Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/207

 can easily understand how the exposure of clan ethics to this widened circle of comparison and contrast was certain to awake Athenian consciousness to defects in their old beliefs. The Socratic questioning is an outcome of this conflicting consciousness; the Platonic universalism is a dogmatic answer to the difficulties it raised; and the customary offering thrown into the sea for the sins of the Athenian people does not more graphically bring before us the early Athenian morality of vicarious punishment than Socratic speculations on the relation of law to morality, or the contrast of customary with subjective morality, bring before us the days of subtle debaters, when the simple ethic of her clan age was as impossible for Athens as it would be for an adult to force himself back into the ideas of his infancy. It was not to be expected that primitive doctrines of vicarious punishment and inherited sin could long retain their hold upon people accustomed to debate recondite problems of personal intention in their courts of law or legislative assembly. It was not to be expected that simple belief in the ancient morality could be retained while ties of kinship were steadily giving way to action from self-interest, and sophists were aiding the cleverness of Athenians bent on comparing the institutions and ideas of the various Greek states or analysing their own subjective thought. It made little difference whether the sophist was a Protagoras, ready to demonstrate the impossibility of truth from the conflict of Greek ideas alike claiming divinity, or a subtle Socrates prepared to raise moral problems. which he could not, or at least did not, solve. In either case old ideas were being undermined; and the struggles of men like Aristophanes to ridicule the new notions out