Sophist
wanted at the time. We will briefly consider how far these statements
appear to be justified by facts: and, 1, about the meaning of the word
there arises an interesting question:--
Many words are used both in a general and a specific sense, and the
two senses are not always clearly distinguished. Sometimes the generic
meaning has been narrowed to the specific, while in other cases the
specific meaning has been enlarged or altered. Examples of the former
class are furnished by some ecclesiastical terms: apostles, prophets,
bishops, elders, catholics. Examples of the latter class may also be
found in a similar field: jesuits, puritans, methodists, and the like.
Sometimes the meaning is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or bad
sense will subsist side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect
is produced on the meaning of a word when the very term which is
stigmatized by the world (e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious
or derided class; this tends to define the meaning. Or, again, the
opposite result is produced, when the world refuses to allow some sect
or body of men the possession of an honourable name which they have
assumed, or applies it to them only in mockery or irony.
The term 'Sophist' is one of those words of which the meaning has been
both contracted and enlarged. Passages may be quoted from Herodotus
and the tragedians, in which the word is used in a neutral sense for a
contriver or deviser or inventor, without including any ethical idea of
goodness or badness. Poets as well as philosophers were called Sophists
in the fifth century before Christ. In Plato himself the term is applied
in the sense of a 'master in art,' without any bad meaning attaching to
it (Symp.; Meno). In the later Greek, again, 'sophist' and 'philosopher'
became almost indistinguishable. There was no reproach conveyed by the
word; the additional association, if any, was only that of rhetorician
or teacher. Philosophy had become eclecticism and imitation: in the
decline of Greek thought there was no original voice lifted up 'which
reached to a thousand years because of the god.' Hence the two words,
like the characters represented by them, tended to pass into one
another. Yet even here some differences appeared; for the term 'Sophist'
would hardly have been applied to the greater names, such as Plotinus,
and would have been more often used of a professor of philosophy in
general than of a maintainer of particular tenets.
But the real question is, not whether the word 'Sophist' has all these
senses, but whether there is not also a specific bad sense in which
the term is applied to certain contemporaries of Socrates. Would an
Athenian, as Mr. Grote supposes, in the fifth century before Christ,
have included Socrates and Plato, as well as Gorgias and Protagoras,
under the specific class of Sophists? To this question we must answer,
No: if ever the term is applied to Socrates and Plato, either the
application is made by an enemy out of mere spite, or the sense in which
it is used is neutral. Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, all give
a bad import to the word; and the Sophists are regarded as a separate
class in all of them. And in later Greek literature, the distinction
is quite marked between the succession of philosophers from Thales to
Aristotle, and the Sophists of the age of Socrates, who appeared like
meteors for a short time in different parts of Greece. For the purposes
of comedy, Socrates may have been identified with the Sophists, and
he seems to complain of this in the Apology. But there is no reason to
suppose that Socrates, differing by so many outward marks, would really
have been confounded in the mind of Anytus, or Callicles, or of any
intelligent Athenian, with the splendid foreigners who from time to time
visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic games. The man of genius, the
great original thinker, the disinterested seeker after truth, the master
of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an argument, was separated,
even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an 'interval which no
geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences, the interpreter
and reciter of the poets, the divider of the meanings of words, the
teacher of rhetoric, the professor of morals and manners.
2. The use of the term 'Sophist' in the dialogues of Plato also shows
that the bad sense was not affixed by his genius, but already current.
When Protagoras says, 'I confess that I am a Sophist,' he implies that
the art which he professes has already a bad name; and the words of the
young Hippocrates, when with a blush upon his face which is just seen
by the light of dawn he admits that he is going to be made 'a Sophist,'
would lose their point, unless the term had been discredited. There is
nothing surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that, whether
deserved or not, was a natural consequence of their vocation. That they
were foreigners, that they made fortunes, that they taught novelties,
that they excited the minds of youth, are quite sufficient reasons to
account for the opprobrium which attached to them. The genius of Plato
could not have stamped the word anew, or have imparted the associations
which occur in contemporary writers, such as Xenophon and Isocrates.
Changes in the meaning of words can only be made with great difficulty,
and not unless they are supported by a strong current of popular
feeling. There is nothing improbable in supposing that Plato may
have extended and envenomed the meaning, or that he may have done the
Sophists the same kind of disservice with posterity which Pascal did to
the Jesuits. But the bad sense of the word was not and could not have
been invented by him, and is found in his earlier dialogues, e.g. the
Protagoras, as well as in the later.
3. There is no ground for disbelieving that the principal Sophists,
Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippias, were good and honourable men.
The notion that they were corrupters of the Athenian youth has no real
foundation, and partly arises out of the use of the term 'Sophist' in
modern times. The truth is, that we know little about them; and the
witness of Plato in their favour is probably not much more historical
than his witness against them. Of that national decline of genius,
unity, political force, which has been sometimes described as the
corruption of youth, the Sophists were one among many signs;--in these
respects Athens may have degenerated; but, as Mr. Grote remarks, there
is no reason to suspect any greater moral corruption in the age of
Demosthenes than in the age of Pericles. The Athenian youth were not
corrupted in this sense, and therefore the Sophists could not have
corrupted them. It is remarkable, and may be fairly set down to their
credit, that Plato nowhere attributes to them that peculiar Greek
sympathy with youth, which he ascribes to Parmenides, and which was
evidently common in the Socratic circle. Plato delights to exhibit
them in a ludicrous point of view, and to show them always rather at
a disadvantage in the company of Socrates. But he has no quarrel with
their characters, and does not deny that they are respectable men.
The Sophist, in the dialogue which is called after him, is exhibited in
many different lights, and appears and reappears in a variety of forms.
There is some want of the higher Platonic art in the Eleatic Stranger
eliciting his true character by a labourious process of enquiry, when he
had already admitted that he knew quite well the difference between
the Sophist and the Philosopher, and had often heard the question
discussed;--such an anticipation would hardly have occurred in the
earlier dialogues. But Plato could not altogether give up his Socratic
method, of which another trace may be thought to be discerned in his
adoption of a common instance before he proceeds to the greater matter
in hand. Yet the example is also chosen in order to damage the 'hooker
of men' as much as possible; each step in the pedigree of the angler
suggests some injurious reflection about the Sophist. They are both
hunters after a living prey, nearly related to tyrants and thieves, and
the Sophist is the cousin of the parasite and flatterer. The effect of
this is heightened by the accidental manner in which the discovery is
made, as the result of a scientific division. His descent in another
branch affords the opportunity of more 'unsavoury comparisons.' For he
is a retail trader, and his wares are either imported or home-made, like
those of other retail traders; his art is thus deprived of the character
of a liberal profession. But the most distinguishing characteristic of
him is, that he is a disputant, and higgles over an argument. A feature
of the Eristic here seems to blend with Plato's usual description of
the Sophists, who in the early dialogues, and in the Republic, are
frequently depicted as endeavouring to save themselves from disputing
with Socrates by making long orations. In this character he parts
company from the vain and impertinent talker in private life, who is a
loser of money, while he is a maker of it.
But there is another general division under which his art may be also
supposed to fall, and that is purification; and from purification
is descended education, and the new principle of education is to
interrogate men after the manner of Socrates, and make them teach
themselves. Here again we catch a glimpse rather of a Socratic or
Eristic than of a Sophist in the ordinary sense of the term. And Plato
does not on this ground reject the claim of the Sophist to be the true
philosopher. One more feature of the Eristic rather than of the Sophist
is the tendency of the troublesome animal to run away into the darkness
of Not-being. Upon the whole, we detect in him a sort of hybrid or
double nature, of which, except perhaps in the Euthydemus of Plato,
we find no other trace in Greek philosophy; he combines the teacher of
virtue with the Eristic; while in his omniscience, in his ignorance
of himself, in his arts of deception, and in his lawyer-like habit of
writing and speaking about all things, he is still the antithesis of
Socrates and of the true teacher.
II. The question has been asked, whether the method of 'abscissio
infinti,' by which the Sophist is taken, is a real and valuable logical
process. Modern science feels that this, like other processes of formal
logic, presents a very inadequate conception of the actual complex
procedure of the mind by which scientific truth is detected and
verified. Plato himself seems to be aware that mere division is an
unsafe and uncertain weapon, first, in the Statesman, when he says that
we should divide in the middle, for in that way we are more likely to
attain species; secondly, in the parallel precept of the Philebus,
that we should not pass from the most general notions to infinity, but
include all the intervening middle principles, until, as he also says
in the Statesman, we arrive at the infima species; thirdly, in the
Phaedrus, when he says that the dialectician will carve the limbs of
truth without mangling them; and once more in the Statesman, if we
cannot bisect species, we must carve them as well as we can. No better
image of nature or truth, as an organic whole, can be conceived than
this. So far is Plato from supposing that mere division and subdivision
of general notions will guide men into all truth.
Plato does not really mean to say that the Sophist or the Statesman
can be caught in this way. But these divisions and subdivisions were
favourite logical exercises of the age in which he lived; and while
indulging his dialectical fancy, and making a contribution to logical
method, he delights also to transfix the Eristic Sophist with weapons
borrowed from his own armoury. As we have already seen, the division