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Updated: September 10, 2025
The Grecian sophists used to meet the demonstrations of the mathematicians and philosophers by conceding that they did indeed set forth the truth, so far as man’s intelligence goes, but that to the intelligence of other beings a bat or an angel, for example they might not hold good at all; that there is a different truth for different intelligences; that the intelligence makes the truth; and that as for the absolutely true, true to every intelligence, there is no such thing.
He did not disdain the subjects which chiefly interested the Sophists, astronomy, rhetoric, physics; but he discussed moral questions, such as, what is piety? what is the just and the unjust? what is temperance? what is courage? what is the character fit for a citizen? and such like ethical points. And he discussed them in a peculiar manner, in a method peculiarly his own.
And yet, I said, there is a still greater necessity, which has not been mentioned. What is that? The gentle force of attainder or confiscation or death which, as you are aware, these new Sophists and educators who are the public, apply when their words are powerless. Indeed they do; and in right good earnest.
Just as the sceptical philosophy of the Encyclopaedists in France promoted the Revolution, and the Revolution in its turn developed and confirmed the philosophic scepticism, so also the collapse of contending philosophies in Greece promoted the collapse of contending systems of political authority, and the collapse of political authority facilitated the growth of that individualism in thought with which the name of the Sophists is associated.
It may seem peculiar that with Aristotle it develops into a view which we can only describe as atheism. There is, however, an important difference between the standpoints of the sophists and of Aristotle.
S. "Even as the myths relate, the nymphs obtained the embraces of the gods; by pleasing him and obeying him in all things, lifting up daily pure hands and a thankful heart, if by any means he may condescend to purge thine eyes, that thou mayest see clearly, and without those motes, and specks, and distortions of thine own organs of vision, which flit before the eyeballs of those who have been drunk over-night, and which are called by sophists subjective truth; watching everywhere anxiously and reverently for those glimpses of his beauty, which he will vouchsafe to thee more and more as thou provest thyself worthy of them, and will reward thy love by making thee more and more partaker of his own spirit of truth; whereby, seeing facts as they are, thou wilt see him who has made them according to his own ideas, that they may be a mirror of his unspeakable splendour.
But of the Sophists they who profess to teach it are plainly a long way off from doing so: in fact, they have no knowledge at all of its nature and objects; if they had, they would never have put it on the same footing with Rhetoric or even on a lower: neither would they have conceived it to be "an easy matter to legislate by simply collecting such laws as are famous because of course one could select the best," as though the selection were not a matter of skill, and the judging aright a very great matter, as in Music: for they alone, who have practical knowledge of a thing, can judge the performances rightly or understand with what means and in what way they are accomplished, and what harmonises with what: the unlearned must be content with being able to discover whether the result is good or bad, as in painting.
The sophists had previously brought their denomination into discredit and reproach, by the arrogance of their pretensions, and the imperious way in which they attempted to lay down the law to the world.
He did not presume to inquire into the Divine essence, yet he believed that the gods were omniscient and omnipresent, that they ruled by the law of goodness, and that in spite of their multiplicity there was unity, a supreme Intelligence that governed the world. Hence he was hated by the Sophists, who denied the certainty of arriving at any knowledge of God.
These men were the Sophists, rhetorical men, who taught the children of the rich; worldly men, who sought honor and power; frivolous men, trifling with philosophical ideas; sceptical men, denying all certainty in truth; men who as teachers added nothing to the realm of science, but who yet established certain dialectical rules useful to later philosophers.
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