrary sports of fancy.
So, at first, he would not have had us keep our secret for a day; but I by a sophistry that is only sophistic when we add to the consideration man's impotent and easily perverted will brought him into my plans, showing him what an instrument for good vast riches would be in his hands. And he was the more easily persuaded because of the very grand purity of his nature.
And the theory of negation of law in nature or in man which underlay the sophistic practice had its logical and necessary effect on the social structure throughout Greece, in a loosening of the bonds of religion, of family reverence and affection, of patriotism, of law, of honour.
The Socratic philosophy is in many ways a continuation of sophistic. This is involved already in the fact that the same questions form the central interest in the two schools of thought, so that the problems stated by the sophists became the decisive factor in the content of Socratic and Platonic thought.
Both are poetry: but one is poetry of the drawing-room, the other of the fields and forests; one is pretence, the other reality; the latter is hardly poetry at all, and cannot be criticized logically; it is rather human feeling finding its natural expression in verse of greater or less perfection according to the skill of the versifier, but always truthful, never posing, using no sophistic formulas, meaning just what it says.
The sophistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants, who in former ages have vexed the world. They are thus bold, because they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters.
It is not to be wondered at that such efforts evoked a vigorous reaction on the part of established society, the more so as in any case the result of sophistic criticism—though not consciously its object—was to liquefy the moral principles on which the social order was based. Such, in principle, appeared to be the state of things.
Suppose, then, that Michelangelo failed in his heads and faces, he, being an Italian, and therefore confessedly inferior to the Greeks in his bodies and limbs, must, by the force of logic, emerge less meritorious than we thought him. To many of my readers the foregoing section will appear superfluous, polemical, sophistic three bad things.
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