woe, were regulated by their almighty decrees.

How the gods

rewarded the good and punished the evil was the subject and plot of most of their dramas. The extent to which religious fanaticism in favour of traditional belief could be evoked at Athens is shown by the popular excitement at the mutilation of the Hermæ. That the Olympian deities were represented by poets and dramatists as liars, adulterers, thieves, did not signify. With an obtuseness which would be marvellous if it were not so common, they refused to recognise palpable incongruities between the religious dogma or worship on the one hand, and the moral sentiment of cultured humanity on the other.

To this disparity the Sophists and Sokrates drew attention, though less by open contradiction than by the tacit and indirect adoption of other hypotheses irreconcilable with it. By the freeteachers the gods were placed distinctly in the background. Human duties and interests, virtues and excellences, were substituted as regulative sanctions for the old Olympian rule. The change was the ethical analogue to a similar revolution taking place in Greek physical science. If 'Vortex' ousted Zeus, as Aristophanes complained, from his material dominion, 'Virtue,' with still more right, it might be said, deprived him of his pretended moral sovereignty over human actions and life. It was already a suspicious circumstance, symptomatic of the change coming over Greek theology, that the thinkers of Greece were now in the habit of referring to the deities in general terms as the gods, instead of designating them as individuals, and so calling attention to the turpitudes associated with their actual names.

But the Sophists not only opposed the religious prepossessions of the Greeks, their free-methods conflicted with their moral convictions as well. The chief Sophists, we have seen, were Rhetors, and with Rhetoric they combined Dialectic and occasionally indulged in Eristic, the captious excess of Dialectic. They taught for pay the art of persuasion, the best and readiest method of securing victory in all kinds of debate. The Athenians could not but see that this art was open to abuse. If not essentially inducing laxity and want of principle, it would undoubtedly do so in the hands of unprincipled persons. Besides, these rhetors came from Sicily, the native land of Rhetoric, and were perhaps, even on that account, obnoxious to the Athenians. Hence the old-fashioned among them regarded these new teachers in the same light as Cato the censor did the Sophistical disquisitions of Carneades, when that Skeptic endeavoured to prove to the Roman youth the identity of justice and expediency. They could not be brought to see the utility of

an art which might conceivably be used to confuse vice with virtue, duty with pleasure, and to prove the worse the better cause. They refused to concede the advantage of intellectual gymnastics for their own sake, or to applaud a rhetorical or dialectic prowess which might be employed so as to endanger the well-being and social order of the State. Men like Anytos and Meletos were far from sharing the robust confidence of Sokrates and Plato in the common sense, the native goodness, the social instincts of the young Athenians; nor were they more prepossessed in favour of such abstract principles as the inherent force of truth, or the claims of Dialectic as an end in itself, or the innate aptitude of the human mind for inquiry and discussion, nor, once more, did they consider that every kind of human knowledge may, in the hands of unworthy persons, be abused. It was enough for them that the liability to such abuse offered by the Sophists and their methods was of a peculiarly seductive nature. Hence the dramatic freedom, the double-tongued argumentation of the Sophists, were as loathsome to dogmatic Athenians as the twofold truth of some Christian thinkers was to the ruling powers of Romanism. This feeling, as we know, aided by political causes, reached its climax in the martyrdom of Sokrates, while the traditional flight of Anaxagoras, the indignation against Prodikos, were less marked expressions of it. Nor can it be said that the Athenians were at all likely to discriminate between the rhetorical and the dialectical arts considered in their probable effect on the minds of their youth. For, although Rhetoric is older than Dialectic, as intellectual synthesis is an earlier mental process than analysis, the end of both is in reality the same. Under any circumstances, as Plato and Aristotle both admitted, the boundary-line between Rhetoric and Dialectic, and between these and Eristic, is in reality and practically of a very insignificant character; for if a man be inveighed to adopt a wrong conclusion and carry it into practice, it cannot matter much whether his feelings have been seduced by Rhetoric or his reason convinced by Logic. In either case, the instrument of persuasion is doubleedged, and just as capable of bad as good effects. Perhaps on the score of permanence, Rhetoric might be considered as the more innocuous, in accordance with the old epigram which happily describes their respective methods:

Rhetorica est palmæ similis, Dialectica pugno;

Hæc pugnet, palmam sed tamen illa feret.1

1 According to Quinctilian, Zenon was the author of this comparison. The epigram in the text is quoted by Fabricius in his notes to Sext. Emp.

But to such niceties the average Athenian Philistine was supremely indifferent. The distinction between the sciences, if he allowed it, would have been between the bad and the worse, a rivalry of ill teaching and immoral consequences. In either case he discerned or thought he discerned in the linguistic legerdemain a potent source of immorality and corruption. His suspicions were no doubt kept alive and confirmed by the more vain and extravagant among the Sophists, who chose the most paradoxical subjects on which to dilate. The more preposterous the theme, the more opposed to the common-sense of mankind, the greater the skill needed to elucidate and establish it. Like a laywer who boasts of carrying his client through some very difficult case, the glory of the victory was in direct proportion to its à priori unlikelihood, in other words, to the justice, reason, and evidence naturally arraigned against it. Aristotle's treatise on the Sophistical elenchi furnishes us with an exhaustive list of the paradoxes the more unscrupulous Sophists pledged themselves to maintain. The effect of such themes on the Athenians might perhaps be illustrated by the indignation excited in some circles in this country on the publication of Mandeville's work proving that 'Private vices were public benefits,' or the excitement caused by the theological paradox of Warburton's 'Divine Legation.' These dialectical excesses are not only reprehended by such writers as Plato and Aristotle, they are also found fault with by Sextos Empeirikos, who bases upon them his argument that the rhetorical, like every other art, is a nullity. But for my part I cannot for a moment suppose that most of those paradoxes with which the Sophists are credited were really adopted by them in good earnest and with a direct purpose to deceive; and much virtuous indignation seems to me to have been wasted on them on that account. I regard these paralogisms, logical puerilities, &c., in the same light as similar playful riddles, equivocations, and quibbles among ourselves. Every intellectual process, like vinous fermentation, will have a certain proportion of good liquor, and so much lees or insoluble subsidence, but no wise man is at all liable to mistake the one for the other. To me at least these paralogisms seem a striking illustration of the astuteness of the Greek intellect, the flexibility of their language, the recklessness with which they adv. Math. ii. § 8, as one of Dupertus; but a very similar epigram may be found by Audoenus, Epigr. ed. Renouard, p. 45. Luther's distinction between rhetoric and dialectic is well known: Rhetor sine dialectica nihil firmi docere potest, et e contra dialecticus sine rhetorica non afficit auditores Utramque vero conjungens docet et persuadet.' Epist. ad Galatas, cap. 5.

Adr. Math. lib. ii,

1

applied their thought-processes to every conceivable object, and the thoroughness with which they followed up every investigation and accepted every result. No other characteristic could, I think, have been expected from a race possessed with an invincible love of freedom, and a hatred of all restraint. Hence we have the noteworthy fact that it is among that nation of all others which carried mental development to the highest pitch of perfection that we find the greatest number and variety of these mock-dialectics. Nor again can I leave out of consideration the fact that much of the power of Sokrates and Plato, and even the dialectical skill of Aristotle himself, was due to a preliminary training in these exercises. For false as well as true Dialectic contributes to the same object of strengthening the mental faculties by intellectual gymnastics, just as grammar may be taught by the correction of what is wrong as well as by direct imitation of what is right. Indeed many of our Skeptics have asserted that even true Dialectic serves no other nor higher purpose.

But although to the simple citizens, the idural of Athens, regarding the effects of Rhetoric and Dialectic on the minds of their youth, the two arts seemed equally culpable and from a practical point of view undifferentiated, still the passing over of Rhetoric into Dialectic is a distinctly marked feature of the progress of Hellenic speculation. It is also connected with the Sophists and

That the stress on Rhetoric which marked the earlier Sophists was later on transferred to Eristic is a theory not only established, as Mr. Sidgwick has shown (Journal of Philology, vol. iv. p. 288, &c.), by Plato's different methods of treating the Sophists, but which receives independent confirmation from the probability of the case, For in the ordinary progress of mankind-considering man as a social and political unit-Rhetoric, the direct appeal to the feelings or the volition, precedes Dialectic, the reasoned persuasion of the intellect, though intrinsically considered the latter comes first. Probably the difference in Plato's treatment of the Sophists also throws some light on the relation of Sokrates to Plato. The original Sophists brought from Sicily the art of rhetoric, and employed it rather unscrupulously to enforce contradictory opinions. But they discovered that their art was soon nonplussed by the native shrewdness of the Athenian intellect, which prided itself on quickly detecting argumentative pitfalls, as well as by that peculiar development of dialectic employed by Sokrates. Accordingly they changed their tactics. Abandoning Rhetoric, at least giving it only the second place in their teaching, they cultivated the Athenian Dialectic and the Sokratic elenchus. So far, therefore, as method was concerned, Sokrates might be said to have been hoist with his own petard.' When Plato discovered, probably after the death of Sokrates, that his master's elenchus had thus been sophisti cated, he adopted another plan, which, however, differed from that of the

Sokrates, and contributed directly and largely to the development of freedom of Greek thought. The difference between the sister arts was in the first instance one of method. The rhetor declaimed in long harangues, dividing his speeches into carefully adjusted periods, each rounded off with artistic and rhythmical cadence; the whole adorned with flowery language, profuse imagery, farfetched expressions, under which the pith of the argument was in danger of being lost. No doubt the voluptuousness of the form frequently served to veil the imperfection of the substance. Inconclusive and false reasoning occasionally lurked beneath the ingeniously woven chain of sentences. Redundancy of words was purposely employed to conceal poverty of matter. Superabundant imagery, subtle distinctions, and high-flown language drew off the hearers' attention from the perverse or untrue deduction. Sokrates and his school conferred therefore incalculable benefit on the cause of Greek free-thought by pitting Dialectic against Rhetoric, and quick short questions and replies in opposition to long and artificial harangues.

Properly speaking, the change thus induced was a return or rather an advance to the native methods of the human reason. For in pursuing its inquiries and arriving at its conclusions the unsophisticated reason does not naturally rely upon verbose arguments and elaborate propositions. Its primary and favourite method is catechetical. The questions of an intelligent child are much more direct and pointed than the reserved and circuitous investigations of the disciplined thinker. Its verdicts also are as plain and simple as the subject-matter may permit. Hence Rhetoric may be called the luxury, while Dialectic is the necessity, of the human reason. The latter is the prose, while the former is the rudimentary poetry, of human language.

Further, Dialectic, the creation and outgrowth of free-thought, is also its potent instrument. It is therefore much less adapted than Rhetoric to enforce dogmas and conclusions of a definitive kind. Indeed its operations when unrestricted by dogmatic postulates and foregone conclusions are not so much constructive as destructive. The attempt to enforce creeds and convictions by methods exclusively dialectical, accompanied with an acknowledgment of the infallibility of the process, may at any moment recoil on the heads of those who make it. Like the eagle, those soaring ratiocinations Sophists more in the end aimed at than in the method pursued. Like his master, he employed Eristic, or a Dialectic indistinguishable from Eristic, for the purpose of exposing Ignorance and discovering Truth; whereas the Sophists in many cases had an eye merely to their own advantage.