FORE:Our readers have now before them everything of importance that is known about the Sophists, and something more that is not known for certain, but may, we think, be reasonably conjectured. Taking the whole class together, they represent a combination of three distinct tendencies, the endeavour to supply an encyclopaedic training for youth, the cultivation of political rhetoric as a special art, and the search after a scientific foundation for ethics derived from the results of previous philosophy. With regard to the last point, they agree in drawing a fundamental distinction between Nature and Law, but some take one and some the other for their guide. The partisans of Nature lean to the side of a more comprehensive education, while their opponents tend more and more to lay an exclusive stress on oratorical proficiency. Both schools are at last infected by the moral corruption of the day, natural right becoming identified with the interest of the stronger, and humanism leading to the denial of objective reality, the substitution of illusion for knowledge, and the confusion of momentary gratification with moral good. The dialectical habit of considering every question under contradictory aspects degenerates into eristic prize-fighting and deliberate disregard of the conditions which alone make argument possible. Finally, the component elements of Sophisti103cism are dissociated from one another, and are either separately developed or pass over into new combinations. Rhetoric, apart from speculation, absorbs the whole time and talent of an Isocrates; general culture is imparted by a professorial class without originality, but without reproach; naturalism and sensuous idealism are worked up into systematic completion for the sake of their philosophical interest alone; and the name of sophistry is unhappily fastened by Aristotle on paid exhibitions of verbal wrangling which the great Sophists would have regarded with indignation and disgust.Before parting with Stoicism we have to say a few words on the metaphysical foundation of the whole systemthe theory of Nature considered as a moral guide and support. It has been shown that the ultimate object of this, as of many other ethical theories, both ancient and modern, was to reconcile the instincts of individual self-preservation with virtue, which is the instinct of self-preservation in an entire community. The Stoics identified both impulses by declaring that virtue is the sole good of the individual no less than the supreme interest of the whole; thus involving themselves in an insoluble contradiction. For, from their nominalistic point of view, the good of the whole can be nothing but an aggre45gate of particular goods, or else a means for their attainment; and in either case the happiness of the individual has to be accounted for apart from his duty. And an analysis of the special virtues and vices would equally have forced them back on the assumption, which they persistently repudiated, that individual existence and pleasure are intrinsically good, and their opposites intrinsically evil. To prove their fundamental paradoxthe non-existence of individual as distinguished from social interestthe Stoics employed the analogy of an organised body where the good of the parts unquestionably subserves the good of the whole;100 and the object of their teleology was to show that the universe and, by implication, the human race, were properly to be viewed in that light. The acknowledged adaptation of life to its environment furnished some plausible arguments in support of their thesis; and the deficiencies were made good by a revival of the Heracleitean theory in which the unity of Nature was conceived partly as a necessary interdependence of opposing forces, partly as a perpetual transformation of every substance into every other. Universal history also tended to confirm the same principle in its application to the human race. The Macedonian, and still more the Roman empire, brought the idea of a world-wide community living under the same laws ever nearer to its realisation; the decay of the old religion and the old civic patriotism set free a vast fund of altruism which now took the form of simple philanthropy; while a rank growth of immorality offered ever new opportunities for an indignant protest against senseless luxury and inhuman vice. This last circumstance, however, was not allowed to prejudice the optimism of the system; for the fertile physics of Heracleitus suggested a method by which moral evil could be interpreted as a necessary concomitant of good, a material for the perpetual exercise and illustration of virtuous deeds.101
Donec sit amet ligula enim. Duis vel condimentum massa.
Maecenas eget congue dui.
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