Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/165

 CHAPTER XV.

THE SOPHISTS OF CHINA.

The philosophers of Greece and the philosophers of China are all more or less familiar even to those whose reading on such subjects is superficial. Everybody of ordinary education knows something, at any rate, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and most people, at all events in China, have a rough acquaintance with the names of Confucius, Mencius, and Lao-tzŭ. But while the great teachers who have founded schools of thought have now a world-wide fame, the empirics who opposed them in their day have fallen into something very much like oblivion. And yet the Sophists did good service. Superficial prattlers though they were, confessedly arguing for the mere love of argument, and playing with logic much as a clever conjurer plays with peas and thimbles, it cannot be denied that they encouraged the exercise of independent thought, and afforded considerable assistance in bringing the art of ratiocination to perfection. Their very sophisms afforded material for true philosophers to work upon, and the exposure of their clever fallacies was a favourite and by no means unproductive pastime even among those whose object was more to discover truth than to juggle successfully with words. A study of Plato's Dialogues is all that is necessary to prove the