Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/448

 426 HISTORY OF GREECE. She component parts of a public harangue, and to propound some precepts for making men tolerable speakers. Protagoras was just Betting forth various grammatical distinctions, while Prodikus discriminated the significations of words nearly equivalent and liable to be confounded. All these proceedings appeared then so new 1 as to incur the ridicule even of Plato : yet they were branches of that same analytical tendency which Sokrates now carried into scientific inquiry. It may be doubted whether any one before him ever used the words genus and species, originally meaning family and form, in the philosophical sense now exclu- sively appropriated to them. Not one of those many names called by logicians names of the second intention which imply distinct attention to various parts of the logical process, and enable us to consider and criticize it in detail, then existed. All of them grew out of the schools of Plato, Aristotle, and the sub- sequent philosophers, so that we can thus trace them in their beginning to the common root and father, Sokrates. o * To comprehend the full value of the improvements struck out by Sokrates, we have only to examine the intellectual paths pur- sued by his predecessors or contemporaries. He set to himself distinct and specific problems : " What is justice ? What is piety, courage, political government ? What is it which is really denoted by such great and important names, bearing upon the conduct or happiness of man ? " Now it has been already re- marked that Anaxagoras, Empedokles, Demokritus, the Pytha- goreans, all had still present to their minds those vast and undi- vided problems which had been transmitted down from the old poets ; bending their minds to the invention of some system which would explain them all at once, or assist the imagination in con- ceiving both how the Kosmos first began, and how it continued to move on. 2 Ethics and physics, man and nature, were all 1 How slowly grammatical analysis proceeded among the Greeks, and how long it was before they got at what are now elementary ideas in e ery Instructed man's mind, may be seen in Grafenhahn Geschichte der Klassis- ihen Philologie im Alterthum, sects. 89-92, etc. On this point, these nophists seem to have been decidedly in advance of their age. ceived as physics, is discernible in the Hippokratic treatises, and even in the treatise De Antiqua Medicina, which M. Littre places first in his edition,
 * This same tendency, to break off from the vague aggregate then con-