Page:A Day in Athens with Socrates (1884).djvu/13

Rh glory, as did Gorgias, Protagoras, and Polus, the art of making the worse appear the better cause, and maintained with an appearance of truth an absurd proposition, however shocking it might be.”

Ethical problems, to solve which was the avowed object of this new school of philosophy, but too frequently were abandoned for a training intended to ensure worldly success and fame; high ideals, sometimes even moral standards, were practically ignored; ability in discussion, facility of expression, came to be regarded not merely as helps to reach truth, but as the sole end of education, the “greatest good of man.” It is doubtless true that to class all the immediate predecessors of Socrates indiscriminately in one school is as unfair as to make their supposed method a mere synonyme for specious argument. Also in their favour it should be remembered that an inestimable service was rendered by these men in preparing the ground for Socrates himself, and through him for all subsequent philosophers. Had the doctrine that "Man is the measure of all things” not been proclaimed by Protagoras, the conclusion would less soon have been reached, that not only is philosophy made for man, but that man also is made for philosophy; and that hence his bounden duty, nay, his privilege it is, to apply to each act of his life the test whereby the true may be separated from the false, the real from the unreal.

But between the teachings of these men and those of Socrates there is a wide divergence — one less of degree than of kind, less of method than of aim and purpose. The long-winded harangues of other teachers, their confident dogmatism which induced an uncriticising acquiescence on the part of their pupils, differed indeed radically