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Rh merely the perfection of the individual. The state itself is nothing but the individual in a brighter form, and in more enlarged proportions.

33. The foregoing details may perhaps have enabled you to form a tolerably adequate conception of the groundwork of the moral philosophy of Socrates, both in its polemical character as a refutation of the Sophists, and in its positive character as a body of sound and scientific ethical doctrine. I have gone into the controversy between Socrates and the Sophists at considerable length, because I conceive that in this controversy are to be found all those elements of dispute which again and again have divided the philosophical world both in ancient and in modern times. We shall see hereafter, in particular, that the controversy between Hobbes and his opponents—at the head of whom stands Butler as one of the most conspicuous, although other moralists (Cudworth, for example) had entered the lists before Butler appeared—we shall see, I say, that this controversy bears a close resemblance in some of its features to the polemic carried on two thousand years before between Socrates and the Sophists. Hobbes took up the ground of sensationalism as the basis of his philosophy very much as the Sophists had done before him, and he found no principle of pacification among men, no curb for their unruly appetites and passions, except the strong and armed hand of a supreme and irresponsible dictator.