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In this country the doctrine of a higher law than the Constitution even, and to be obeyed rather than the Constitution and laws enacted in accordance therewith, has had and even now has earnest advocates. But the contrary doctrine of Carneades and the Sophists would not down.
Among his disciples were all the young men who were to become the leading philosophers of the next generation and some who played prominent parts in Athenian history. If the Athenians had had a daily press, Socrates would have been denounced by the journalists as a dangerous person. They had a comic drama, which constantly held up to ridicule philosophers and sophists and their vain doctrines.
In behind here the sophists Demetrius and Pancrates are entertaining a few great men from Rome, rhetoricians or philosophers or something of the kind. Now they are bringing in the fine lamps and they have been sitting and talking at that table ever since breakfast. There come the guests out of the side room. Will you take it?" "Yes," said Hadrian.
At this point commenced the action of the Sophists, who, by setting the doctrines of one school in opposition to those of another, and representing them all as of equal value, occasioned the destruction of them all, and the philosophy founded on physical speculation came to an end.
Born in Athens in the year 470 B.C., the son of a poor sculptor, he devoted his life to the search after truth for its own sake, and sought to base it on immutable foundations. He was the mortal enemy of the Sophists, whom he encountered, as Pascal did the Jesuits, with wit, irony, puzzling questions, and remorseless logic.
The father of Seneca hung upon the favor of the Sophists: he taught them mnemonics, rhetoric and elocution, and the fact that he was a courtly Spaniard was in his favor we dote on a foreign accent and relish the thing that comes from afar. Marcus Seneca was getting rich.
After Cicero and the civilians, after Hobart and Blackstone, came our modern utilitarians, or sophists, Bentham, Mill, Austin, and others, who have vigorously maintained with weighty arguments the utilitarian theory of justice; and that theory is now generally accepted by lawyers and statesmen as at least the most workable theory in human affairs.
He surpassed all his predecessors, Greek or Roman, in distortion and abuse, and he combined the charges invented by the jealousy and rancor of Greek sophists with the abuse of Jewish character induced by Imperial Roman passion. His account cannot be mistaken for a sober judgment.
Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known, whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fulness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion, have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far.
Isocrates, in what is called his discourse against the sophists, reproaches the teachers of his own times with inconsistency. "They make the most magnificent promises to their scholars," says he, "and undertake to teach them to be wise, to be happy, and to be just; and, in return for so important a service, they stipulate the paltry reward of four or five minae."
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