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216 endowment even of the natural man. Thought was the element which Socrates found fault with the Sophists for having overlooked.

6. Here, perhaps, an objection might be raised. It might be said that thought has no place in the economy of the purely natural man, but that it owes its being entirely to the action and the influences of society. It might be argued, in the language of modern schools, that thought is a secondary and derivative, not a primary and original formation. It is not improbable that this was what the Sophists actually maintained. I said formerly that they either ignored thought or merged this phenomenon in the phenomena of sensation. Perhaps this assertion should be qualified by the statement that there was still another way in which some of them disposed of the phenomenon of thought, another point of view under which they regarded it, and that was, its conventional character and origin. They may have held that thought was due to the social circumstances in the midst of which man was placed, no less than the rules of morality were due to these same circumstances. And if this were the case, if this could be made out, it would leave sensation as the sole fundamental constituent of human nature; in which case, the contradiction between nature and convention, the opposition between what man was in himself and what he was through his contact with society, the discord or antagonism between the natural ethics of sensation and desire