HIGHER EDUCATION--THE SOPHISTS AND SOCRATES.
§ 50. As every one knows now, the real position and merits of the
Sophists were first brought to light by Grote in his monumental
“History of Greece.” Since the publication of that book the English
scholar has learned that sophist, in early Greek history, is not
synonymous with liar and villain, undermining public morals and sapping
religion. Within the last few years the influence of this new view is
gradually reaching the Germans, a nation not very ready to adopt, in
philology at least, English opinions. But this very natural reluctance
has its exceptions; for in the most important new book on the history
of Greek philosophy, Zeller’s last edition, we find that, in spite of
sundry reservations, the main results of Grote’s investigations are
recognized and adopted.
Before I go on to appropriate from these authors that part of their
account of the Sophists which belongs properly to the subject of Greek
education, it is worth reflecting a moment on so very remarkable an
instance of misunderstood evidence as this controversy exhibits.
The main body of philologists simply followed like a flock of sheep
Plato’s and Aristotle’s polemic against their own rivals. Plato
inherited from Socrates a strong antipathy to these practical and often
utilitarian teachers. But it was for the most part the same sort of
antipathy that the solid university professor of our own day has for
the successful crammer. The competition mania of the present day has
created a demand for these specialists, who do not profess anything
more than their special trade of passing men for examinations, and who
do it admirably, and derive from it large emoluments. So the rise of
democratic institutions, and the spread of international debates, made
the fifth century B.C. in Greece one that required suddenly a set of
practical teachers for men who practised at the bar or debated in the
public assembly. We are too much in the habit of thinking that such
men required training merely in rhetoric--in the way of disputing and
of plausibly stating their views. They required more; they required
education in general subjects, and of course not a deep education,
but such a one as would enable them to talk intelligently, and make
and understand allusions to the deeper questions of the day. We hear
that now in America it is not an uncommon thing for men who have risen
suddenly in the world, and for their wives, to send for a teacher and
say, “I am now in a position to move in educated society, and to be
required to speak on public affairs. My early training was entirely
neglected. I want you to instruct me in the ordinary topics of the day,
as well as in those points of art and science which may be serviceable
for my purpose.” And such instruction, very superficial, no doubt, and
inaccurate, but highly practical, is often given.
§ 51. Now, let us imagine that an intelligent Greek or other foreigner,
totally unacquainted with modern journalism, were to seek for evidence
of its moral value and the real benefits it confers upon us. What
answer would he receive? If he applied to the journalists themselves,
they would tell him that it was their object so to furnish their
readers with all the current topics of instruction as to make them
able to converse intelligently without any further study. They would
also profess to be leaders of the moral sense of the public, praising
what was of good repute, and blaming the wicked, exposing abuses, and
expounding virtue. They would also claim the merit of supplying the
public with arguments in favor of a disputed conclusion, so that men
might be furnished with weapons to meet their intellectual adversaries.
He would naturally ask, on hearing this exalted programme, whether
all this was done out of pure philanthropy or with any ulterior view;
more especially, whether there was any pecuniary gain attached. They
would reply that they did indeed take money for their teaching--and the
laborer is worthy of his hire--but they would appeal to any of their
readers whether the instruction afforded was not greatly in excess of
their remuneration. With this reply our stranger might perhaps be but
half satisfied, and might have some suspicion that independent evidence
would not come amiss; and on inquiring from thoughtful men what
emoluments were to be gained by this profession, he would hear that, if
successful, it was one of the most lucrative known, and that many of
the contributors confessedly worked, not for the sake of conviction,
but of gain. He would next inquire whether success was always in their
case a test of solid merit, and would discover that, however it might
be so intellectually, from a moral point of view such was not the case.
The most thoughtful and candid members of our society would explain to
him that, here as elsewhere, men delighted more in reading what fell in
with their prejudices than what exposed them, and that by pandering to
this defect, and following in the wake of public opinion, newspapers
often succeeded better than by honest and fearless teaching. He would
hear that almost every paper belonged to some political party,
whose errors and weaknesses it felt bound to justify and protect.
Furthermore, that for the sake of clearness and of brevity, as well as
from a want of care to do more than please for the hour, many arguments
in the daily papers were superficial and illogical, not clearing, but
obscuring, the real questions at issue. He would certainly, therefore,
in the course of his inquiry, come to look upon them as a class or
profession; but yet, if he spoke of them as such, he might be surprised
to hear himself corrected by the journalists or by their friends.
They would deny that they were a distinct profession, and say with
truth that _all_ intelligent men who desired to teach were to some
extent journalists, who are marked by no fixed principle, by the bonds
of no special education. Even their own critics, he would hear with
surprise, at times joined them and wrote to instruct the public. They
were a class and not a class, a profession and not a profession; with
a common object, to some extent a common method, but hardly any common
principles, any direct co-operation, any common interest, to outbalance
their jealous rivalry.
§ 52. Is this a fair picture of the moral side of journalism? It is
obtained simply by describing, in the wake of Plato and of Mr. Grote
and of Sir Alexander Grant, the old Greek Sophists. These, then,
were really the Greek journalists, who, before the days of posts and
printing, carried about from city to city the latest news, the most
recent criticism, the most modern views of politics and of education,
the newest theories on morals and on religion. It may be thought
irreverent to compare St. Paul to our daily press, but I cannot better
explain myself than by pointing to that most graphic scene in the Acts
where the apostle arrives at Athens. He is seized by the eager and
curious public as we seize the precious journal in some remote country
place when we have been separated from the current of affairs for a
few days. And, no doubt, they first asked him what local or political
information he had brought from his previous sojourn, just as we first
read the messages from Paris or London; and when this curiosity was
satisfied, they began to inquire what more he had to say; and, finding
that he was an ethical teacher, or sophist, they proceeded at greater
leisure to enjoy the rest of his communications, just as we should
turn on to the leading article, the correspondence about ritualistic
innovations, or the reviews. St. Paul was taken for a sophist, and
justly so in some sense, for he taught morals and religion; still
more, he taught a new religion. We all know how far he differed from
that class. Flippant, plausible, ingenious, sceptical, they were the
idols of the public, but the aversion of those deeper minds to whom
the ignorance and prejudice of the masses are not a source of material
gain, but rather a grievous and galling spiritual burden.
§ 53. This is what the Greek Sophists really were, crammers not for
special competitions, but for the general requirements of higher
society and of political life. They crammed more or less honestly, more
or less efficiently, for a generation or two. Then the want of them
passed away, as we may hope the want of the modern crammer will pass
away with the superstition that we can find out practical merit by mere
examinations. At Athens and throughout Greece the encyclopædic teaching
of the Sophists was presently carried into minute specialty by teachers
of rhetoric, of dialectic, and of morals, just as the professors of
geology of thirty years ago are being supplanted by special teaching in
fossil anatomy, botany, and mineralogy. From the middle of the fourth
century B.C. the Sophists disappear as a class altogether. It is,
nevertheless, certain that they left no bad name behind them in Greece,
except among the immediate followers of Plato and Aristotle; for in the
second century A.D. the title was revived as one of the highest honor,
and attaching to the greatest literary post in Athens.
We need not assert that these teachers were as strictly business-like
as the modern _coach_, or that they confined themselves as strictly
to their definite object. They often boasted of great performances
which were beyond the reach of ordinary people, and were merely meant
for display. But then their aims were far wider and more varied than
those of the coach, and were not to be tested by the clear and definite
result of the examination lists. Hence Plato and Socrates found it easy
to pick holes in their programmes, and to accuse them of getting money
under false pretences. These philosophers went further, and reviled
them for taking money at all, bartering their wisdom for gold, and
imparting virtue for a fee. All this was mere jealous polemic, and
based on an unfair estimate of the attempt made by practical men to
supply a public want. Yet even though Plato himself paints the leading
Sophists as most respectable men, though we know from independent
evidence that they were so, whether Plato confessed it or not, the
attacks on the profession made by him and by Aristophanes--the one a
radical reformer, and the other a blind conservative--have so imposed
upon the learned that they have completely mistaken the real evidence
on the question, and set down the arguments for the prosecution as if
they were a judicial charge or a mature verdict. So powerful is the
influence of literary skill, when it causes the survival of a single
work amid the loss of all its fellows. Because Plato is our leading
witness on the Sophists, because Aristophanes’ satire has survived, men
imagine that this must be the general verdict, and set down the bias
and the prejudice of an individual as the reflex of public opinion.
§ 54. These men really shaped out the first form which university
education took in Europe, meaning by university education that higher
general training which, coming after school discipline, trains men for
the duties of social and political as well as scientific and literary
life.
In the city life of the Greeks, when residence in any foreign place
entailed great inconvenience, it was evident that this university
teaching could not occupy a fixed place. It was not till the
amalgamation of the Greek nation under Roman sway that Athens became
(like Alexandria) strictly a university town. So, as the students could
not gather round the early sophist, he was obliged to go to them,
wandering through Greece, and staying for a considerable time in each
great centre, where the native youth could profit by him. But even in
early days there were some enthusiastic pupils, who abandoned home and
country, and wandered about as aliens in the wake of these brilliant
teachers. The latter generally made high display of their acquirements,
and gave exhibitions of eloquence and of argument to show the value of
their wares. They lived an ostentatious life, like the professional
artists of the present day, and though they made large profits, saved
but little money. Their first object was to make ready and practical
citizens, men able to collect and express their thoughts and give
sound advice on public matters. For this purpose they not only taught
the art of rhetoric and that of disputation, but they were obliged
to enter upon some of the great theories which form the basis of all
practical life--the problems of philosophy, of ethics, and of religion.
As we might expect, they took in all these a utilitarian view, such
as a practical crammer would take. Some of them, such as Gorgias and
Protagoras, studied philosophy deeply, but only to show that a devotion
to metaphysic or to abstract science was idle, all knowledge being
subjective, and varying with the age. Man was the measure of things;
abstract nature was mere nothing. On the more pressing question of
morals, though practically sound enough, and though some of them,
such as Prodicus, were celebrated as moral preachers, they denied
all immutable morality, and were content with obeying the existing
laws of society, without admitting any permanent scientific basis
for them. It was Socrates who first applied his great mind to solve
this question, and his classes of young men--he was in this a regular
sophist or university teacher, and was commonly so called--were
specially exercised in seeking for the permanent and immutable ideas
implied in our moral terms which characterize our moral actions. As
regards religion, seeing that the Greek faith had grown up in myths
and poetry, and was imbedded in an elaborate polytheistic mythology
full of immoralities and absurdities, the Sophists were, as we might
expect, sceptical, and so far opposed to the conservative public. One
of them, Protagoras, actually professed his unbelief in the national
faith, and was persecuted accordingly; others, though more cautious,
and regarding any formal denial of transcendental truths as hardly
practical, were justly suspected of agnosticism, as their moral essays
kept suspiciously clear of theology. They were regarded as unsound in
faith, and hence alleged to be unsound in morals by the orthodox,
whose faith the Sophists charged fairly enough with the same objection.
§ 55. So the education of the Sophists came to be regarded by the
soberest part of the public, the steady-going old people, as subversive
of ancient and venerable traditions. In religion it was supposed
to suggest, if not to teach, infidelity; in politics and society,
radicalism. This is exactly the sort of charge we hear made by the
old-fashioned public against the universities--still more in Germany,
where the gulf between the average and the learned part of society
is far wider than it is here. When we university teachers make young
men think, even though carefully avoiding (as we are in honor bound)
anything which may shock the traditions in which they have been brought
up, the mental agitation produced must, nevertheless, lead them to
reject at least some superstitions which they have accepted on weak
evidence. If our education does not produce this result, it is not
worthy the name. But this partial and cautious scepticism is of course
identified by the older generation, who are less spiritually developed,
with the rejection of vital truths. And there are many cases where the
young sceptic really oversteps his just bounds, and becomes as rash in
negation as his fathers were uncritical in affirmation. Let us add that
the orthodox party are not very particular about evidence, and will
start a calumnious charge against a teacher whom they suspect and fear,
with very little care about really proving their case. This party are,
moreover, always supplied with powerful allies by the jealousies and
differences among the teachers themselves, the elder and less able of
whom often try to sustain their waning influence by an alliance with
orthodoxy, and make up by theological popularity what they have been
unable to attain for want of intellectual force and sympathy.
All these things, which now happen constantly in our universities,
are the exact counterparts of what happened in Greece in the days of
the Sophists. They taught clever young men such surface-knowledge
of science as disgusted the deeper experts, and, what was more,
they taught them that the experts were pursuing a vain shadow, and
attempting insoluble problems. They taught them to avoid becoming
specialists, and to apply themselves to public life. Just as the
English universities can boast of many great politicians and literary
men, rather than of specialists in the sciences, and as they might hold
that to produce a Gladstone or a Cornewall Lewis is better than to
produce a Faraday, so the Sophists made general culture their professed
object, and so far quarrelled with deeper philosophy.
§ 56. The same sort of proceeding in morals brought them into contact
with Socrates, whose daily teaching may be regarded as the best
university teaching of the day. Socrates was in all external respects
a sophist, and commonly regarded as such. He did not, indeed, travel
about, being luckily a citizen of the largest and most enlightened city
in Greece. He despised, too, wealth and ostentation of the ordinary
kind, though he made himself no less remarkable by his voluntary
poverty. But in more important respects, in despising abstract science
and speculative philosophy, and sifting traditional theories of
morals and society, in radically shaking up and often upsetting all
preconceived notions, Socrates was a sophist, and one of the most
dangerous of them. He sought, indeed, to do what they had not done--to
find some better and surer positive basis for morals, but the negative
part of his work was far the most successful and striking. Hence the
conservative public at Athens not only suspected and disliked him, but
at the prosecution of their mouthpiece, Anytus, a most respectable
and earnest man, condemned him to death, when he showed clearly that
no verdict of theirs would restrain him from pursuing his occupation.
This sentence on Socrates, which the orthodox party at Athens never
regretted, and even justified, should indeed be a warning to those who
calumniate their fellows in the interests of orthodoxy. But with this
we are not now concerned.
The higher teaching of the Sophists and of Socrates, which was at
best desultory, passed into the hands of successors like Plato and
Isocrates, who established regular schools, and subjected their pupils
to a regular course of training. This was all the more necessary, as
the training given by Socrates had no definite limits, and his tendency
was to keep young men talking and discussing ethical problems when they
ought to have turned to practical life. Leisure was, indeed, in such
high repute among the old Greeks that idleness was not reprehended as
it should have been. The orthodox party made this objection with much
force to the school or following of Socrates. In the case of Plato
there was a regular course of higher philosophy, and his principal
pupils became, in their turn, philosophic teachers. But the school
of Plato was even more than that of Socrates a university training,
for which there may even have been a matriculation examination, if we
adopt literally the statement that no one was allowed to enter without
knowing elementary geometry. The great fault of Plato, as of Socrates,
was that he did not introduce men to public or practical life, but made
them philosophers or idlers. In science, indeed, this special training
was of great service, and the history of geometry would have been
very different without these speculators. But the Platonic pupil when
completely trained was professedly, according to the master himself,
disinclined to join in politics, and only to be persuaded by his sense
of duty and the willing obedience of the public.
It is on account of the same sort of exclusiveness, even monastic in
its strictness, that the famous brotherhood of Pythagoras deserves but
a small place in any general history of Greek education. Admission to
this brotherhood was only obtained through a strict novitiate, and
the object of it was to combine peculiar religious asceticism with an
aristocratic policy, and a sort of club life antagonistic to ordinary
society. We have, unfortunately, only few authentic details concerning
this sect, and know it best from the few echoes of it in early, and
the many in later, Platonism. But it, too, may be regarded as a higher
intellectual or university training, combined with collegiate life and
its restraints, thus anticipating in spirit that feature which makes
the English universities so peculiar among the modern seats of learning
in Europe.
I will return to Plato and his followers when we come to consider the
theories of education which the philosophers based on the phenomena of
Greek history. And before we pass from the Sophists to the Rhetors,
and show a further specializing of higher education in that direction,
we may say a word in conclusion on the external history of these once
celebrated, and since much-maligned, educators. We hardly know them
at all, save through their enemies, the specialist philosophers and
specialist rhetoricians; and what we hear of them must be distrusted
and sifted accordingly. Nevertheless, even from their enemies, we
learn that the three greatest of them--Protagoras, Gorgias, and
Prodicus--were eminently respectable and respected men. So was the
fourth in importance, Hippias, though the encyclopædic pretensions he
put forth to practise all trades and manual dexterities, as well as
philosophy, history, and rhetoric, have left an unpleasant impression
against him. Nevertheless, he was honored at Elis, his native place, as
their leading citizen, and compiled for them the annals of their famous
past in such a way as to gain universal acceptance.
As regards the other three, though they all professed to impart
general education, and to give their pupils that negative training
in philosophy which would arm them against false theories, yet they
were each remarkable for some special line. Protagoras, apart from his
famous philosophical position of the relativity of knowledge to him who
knows, openly professed to teach _political_ wisdom, and despised all
other kinds of knowledge in comparison with it. Gorgias, on the other
hand, though he wrote a famous treatise with the very Hegelian title
“concerning nature or the non-existent,” devoted his main attention
to _rhetoric_, and was truly the father of technical Greek oratory.
For though we hear of Corax and Tisias in Sicily, and of Empedocles,
as having cultivated the art, the first recognized theorist and
practical speaker was Gorgias. He not only delivered set speeches, but
so trained himself as to deliver elegant discourses on any proposed
subject, apparently without preparation, but of course with the help of
a clever system of well-arranged commonplaces, which he applied with
quickness and variety. The philosophy of Prodicus was chiefly ethical,
and his apologues were very popular and quoted in after-days. But
more important were his _grammatical_ studies, whereby he fixed the
parts of speech, and laid the groundwork of the grammar of the modern
languages of Europe. Indeed, the strict attention to form shown by all
the Sophists led them to study language with peculiar care, and they
were the forefathers of modern philologists in this as in some other
respects.
A great many more Sophists are known by name, some of them depicted or
maligned in Plato’s dialogues, such as Thrasymachus, Polus, Euenus;
but they do not present to us any special features. All are said to
have insisted on the dictates of society as superior to any supposed
law of nature, and this Hobbism has brought upon them the anathemas of
moralists. Within the century 470-370 B.C. their part was played out;
and even Plato, in his later works, no longer thinks them worthy of
refutation.