Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/391

 GORGIAS. 363 sophist, instead of performing the duty incumbent on them of explaining his thesis in immediate sequence with the specula- tions which preceded it. In our sense of the words, it is a mon- strous paradox : but construing them in their legitimate filiation from the Eleatic philosophers immediately before him, it is a plausible, not to say conclusive, deduction from principles which they would have acknowledged. 1 The word existence, as they understood it, did not mean phenomenal, but ultra-phenomenal existence. They looked upon the phenomena of sense as always coming and going, as something essentially transitory, fluctuat- ing, incapable of being surely known, and furnishing at best grounds only for conjecture. They searched by cogitation for what they presumed to be the really existent something or sub- stance the noumenon, to use a Kantian phrase lying behind or under the phenomena, which noumenon they recognized as the only appropriate subject of knowledge. They discussed much, as I have before remarked, whether it was one or many ; noumenon in the singular, or noumena in the plural. Now the thesis of Gorgias related to this ultra-phenomenal existence, and bore closely upon the arguments of Zeno and Melissus, the Eleatic reasoners of his elder contemporaries. He denied that any such ultra-phenomenal something, or noumenon, existed, or could be known, or could be described. Of this tripartite thesis, the first negation was neither more untenable, nor less untenable, than that of those philosophers who before him had argued for the affirmative : on the two last points, his conclusions were neither paradoxical nor improperly skeptical, but perfectly just, and have been ratified by the gradual abandonment, either avowed or implied, of such ultra-phenomenal researches among the major part of philosophers. It may fairly be presumed that these doctrines were urged by Gorgias for the purpose of divert- ing his disciples from studies which he considered as unprom* ising and fruitless : just as we shall find his pupil Isokratefr afterwards enforcing the same view, discouraging speculations of this nature, and recommending rhetorical exercise as preparation 1 See the note of Mullach, on the treatise mentioned in the preceding note, p. 72. He shows that Gorgias followed in the steps of Zeno and Melisstu. VOL. viTt i s* 24oc.