Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/248

Rh intelligence, actual or possible, and his particular nature, the nature which is peculiar to him as a human being. If that distinction be made out, truth, virtue, and beauty stand secure and unshaken; for no one would claim for truth a more absolute character than this, that whatever is accepted as true and right by all intelligence, that is absolute and immutable truth and right. To fix, then, a standard of truth, of morals, and of beauty, we must first fix a standard of intelligence; in other words, we must show, or at least hold, that there is a nature common to all intelligence, and that man participates in this universal nature. If that can be shown, truth and morals are established as immutable; if, on the contrary, it be held that there is no standard in intelligence, no common nature in all reason, it must at the same time be conceded that there is no standard in truth or in morality.

13. From these remarks, it is obvious that there is a sense in which the principle of the Sophists may be accepted as sound and valid. Man is the measure of the universe, in so far as he participates in the nature of all intellect. In so far as, he has a faculty of the universal, a universal faculty, he is cognisant of truth absolutely; but in so far as his particular faculty, his senses and understanding, is concerned, he is not the measure of the universe, not the recipient of truth as it is for all, but only of truth as it is for him; that is to say, the recipient of mere