THE SOPHISTS
The first period of Greek philosophy closes with Anaxagoras. His
doctrine of the world-forming intelligence introduced a new principle
into philosophy, the principle of the antithesis between corporeal
matter and incorporeal mind, and therefore, by implication, the
antithesis between nature and man. And if the first period of
philosophy has for its problem the origin of the world, and the
explanation of the being and becoming of nature, the second period of
philosophy opens, in the Sophists, with the problem of the position of
man in the universe. The teaching of the earlier philosophers was
exclusively cosmological, that of the Sophists exclusively humanistic.
Later in this second period, these two modes of thought come together
and fructify one another. The problem of the mind and the problem of
nature are subordinated as factors of the great, universal,
all-embracing, world-systems of Plato and Aristotle.
It is not possible to understand the activities and teaching of the
Sophists without some knowledge of the religious, political, and
social conditions of the time. After long struggles between the people
and the nobles, democracy had almost everywhere triumphed. But in
Greece democracy did not mean what we now mean by {107} that word. It
did not mean representative institutions, government by the people
through their elected deputies. Ancient Greece was never a single
nation under a single government. Every city, almost every hamlet, was
an independent State, governed only by its own laws. Some of these
States were so small that they comprised merely a handful of citizens.
All were so small that all the citizens could meet together in one
place, and themselves in person enact the laws and transact public
business. There was no necessity for representation. Consequently in
Greece every citizen was himself a politician and a legislator. In
these circumstances, partisan feeling ran to extravagant lengths. Men
forgot the interests of the State in the interests of party, and this
ended in men forgetting the interests of their party in their own
interests. Greed, ambition, grabbing, selfishness, unrestricted
egotism, unbridled avarice, became the dominant notes of the political
life of the time.
Hand in hand with the rise of democracy went the decay of religion.
Belief in the gods was almost everywhere discredited. This was partly
due to the moral worthlessness of the Greek religion itself. Any
action, however scandalous or disgraceful, could be justified by the
examples of the gods themselves as related by the poets and
mythologers of Greece. But, in greater measure, the collapse of
religion was due to that advance of science and philosophy which we
have been considering in these lectures. The universal tendency of
that philosophy was to find natural causes for what had hitherto been
ascribed to the action of the divine powers, and this could not but
have an undermining effect upon popular {108} belief. Nearly all the
philosophers had been secretly, and many of them openly, antagonistic
to the people's religion. The attack was begun by Xenophanes;
Heracleitus carried it on; and lastly Democritus had attempted to
explain belief in the gods as being caused by fear of gigantic
terrestrial and astronomical phenomena. No educated man any longer
believed in divination, auguries, and miracles. A wave of rationalism
and scepticism passed over the Greek people. The age became one of
negative, critical, and destructive thought. Democracy had undermined
the old aristocratic institutions of the State, and science had
undermined religious orthodoxy. With the downfall of these two pillars
of things established, all else went too. All morality, all custom,
all authority, all tradition, were criticised and rejected. What was
regarded with awe and pious veneration by their fore-fathers the
modern Greeks now looked upon as fit subjects for jest and mockery.
Every restraint of custom, law, or morality, was resented as an
unwarrantable restriction upon the natural impulses of man. What alone
remained when these were thrust aside were the lust, avarice, and
self-will of the individual.
The teaching of the Sophists was merely a translation into theoretical
propositions of these practical tendencies of the period. The Sophists
were the children of their time, and the interpreters of their age.
Their philosophical teachings were simply the crystallization of the
impulses which governed the life of the people into abstract
principles and maxims.
Who and what were the Sophists? In the first place, they were not a
school of philosophers. They are not to be compared, for example, with
the Pythagoreans or {109} Eleatics. They had not, as a school has, any
system of philosophy held in common by them all. None of them
constructed systems of thought. They had in common only certain loose
tendencies of thought. Nor were they, as we understand the members of
a school to be, in any close personal association with one another.
They were a professional class rather than a school, and as such they
were scattered over Greece, and nourished among themselves the usual
professional rivalries. They were professional teachers and educators.
The rise of the Sophists was due to the growing demand for popular
education, which was partly a genuine demand for light and knowledge,
but was mostly a desire for such spurious learning as would lead to
worldly, and especially political, success. The triumph of democracy
had brought it about that political careers were now open to the
masses who had hitherto been wholly shut out from them. Any man could
rise to the highest positions in the State, if he were endowed with
cleverness, ready speech, whereby to sway the passions of the mob, and
a sufficient equipment in the way of education. Hence the demand arose
for such an education as would enable the ordinary man to carve out a
political career for himself. It was this demand which the Sophists
undertook to satisfy. They wandered about Greece from place to place,
they gave lectures, they took pupils, they entered into disputations.
For these services they exacted large fees. They were the first in
Greece to take fees for the teaching of wisdom. There was nothing
disgraceful in this in itself, but it had never been customary. The
wise men of Greece had never accepted any payment for their wisdom.
Socrates, who never accepted any payment, {110} but gave his wisdom
freely to all who sought it, somewhat proudly contrasted himself with
the Sophists in this respect.
The Sophists were not, technically speaking, philosophers. They did
not specialise in the problems of philosophy. Their tendencies were
purely practical. They taught any subject whatever for the teaching of
which there was a popular demand. For example, Protagoras undertook to
impart to his pupils the principles of success as a politician or as a
private citizen. Gorgias taught rhetoric and politics, Prodicus
grammar and etymology, Hippias history, mathematics and physics. In
consequence of this practical tendency of the Sophists we hear of no
attempts among them to solve the problem of the origin of nature, or
the character of the ultimate reality. The Sophists have been
described as teachers of virtue, and the description is correct,
provided that the word virtue is understood in its Greek sense, which
did not restrict it to morality alone. For the Greeks, it meant the
capacity of a person successfully to perform his functions in the
State. Thus the virtue of a mechanic is to understand machinery, the
virtue of a physician to cure the sick, the virtue of a horse trainer
the ability to train horses. The Sophists undertook to train men to
virtue in this sense, to make them successful citizens and members of
the State.
But the most popular career for a Greek of ability at the time was the
political, which offered the attraction of high positions in the
State. And for this career what was above all necessary was eloquence,
or if that were unattainable, at least ready speech, the ability to
argue, to meet every point as it arose, if not with sound {111}
reasoning, then with quick repartee. Hence the Sophists very largely
concentrated their energies upon the teaching of rhetoric. In itself
this was good. They were the first to direct attention to the science
of rhetoric, of which they may be considered the founders. But their
rhetoric also had its bad side, which indeed, soon became its only
side. The aims of the young politicians whom they trained were, not to
seek out the truth for its own sake, but merely to persuade the
multitude of whatever they wished them to believe. Consequently the
Sophists, like lawyers, not caring for the truth of the matter,
undertook to provide a stock of arguments on any subject, or to prove
any proposition. They boasted of their ability to make the worse
appear the better reason, to prove that black is white. Some of them,
like Gorgias, asserted that it was not necessary to have any knowledge
of a subject to give satisfactory replies as regards it. And Gorgias
ostentatiously undertook to answer any question on any subject
instantly and without consideration. To attain these ends mere
quibbling, and the scoring of verbal points, were employed. Hence our
word "sophistry." The Sophists, in this way, endeavoured to entangle,
entrap, and confuse their opponents, and even, if this were not
possible, to beat them down by mere violence and noise. They sought
also to dazzle by means of strange or flowery metaphors, by unusual
figures of speech, by epigrams and paradoxes, and in general by being
clever and smart, rather than earnest and truthful. When a man is
young he is often dazzled by brilliance and cleverness, by paradox and
epigram, but as he grows older he learns to discount these things and
to care chiefly for the substance and {112} truth of what is said. And
the Greeks were a young people. They loved clever sayings. And this it
is which accounts for the toleration which they extended even to the
most patent absurdities of the Sophists. The modern question whether a
man has ceased beating his wife is not more childish than many of the
rhetorical devices of the Sophists, and is indeed characteristic of
the methods of the more extravagant among them.
The earliest known Sophist is Protagoras. He was born at Abdera, about
480 B.C. He wandered up and down Greece, and settled for some time at
Athens. At Athens, however, he was charged with impiety and atheism.
This was on account of a book written by him on the subject of the
gods, which began with the words, "As for the gods, I am unable to say
whether they exist or whether they do not exist." The book was
publicly burnt, and Protagoras had to fly from Athens. He fled to
Sicily, but was drowned on the way about the year 410 B.C.
Protagoras was the author of the famous saying, "Man is the measure of
all things; of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not."
Now this saying puts in a nutshell, so to speak, the whole teaching of
Protagoras. And, indeed, it contains in germ the entire thought of the
Sophists. It is well, therefore, that we should fully understand
exactly what it means. The earlier Greek philosophers had made a clear
distinction between sense and thought, between perception and reason,
and had believed that the truth is to be found, not by the senses, but
by reason. The Eleatics had been the first to emphasize this
distinction. The ultimate reality of {113} things, they said, is pure
Being, which is known only through reason; it is the senses which
delude us with a show of becoming. Heracleitus had likewise affirmed
that the truth, which was, for him, the law of becoming, is known by
thought, and that it is the senses which delude us with a show of
permanence. Even Democritus believed that true being, that is,
material atoms, are so small that the senses cannot perceive them, and
only reason is aware of their existence. Now the teaching of
Protagoras really rests fundamentally upon the denying and confusing
of this distinction. If we are to see this, we must first of all
understand that reason is the universal, sensation the particular,
element in man. In the first place, reason is communicable, sensation
incommunicable. My sensations and feelings are personal to myself, and
cannot be imparted to other people. For example, no one can
communicate the sensation of redness to a colour-blind man, who has
not already experienced it. But a thought, or rational idea, can be
communicated to any rational being. Now suppose the question is
whether the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal. We
may approach the problem in two ways. We may appeal either to the
senses or to reason. If we appeal to the senses, one man will come
forward and say that to him the angles look equal. Another man will
say that one angle looks bigger than the other, and so on. But if,
like Euclid, we appeal to reason, then it can be proved that the two
angles are equal, and there is no room left for mere personal
impressions, because reason is a law universally valid and binding
upon all men. My sensations are private and peculiar to myself. They
bind no one but myself. My {114} impressions about the triangle are
not a law to anyone except myself. But my reason I share with all
other rational beings. It is not a law for me merely, but for all. It
is one and the same reason in me and in other men. Reason, therefore,
is the universal, sensation the particular, element in man. Now it is
practically this distinction that Protagoras denied. Man, he said, is
the measure of all things. By man he did not mean mankind at large. He
meant the individual man. And by measure of all things he meant the
standard of the truth of all things. Each individual man is the
standard of what is true to himself. There is no truth except the
sensations and impressions of each man. What seems true to me is true
for me. What seems true to you is true for you.
We commonly distinguish between subjective impressions and objective
truth. The words subjective and objective are constantly recurring
throughout the history of philosophy, and as this is the first time I
use them, I will explain them here. In every act of thought there must
necessarily be two terms. I am now looking at this desk and thinking
of this desk. There is the "I" which thinks, and there is the desk
which is thought. "I" am the subject of the thought, the desk is the
object of the thought. In general, the subject is that which thinks,
and the object is that which is thought. Subjective is that which
appertains to the subject, and objective is that which appertains to
the object. So the meaning of the distinction between subjective
impressions and the objective truth is clear. My personal impression
may be that the earth is flat, but the objective truth is that the
{115} earth is round. Travelling through a desert, I may be subject to
a mirage, and think that there is water in front of me. That is my
subjective impression. The objective truth is that there is nothing
but sand. The objective truth is something which has an existence of
its own, independent of me. It does not matter what I think, or what
you think, what I want, or what you want; the truth is what it is. We
must conform ourselves to the truth. Truth will not conform itself to
our personal inclinations, wishes, or impressions. The teaching of
Protagoras practically amounted to a denial of this. What it meant was
that there is no objective truth, no truth independent of the
individual subject. Whatever seems to the individual true is true for
that individual. Thus truth is identified with subjective sensations
and impressions.
To deny the distinction between objective truth and subjective
impression is the same as to deny the distinction between reason and
sense. To my senses the earth seems flat. It looks flat to the eye. It
is only through reason that I know the objective truth that the world
is round. Reason, therefore, is the only possible standard of
objective truth. If you deny the rational element its proper part, it
follows that you will be left a helpless prey to diverse personal
impressions. The impressions yielded by the senses differ in different
people. One man sees a thing in one way, another sees it in another.
If, therefore, what seems to me true is true for me, and what seems to
you true is true for you, and if our impressions differ, it will
follow that two contradictory propositions must both be true.
Protagoras clearly understood this, {116} and did not flinch from the
conclusion. He taught that all opinions are true, that error is
impossible, and that, whatever proposition is put forward, it is
always possible to oppose to it a contradictory proposition with
equally good arguments and with equal truth. In reality, the result of
this procedure is to rob the distinction between truth and falsehood
of all meaning. It makes no difference whether we say that all
opinions are true, or whether we say that all are false. The words
truth and falsehood, in such context, have no meaning. To say that
whatever I feel is the truth for me means only that what I feel I
feel. To call this "truth for me," adds nothing to the meaning.
Protagoras seems to have been led to these doctrines partly by
observing the different accounts of the same object which the
sense-organs yield to different people, and even to the same person at
different times. If knowledge depends upon these impressions, the
truth about the object cannot be ascertained. He was also influenced
by the teaching of Heracleitus. Heracleitus had taught that all
permanence is illusion. Everything is a perpetual becoming; all things
flow. What is at this moment, at the next moment is not. Even at one
and the same moment, Heracleitus believed, a thing is and is not. If
it is true to say that it is, it is equally true that it is not. And
this is, in effect, the teaching of Protagoras.
The Protagorean philosophy thus amounts to a declaration that
knowledge is impossible. If there is no objective truth, there cannot
be any knowledge of it. The impossibility of knowledge is also the
standpoint of Gorgias. The title of his book is characteristic of
{117} the Sophistical love of paradox. It was called "On Nature, or
the non-existent." In this book he attempted to prove three
propositions, (1) that nothing exists: (2) that if anything exists, it
cannot be known: (3) that if it can be known, the knowledge of it
cannot be communicated.
For proof of the first proposition, "nothing exists," Gorgias attached
himself to the school of the Eleatics, especially to Zeno. Zeno had
taught that in all multiplicity and motion, that is to say, in all
existence, there are irreconcilable contradictions. Zeno was in no
sense a sceptic. He did not seek for contradictions in things for the
sake of the contradictions, but in order to support the positive
thesis of Parmenides, that only being is, and that becoming is not at
all. Zeno, therefore, is to be regarded as a constructive, and not
merely as a destructive, thinker. But it is obvious that by
emphasizing only the negative element in his philosophy, it is
possible to use his antinomies as powerful weapons in the cause of
scepticism and nihilism. And it was in this way that Gorgias made use
of the dialectic of Zeno. Since all existence is self-contradictory,
it follows that nothing exists. He also made use of the famous
argument of Parmenides regarding the origin of being. If anything is,
said Gorgias, it must have had a beginning. Its being must have arisen
either from being, or from not-being. If it arose from being, there is
no beginning. If it arose from not-being, this is impossible, since
something cannot arise out of nothing. Therefore nothing exists.
The second proposition of Gorgias, that if anything exists it cannot
be known, is part and parcel of the whole Sophistic tendency of
thought, which identifies knowledge {118} with sense-perception, and
ignores the rational element. Since sense-impressions differ in
different people, and even in the same person, the object as it is in
itself cannot be known. The third proposition follows from the same
identification of knowledge with sensation, since sensation is what
cannot be communicated.
The later Sophists went much further than Protagoras and Gorgias. It
was their work to apply the teaching of Protagoras to the spheres of
politics and morals. If there is no objective truth, and if what seems
true to each individual is for him the truth, so also, there can be no
objective moral code, and what seems right to each man is right for
him. If we are to have anything worth calling morality, it is clear
that it must be a law for all, and not merely a law for some. It must
be valid for, and binding upon, all men. It must, therefore, be
founded upon that which is universal in man, that is to say, his
reason. To found it upon sense-impressions and feelings is to found it
upon shifting quicksands. My feelings and sensations are binding upon
no man but myself, and therefore a universally valid law cannot be
founded upon them. Yet the Sophists identified morality with the
feelings of the individual. Whatever I think right is right for me.
Whatever you think right is right for you. Whatever each man, in his
irrational self-will, chooses to do, that is, for him, legitimate.
These conclusions were drawn by Polus, Thrasymachus, and Critias.
Now if there is, in this way, no such thing as objective right, it
follows that the laws of the State can be founded upon nothing except
force, custom, and convention. We often speak of just laws, and good
laws. But to speak in that way involves the existence of an objective
{119} standard of goodness and justice, with which we can compare the
law, and see whether it agrees with that standard or not. To the
Sophists, who denied any such standard, it was mere nonsense to speak
of just and good laws. No law is in itself good or just, because there
is no such thing as goodness or justice. Or if they used such a word
as justice, they defined it as meaning the right of the stronger; or
the right of the majority. Polus and Thrasymachus, consequently, drew
the conclusion that the laws of the State were inventions of the weak,
who were cunning enough, by means of this stratagem, to control the
strong, and rob them of the natural fruits of their strength. The law
of force is the only law which nature recognizes. If a man, therefore,
is powerful enough to defy the law with impunity, he has a perfect
right to do so. The Sophists were thus the first, but not the last, to
preach the doctrine that might is right. And, in similar vein, Critias
explained popular belief in the gods as the invention of some crafty
statesman for controlling the mob through fear.
Now it is obvious that the whole tendency of this sophistical teaching
is destructive and anti-social. It is destructive of religion, of
morality, of the foundations of the State, and of all established
institutions. And we can now see that the doctrines of the Sophists
were, in fact, simply the crystallization into abstract thought of the
practical tendencies of the age. The people in practice, the Sophists
in theory, decried and trod under foot the restrictions of law,
authority, and custom, leaving nothing but the deification of the
individual in his crude self-will and egotism. It was in fact an age
of "aufklaerung," which means enlightenment or {120} illumination. Such
periods of illumination, it seems, recur periodically in the history
of thought, and in the history of civilization. This is the first, but
not the last, such period with which the history of philosophy deals.
This is the Greek illumination. Such periods present certain
characteristic features. They follow, as a rule, upon an era of
constructive thought. In the present instance the Greek illumination
followed closely upon the heels of the great development of science
and philosophy from Thales to Anaxagoras. In such a constructive
period the great thinkers bring to birth new principles, which, in the
course of time, filter down to the masses of the people and cause
popular, if shallow, science, and a wide-spread culture. Popular
education becomes a feature of the time. The new ideas, fermenting
among the people, break up old prejudices and established ideas, and
thus thought, at first constructive, becomes, among the masses,
destructive in character. Hence the popular thought, in a period of
enlightenment, issues in denial, scepticism, and disbelief. It is
merely negative in its activities and results. Authority, tradition,
and custom are wholly or partially destroyed. And since authority,
tradition, and custom are the cement of the social structure, there
results a general dissolution of that structure into its component
individuals. All emphasis is now laid on the individual. Thought
becomes egocentric. Individualism is the dominant note. Extreme
subjectivity is the principle of the age. All these features make
their appearance in the Greek aufklaerung. The Sophistical doctrine
that the truth is what I think, the good what I choose to do, is the
extreme application of the subjective and egocentric principles.
{121}
The early eighteenth century in England and France was likewise a
period of enlightenment, and the era from which we are now, perhaps,
just emerging, bears many of the characteristics of aufklaerung. It is
sceptical and destructive. All established institutions, marriage, the
family, the state, the law, come in for much destructive criticism. It
followed immediately upon the close of a great period of constructive
thought, the scientific development of the nineteenth century. And
lastly, the age has produced its own Protagorean philosophy, which it
calls pragmatism. If pragmatism is not egocentric, it is at least
anthropocentric. Truth is no longer thought of as an objective
reality, to which mankind must conform. On the contrary, the truth
must conform itself to mankind. Whatever it is useful to believe,
whatever belief "works" in practice, is declared to be true. But since
what "works" in one age and country does not "work" in another, since
what it is useful to believe to-day will be useless to-morrow, it
follows that there is no objective truth independent of mankind at
all. Truth is not now defined as dependent on the sensations of man,
as it was with Protagoras, but as dependent on the volition of man. In
either case it is not the universal in man, his reason, which is made
the basis of truth and morals, but the subjective, individual,
particular element in him.
We must not forget the many merits of the Sophists. Individually, they
were often estimable men. Nothing is known against the character of
Protagoras, and Prodicus was proverbial for his wisdom and the genuine
probity and uprightness of his principles. Moreover the Sophists
contributed much to the advance of learning. {122} They were the first
to direct attention to the study of words, sentences, style, prosody,
and rhythm. They were the founders of the science of rhetoric. They
spread education and culture far and wide in Greece, they gave a great
impulse to the study of ethical ideas, which made possible the
teaching of Socrates, and they stirred up a ferment of ideas without
which the great period of Plato and Aristotle could never have seen
the light. But, from the philosophical point of view, their merit is
for the first time to have brought into general recognition _the right
of the subject_. For there is, after all, much reason in these attacks
made by the Sophists upon authority, upon established things, upon
tradition, custom and dogma. Man, as a rational being, ought not to be
tyrannized over by authority, dogma, and tradition. He cannot be
subjected, thus violently, to the imposition of beliefs from an
external source. No man has the right to say to me, "you _shall_ think
this," or "you _shall_ think that." I, as a rational being, have the
right to use my reason, and judge for myself. If a man would convince
me, he must not appeal to force, but to reason. In doing so, he is not
imposing his opinions externally upon me; he is educing his opinions
from the internal sources of my own thought; he is showing me that his
opinions are in reality my own opinions, if I only knew it. But the
mistake of the Sophists was that, in thus recognizing the right of the
subject, they wholly ignored and forgot _the right of the object_. For
the truth has objective existence, and is what it is, whether I think
it or not. Their mistake was that though they rightly saw that for
truth and morality to be valid for me, they must be assented to by,
and developed out of, {123} me myself, not imposed from the outside,
yet they laid the emphasis on my merely accidental and particular
characteristics, my impulses, feelings, and sensations, and made these
the source of truth and morality, instead of emphasizing as the source
of truth and right the universal part of me, my reason. "Man is the
measure of all things"; certainly, but man as a rational being, not
man as a bundle of particular sensations, subjective impressions,
impulses, irrational prejudices, self-will, mere eccentricities,
oddities, foibles, and fancies.
Good examples of the right and wrong principles of the Sophists are to
be found in modern Protestantism and modern democracy. Protestantism,
it is often said, is founded upon the right of private judgment, and
this is simply the right of the subject, the right of the individual
to exercise his own reason. But if this is interpreted to mean that
each individual is entitled to set up his mere whims and fancies as
the law in religious matters, then we have the bad sort of
Protestantism. Again, democracy is simply political protestantism, and
democratic ideas are the direct offspring of the protestant
Reformation. The democratic principle is that no rational being can be
asked to obey a law to which his own reason has not assented. But the
law must be founded upon reason, upon the universal in man. I, as an
individual, as a mere ego, have no rights whatever. It is only as a
rational being, as a potentially universal being, as a member of the
commonwealth of reason, that I have any rights, that I can claim to
legislate for myself and others. But if each individual's capricious
self-will, his mere whims and fancies, are erected into a law, then
democracy turns into anarchism and bolshevism.
{124}
It is a great mistake to suppose that the doctrines of the Sophists
are merely antiquated ideas, dead and fossilized thoughts, of interest
only to historians, but of no importance to us. On the contrary,
modern popular thought positively reeks with the ideas and tendencies
of the Sophists. It is often said that a man ought to have strong
convictions, and some people even go so far as to say that it does not
much matter what a man believes, so long as what he believes he
believes strongly and firmly. Now certainly it is quite true that a
man with strong convictions is more interesting than a man without any
opinions. The former is at least a force in the world, while the
latter is colourless and ineffectual. But to put exclusive emphasis on
the mere fact of having convictions is wrong. After all, the final
test of worth must be whether the man's convictions are true or false.
There must be an objective standard of truth, and to forget this, to
talk of the mere fact of having strong opinions as in itself a merit,
is to fall into the error of the Sophists.
Another common saying is that everyone has a right to his own
opinions. This is quite true, and it merely expresses the right of the
subject to use his own reason. But it is sometimes interpreted in a
different way. If a man holds a totally irrational opinion, and if
every weapon is beaten out of his hands, if he is driven from every
position he takes up--so that there is nothing left for him to do,
except to admit that he is wrong, such a man will sometimes take
refuge in the saying, that, after all, argue as you may, he has a
right to his own opinion. But we cannot allow the claim. No man has a
right to wrong opinions. There cannot be any right {125} in wrong
opinions. You have no right to an opinion unless it is founded upon
that which is universal in man, his reason. You cannot claim this
right on behalf of your subjective impressions, and irrational whims.
To do so is to make the mistake of the Sophists.
The tendencies of the more shallow type of modern rationalism exhibit
a similar Sophistical thought. It is pointed out that moral ideas vary
very much in different countries and ages, that in Japan, for example,
prostitution is condoned, and that in ancient Egypt incest was not
condemned. Now it is important to know these facts. They should serve
as a warning to us against dogmatic narrow-mindedness in moral
matters. But some people draw from these facts the conclusion that
there is no universally valid and objectively real moral law. The
conclusion does not follow from the premises, and the conclusion is
false. People's opinions differ, not only on moral questions, but upon
every subject under the sun. Because men, a few hundred years ago,
believed that the earth was flat, whereas now we believe it is round,
it does not follow that it has in reality no shape at all, that there
is no objective truth in the matter. And because men's opinions
differ, in different ages and countries, as to what the true moral law
is, it does not follow that there is no objective moral law.
We will take as our last example the current talk about the importance
of developing one's personality. A man, it is said, should "be
himself," and the expression of his own individuality must be his
leading idea. Now certainly it is good to be oneself in the sense that
it is hypocritical to pretend to be what one is not. Moreover, it is
no doubt true that each man has certain special {126} gifts, which he
ought to develop, so that all, in their diverse ways, may contribute
as much as possible to the spiritual and material wealth of the world.
But this ideal of individuality often leads to false developments, as
we see in the spheres of art and of education. Such a man as Oscar
Wilde, whose personality is essentially evil, defends his artistic
principles on the ground that he must needs express his personality,
that art is nothing but such personal expression, and that it is
subject to no standard save the individuality of the artist. Some
writers on education, among them Mr. Bernard Shaw, who has many points
in common with the Sophists, tell us that to attempt to mould the
character of a child by discipline, is to sin against its personality,
and that the child should be allowed to develop its individuality
unchecked in its own way. But against this we have to protest that to
make the cultivation of individuality an end in itself, and to put
exclusive emphasis on this, is wrong. The cultivation of an
individuality is not in itself a good thing; it is not a good thing if
the individuality be a worthless one. If a child exhibits savage or
selfish tendencies, it must be subjected to discipline, and it is
ridiculous to make a fetish of its personality to such an extent as to
allow it to develop as it likes. In a similar way, the ideal of
individuality is often interpreted to mean that the cultivation of the
mere eccentricities and oddities of the individual is something good.
But the personal peculiarities of a man are just what is worthless
about him. That alone which entitles him to the sacred rights of a
"person" is his rational and universal nature.
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