THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERIOD (490–399 B. C.):
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAN
=An Historical Summary of the Anthropological Period.= The
Anthropological Period begins with the Persian Wars, 490 and
480 B. C. After the battle of Marathon there sprang up a distinct
impulse toward knowledge all over Greece; and detailed investigations
were begun in mathematics, astronomy, biology, medicine, history,
and physics. Science, which had up to this time been unorganized and
undifferentiated, now became sharply divided into the special sciences.
But what makes the Persian Wars of particular importance is that they
are the starting-point in the motherland of the movement in the study
of man and human relations. The battle of Marathon does not therefore
mark the end of the Cosmological movement and the waning of the Greeks’
interest in science; but it marks rather the beginning in Athens of
the Anthropological movement. The Cosmological and the Anthropological
Periods overlap.
The Anthropological Period easily divides itself into three epochs from
the point of view of its political affairs:――
1. The Persian Wars, 490 and 480 B. C.
2. The Age of Pericles, 467–428 B. C.
3. The Peloponnesian Wars, 432–403 B. C.
The first epoch is the birth and the last epoch the decadence of pure
Greek civilization, while the thirty-nine years of the supremacy of
Pericles cover the ripest period of Greek life. In this connection
it is well to mention Hegel’s thought that nations do not ripen
intellectually until they begin to decay politically (“The owl of
Minerva does not start upon its flight until the evening twilight
has begun to fall”). Plato and Aristotle do not come until after this
period, when Greek political life had begun to wane.
The following table is a partial list of the notable men of the period,
with the date of their _birth_:――
Æschylus, 525 (dramatist before Pericles).
Sophocles, 495 (dramatist during Age of Pericles).
Phidias, 490.
Euripides, 480 (dramatist of the Sophistic and the new learning).
Herodotus, 475.
Thucydides, 471.
Xenophon, 430?
Aristophanes, 444.
Anaxagoras, 500.
Empedocles, 495.
Protagoras, 480.
Democritus, 470.
Sophists (many), 450–350.
Socrates, 469.
Antisthenes, 440.
Aristippus, 435.
Plato, 427.
=The Persian Wars and the Rise of Athens.= The blow that had been
impending over Greece during the sixth century had been struck,
but had been averted in the Persian Wars of 490 B. C. and 480 B. C.
The powerful and splendidly organized “barbaric neighbor,” who had
threatened the civilization of the Greek cities of Asia Minor for so
many years, had swept over the Hellespont into Greece and had been
turned back. It has been pointed out[14] that the Persian Wars were
only one of a series of conflicts between Oriental and Occidental
civilizations; and that the strip of Asia Minor along the Mediterranean
has always been a disputed borderland between irreconcilable
hemispheres. First was the mythical invasion of Troy; then the Persian
Wars; then came the arms of Alexander conquering Persia; then the
invasion of the Mohammedans to the very walls of Tours; then the
Crusades; and to-day we still have the eternal Eastern question with
us. While each of these conflicts was momentous for Europe, none was
more important in its issues for the world than the Persian Wars. For
through those wars did Greece first come to a consciousness of herself.
Never before did she realize her united strength,――the greatness of
her inherited instincts. The fifth century B. C. was the most clearly
conscious moment of Greece, if not of the world. Classic Greece――the
Greece whose thought became fundamental to western civilization――was
born from the Persian Wars.
The centre of gravity of the Greek world was shifted after the Persian
Wars from Miletus to Athens, from the colonies to the motherland.
Indeed, the history of classic Greece is almost entirely the history
of Athens. Of the large cities of Greece,――Corinth, Ægina, Sparta, and
Thebes,――Athens was naturally the locality where Grecian civilization
would centre when the commercial and maritime colonies fell. The Ionian
race, by whom it had been settled, was a mixed race, and by nature very
versatile. Before the Persian Wars it had been under the wise tyranny
of Pisistratus, who took the first steps toward the founding of an
Athenian empire. In the period between the two wars, Themistocles had
built the Athenian fleet and thereby made Athens the great maritime
and naval centre of Greece. There was, indeed, every reason why Athens
and not some other Grecian city should become the new centre of classic
Greece. The Spartans were oligarchical, stern, unintellectual, and
offensive to strangers; the people of Thebes were held under a strict
aristocratic government, the people of Thessaly were aristocratic,
luxurious, and stagnant; but the Athenians were democratic, social to
strangers, literary, liberal, frugal, and alert. After the Persian Wars
the power of the Delian confederacy became more and more centralized
in the city of Athens. Controlling the fleet of the Confederacy for her
own defense and using the rich treasury of the Confederacy for her own
municipal improvements, Athens under the brilliant rule of Pericles,
who summoned scholars and artists from all Greece, was the only city
of Greece where the Renaissance of Greece was possible. Athens had
become the eye of Greece, and the following description of the Greek
Renaissance is especially significant in regard to her.
=The Greek Enlightenment.= Following the Persian Wars there arose
throughout Greece a great national intellectual movement. The years
mark the Greek Renaissance, the Age of Pericles, and the time when
the Greek masterpieces in literature and plastic art were produced.
Perhaps the greatest Greek production was Athens itself, whose cultural
influence was personified in the scholar-politician, Pericles.
1. _The Impulse for Learning._ In the first place there was a general
impulse throughout Greece for education. Everybody seemed to want to
know what the schools of Cosmologists had had to say about science. The
Greeks now had wealth and therefore leisure; they had come into contact
with the Oriental peoples and therefore they had their curiosity
excited. Learning, which had been confined in the Cosmological Period
to a few scholars in the schools, now came forth into the market place.
Learning in the fifth century B. C. was drawn from the schools into
publicity. The objects of interest had greatly widened and the learning
of the scholars began to filter into the general consciousness. Whereas
in the sixth century philosophy was a matter between learned men, in
the fifth century we find Socrates and the Sophists teaching whosoever
would listen.
2. _The Practical Need of Knowledge._ But mere curiosity will not
entirely explain the Greek intellectual movement. There had grown up
an imperative practical need for knowledge. In Athens and other Greek
cities the democracy of the fifth century B. C. had supplanted the
tyranny of the sixth century. Duty and inclination together forced
the citizen into active participation in public affairs. In these
democratic cities family tradition and character were no longer
sufficient for success; but it became generally recognized that the
most useful and successful man was the educated man. The complex
relations existing between states and between the citizens in the
states made education absolutely necessary for the politician. Nowhere
was the need of an education more imperative than in Athens; nowhere
was the need more easily filled. In a very short time after the Persian
Wars the social position of science changed to one of power; and the
inner character of science changed from the study of nature to the
study of ethical and political problems. Scientists became teachers of
eloquence, for the citizen now needed to be an orator and a rhetorician.
Statesmen and generals must know how to persuade. Courts of law were
public, their proceeding oral, and personal attendance was therefore
required. There was no man in Athens who might not be condemned, if
he could not personally in court refute falsehoods and disentangle
sophistries. Besides, to be beaten in debate was as disgraceful in the
eyes of the public as to lose one’s cause.
Two classes of men, with an importance hitherto unknown, appear in
Greek history,――the rhetoricians and the dialecticians. _Rhetoric_ was
public oratory, necessary for the public defense of one’s rights, or
for the maintenance of one’s dignity, or for the gratification of one’s
ambition. The _dialectic_ was, on the other hand, argument employed in
private between two persons, usually friends, to unravel an obscurity,
to reduce an opponent to silence, to exercise one’s self in the mastery
of a subject, or to sift evidence. The dialectic, therefore, became
a distinct mental pursuit for men who had a natural defect in public
speaking or rhetoric. Besides rhetoric and dialectic, there grew up
somewhat later what was called the eristic. _Eristic_ was polemical
argument consisting of catch-phrases and logical subtleties. It was
taught as an art of adroit argument.
The great Greek tragedies occupy a place in the development of
the dialectic and the satisfying of the need of knowledge. Science,
through the drama, transformed the old religious views and brought
its new interpretation to the common people. The development of the
fifth-century drama out of the epic of the sixth century was not merely
a change in architectonic, but a transformation of its ethical and
religious spirit. The germ was in the previous ethics, lyrics, and
gnomics, yet it was fully amplified in the drama. Instead of a summary
of deeds the tragic poet makes his characters talk, defend, refute,
accuse, lament, etc. This gives rise to exigencies that require the
dialectic. In the conflicting duties and in the justification of the
wrong done by the wrong suffered, dialectical skill is called for in
the drama to weigh the ethical motives in a manner that the epic does
not demand. Thus the drama of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was a
link between the lyric and gnomic poetry of the sixth century B. C. and
the dialogue literature of Plato.[15]
3. _The Critical Attitude of Mind._ The most important characteristic
of this period is neither the intensified social curiosity nor the
increased social needs. It is rather ethical in its character. It is
the “critical” or “individualistic” attitude of mind. This began with
the “free city feeling”――the consciousness of the free man in a free
state――in the first half of the fifth century B. C., and developed
rapidly into individualism and critical skepticism toward the end of
that century.
If one were to compare in a single word the history of Greece before
the Persian Wars with that after the Persian Wars, he would say that
the former was traditional and the latter was critical. Nevertheless,
at the beginning of the Cosmological Period Greek traditional customs
were being weakened by attacks upon them. Religious ideas were
threatened by the Cosmologists. The subordination of the gods to the
cosmic substance was an attack upon the established polytheism of the
Epic, and the attack became direct in the hands of Xenophanes. It was
“the divestiture of Nature of its gods by science.” The Mysteries were
a part of this departure from the traditional religion. But the new
and more critical scientific attitude toward traditional religion was
only incidental to the growing criticism of law. In the days of the
oligarchy there were two self-evident political assumptions: (1) that
law has validity because it is law; (2) that obedience to law is for
one’s advantage. When, however, the political disturbances began, a
self-conscious individualism developed among the Greeks. The Gnomic
Poets had been the first to appeal to the individual consciousness
of the people. All through the sixth century B. C. Greece had stern
experiences, and the individual found himself questioning the sanctity
of tradition and of time-honored laws. There was no longer a tacit
acquiescence in established order, and the claims of authority were no
longer, as formerly, unchallenged. Confidence in political assumptions
began to waver, and a critical attitude was taken toward laws which
changed from year to year. The appearance everywhere of the tyrant, the
vigorous personality who could set up his will against the will of a
traditional aristocracy, impressed the age with the power of individual
egoism. The seat of authority was shifted from tradition to the
individual reason, and all institutions were brought under individual
criticism.
The Persian Wars mark the point of transition from the traditional
attitude to the critical attitude of the Greek mind. In themselves the
Persian Wars were a great moral uplift, and were a return for a time
to the traditional institutions. The changes long since begun were
suspended for a time in the united effort of the Greek nation. But
the tendencies became more insistent when the danger was past. The
Persian Wars had cleared the atmosphere of its pessimism and had given
freedom to the intellectual movement. Then later, in the heat of that
intellectual movement, individualism and criticism came to fullest
fruitage. Doubt grew into positive skepticism.
In the last part of the fifth century B. C., critical skepticism became
universal. In religion the anthropomorphism of the Epic passes under
ridicule. Critias declares that the gods are the invention of shrewd
statecraft. In literature the Epic, in which the gods interfere in all
human details, yields to the naturalistic descriptions of Herodotus
and Thucydides, and to the personal note of lyric and satirical poetry.
More important than all was the change of attitude toward the laws.
Instead of the law having a divine authority, the individual placed
himself above it and sat in judgment upon it. The tribal conception
of guilt, that when a member of a tribe sinned the whole tribe would
suffer at the hands of the gods, had given way at the time of the
Persian Wars to that of personal responsibility and retribution. It
was noted that laws change in the same state, that they differ in
different states, and that moral customs have a great variety. All laws
seem therefore to be made by man, and the question then arose, Is there
any law which has universal validity? Is there any real _prius_ or
“Nature” of laws? In the Anthropological Period, the important question
was about the real _prius_ or “Nature” of human institutions, just
as in the Cosmological Period the question was about the real _prius_
or “Nature” of the world of physical phenomena. Yet the question
of the Anthropologists was a part of the Cosmological problem. The
Cosmologists had called the real _prius_ or “Nature” (φύσις), that
which ever remains like itself, and it is now asked if “Nature” in
itself contains any unchanging and eternal politico-moral law. The
contrast is thus drawn for all time between natural law and statute law,
and the distinction dominates this period. Human legal institutions
were regarded as only makeshifts, and often even as contradicting the
divine law. The conflict between natural or divine law and human law
appears worked out in the _Antigone_ of Sophocles.
The same interest in the foundations of morality and moral relations
opened up the whole subject of the power of human consciousness to
discern such relations. It was a logical necessity that turned thought
from a review of man’s relations with his fellows to a criticism of his
own constitution. What is man? What are his faculties? Has he any that
give him the truth and the reality? Or do they all deceive him so that
he cannot detect the real from the sham of life? What are the mental
faculties used in disputation, and how are they to be trained so that
man may rise to an eminence of culture among his fellows? The Greek
thus turned to a criticism of his knowing faculties, and the positive
social and moral demands made such a criticism necessary to his
well-being. Greek science took a strong anthropological direction, and
logic, ethics, psychology, rhetoric, etc., took the place of natural
science subjects. The Greek in the fifth century B. C. was interested
in man――in his inner activities, his ideations and volitions. Of
this critical and individualistic attitude Euripides is the literary
exponent; Pericles is the political personification; Socrates and the
Sophists are its philosophical expression.
=The Significance of the Sophists.= The Sophists were the direct means
of bringing this intellectual change into Greek life. They were the
bearers of this Greek Enlightenment, and they were the missionaries
that spread its influence far and wide. This significance of the
Sophists to the culture of Greece was never understood by the historian
until Hegel set them in their true light. The dark side of their
character has been painted in blackest colors, so that the word
“Sophist” has carried an opprobrium with it. They were, however,
the exponents of the Greek illumination, and not the cause of it.
They therefore share all its weaknesses and its excellencies; and
any judgment upon them is a judgment upon the time itself. The most
accurate description of them is that they were the exponents of Greek
culture in the age of Pericles; the worst that can be said of them
is that they stimulated the Greek spirit in directions in which it
should have been controlled. Their true work was to carry the gospel
of Greek individualism everywhere; their fault lay in the fact that
too frequently they confused individualism with hypocrisy, and led
their hearers to believe that appearance knowledge is the same as true
knowledge.
The word “Sophist” had a development among the Greeks. It first
meant a wise man (the Cosmologists, from Thales to Anaxagoras, were
Sophists); then a teacher of wisdom; then a paid teacher of wisdom.
Moreover, among the Sophists there is a difference between the early
Sophists, who were inspired by a distinct desire to spread culture,
and the later Sophists, who were mercenary teachers, and had on that
account degenerated into mere quibblers. In general, the ground of
the contemporary hostility to the Sophists was the hatred of the
conservative and reactionary party, to which belonged Aristophanes
the satirist, Æschylus “the father of tragedy,” and the exponent of
institutional morals, and Xenophon, who stood for a complete return to
a patriarchal state. This party was very bitter against the exponents
of the new and radical spirit springing up in Greece. All the
philosophers of the new learning, including Socrates, suffered at the
hands of those who would conserve the old traditions. In particular,
the accusations against the Sophists of this period were: they were
cavilers; they taught for pay; they represented the universalizing of
education against the old aristocracy; they menaced institutions.
The Sophists were then primarily and, on the whole, the transmitters
to the people of the culture of the time. They were the teachers of
the humanities to that age. They were not technically philosophers,
but were interested in philosophical questions. Protagoras was the only
Sophist who was the author of any fruitful philosophical conceptions.
Gorgias made occasional essays into philosophy. But besides Protagoras
and Gorgias no other Sophists can be classed as philosophers, except
possibly Hippias and Prodicus.
The Sophists introduced a profusion of knowledge among the people. They
made investigations in language, logic, and the theory of cognition.
They taught literature, history, grammar, the principles of the
dialectic, the eristic, and rhetoric――all subjects concerned with the
art of human expression. They studied and taught the special subjects
concerned with human relations, like ethics, the theory of knowledge,
psychology, and politics. Anything that had a place in Greek culture
was systematically and skillfully presented by such men as Protagoras,
Gorgias, Hippias, and Prodicus, who were men of encyclopædic erudition.
The Sophist took the education of the Greek child at the age of sixteen,
after he had received his elementary training, first at home and then
at the hands of the teacher at school. The Greek boy’s education was
naturally divided into two parts: gymnastics for the body and music for
the soul. Under music was included geometry, performance on the lyre,
pronunciation, the chorus and poetry, astronomy, physics, and geography.
At the age of sixteen he got his instruction by meeting public men,
such as the Sophists, in the street, in the Agora, and other public
places. It was at this period of his life that the Sophist took
his education into those higher branches which were necessary for
his success in politics, society, and law. Thus the instruction of
the Sophist was usually for a specific purpose, and thus rhetoric,
dialectic, and the mental sciences were in great demand.
=The Prominent Sophists.= The list of Sophists is a long one. The first
to call himself a Sophist and a teacher of public virtue was, according
to Plato, Protagoras of Abdera. He was also probably the most eminent
of the number. He was born about 480 B. C. Polus and Thrasymachus
were the last; and Aristotle mentions the Sophists as in the past.
So that we may conclude that as a band they existed only one hundred
years (450–350 B. C.). Already at the beginning of the fourth century
(400 B. C.) their importance had greatly diminished. In this hundred
years we find some fourteen or fifteen prominent Sophists. There is,
first, Protagoras, whose theory of knowledge is not only in itself a
contribution to thought, but also of importance as a factor in forming
the materialist atomistic doctrine of the school of Abdera,――the
school of Leucippus and Democritus; Gorgias of Leontini, the head of
an embassy to Athens, a man of eloquence, whose style was imitated
by Thucydides and whom we might have studied in connection with the
Eleatic school, for he carried out still further the doctrines of Zeno;
Prodicus, the pupil of Protagoras and Gorgias, a brilliant man and a
traveler, whose method of instruction was used by Socrates; Hippias,
contemporary of Prodicus, remarkable for his mathematical, physical,
and historical erudition, and a man full of vanity; the brothers,
Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus, teachers of eristic; the rhetorician
Thrasymachus and the rhetoricians of the school of Gorgias, viz., Polus,
Lycophron, Protarchus, and Alcidamus; Evenus, rhetorician, moralist,
and poet; Critias, the leader of the thirty; Callicles and Hippodamus.
Many of these men were reformers. Some (as Alcidamus) were opposed
to the institution of slavery in Greece; some to marriage; some (as
Lycophron) to the nobility; some to the inequality of property; while
Hippodamus was the first to propose an ideal state.
The method of argumentation employed by the Sophists was first to
perplex and confuse their opponents as to what had been taken in the
past as valid. Then they made their opponents ridiculous by drawing out
consequences from their statements. Their conclusions were often verbal
and their witticisms vulgar.[16]
=The Philosophy of the Sophists.= The philosophy of the Sophists was
only the logical following out of the general attitude of the time
toward all traditions. The more the old physical theories fell into
disrepute, the more the changes of the world of politics seemed to
indicate instability everywhere, the more opinions differed on the same
subject,――so much the more did the possibility present itself to the
Sophists of taking two contradictories as equally true, and so much the
faster did the whole Greek world lose faith in any valid truth and in
any certain knowledge. The dogmatism of the Cosmological Period is thus
naturally followed by the skepticism of the Anthropological. Beginning
with the cautious and enlightened relativism of Protagoras, there grew
up a volume of criticism, until the later Sophists applied destructive
doctrines to everything. The best representatives of the philosophical
aspect of the Sophistic movement were Protagoras and Gorgias.
=1. The Relativism of Protagoras.= Although theoretically skepticism
is the centre and logical result of the Sophistic movement, the
teaching of the greatest Sophist, Protagoras, cannot be strictly called
skepticism. Philosophically, skepticism is not the denial of this
or that particular belief as true, but the denial of the existence
of any truth whatever. Protagoras refused to make any positive
statements――either in denial or affirmation――about ultimate truth,
because, as he said, we have no insight whatever into the nature of
absolute truth. Our knowledge is confined to motions and the phenomena
of motion. His teaching would be called in modern times relativism or
phenomenalism. The fundamental principle beneath such a doctrine is
that knowledge is human――never absolute, but always relative.
The relativism of Protagoras was based on two principles: the first
is that of universal change, which he borrowed from Heracleitus;
the second is, so far as we know, original with Protagoras,――that
sense-perception is the only source and only kind of knowledge. In
Heracleitus’ doctrine change is universal, each term of a series of
changes passing into another. The senses are a part of this flux, and
since they are, according to Protagoras, the only source of knowledge,
knowledge is ephemeral and unreal. Reason is extended and continued
sensation. A movement external to the organism stimulates an organ of
the body and is met by a reacting movement of the organ. The result is
perception. Perception being itself a process, each present moment of
perception is the only knowledge. We cannot know things as they are
in themselves; there is no insight into the Being of things over and
above our perceptions. On the contrary, reality is not only what it
perceptually appears for each individual, but also what it appears at
each individual momentary perception.
What is the result of such a theory of knowledge? Protagoras expresses
it well in his famous words, “Man is the measure of all things.” It is
absolute sensationalism. There is no truth except that of the present
moment. Each man sees the truth for himself at the moment of his
perception. It does not matter if another has a different perception.
It does not matter if at the next moment his perception differs. Each
perception exists at the moment, is true, and at that moment is the
only perception. There are as many truths as there are individuals,
as many as there are moments in an individual’s life. Each individual
is the measure of the true, the beautiful, and the good; for a thing
that is good or true to one man may be harmful or false to another.
Metaphysical discussions are vain, for the only reality to prove is
the content of the present moment. All causes and ultimate criteria are
impossible to be known.
=2. The Nihilism of Gorgias.= As the philosophy of Protagoras
teaches that everything is equally true, that of Gorgias teaches that
everything is equally false. Gorgias declared that Being, knowledge,
and the communication of knowledge are impossible. Starting from the
dialectic of the Eleatic, Zeno (as Protagoras started from that of
Heracleitus), Gorgias maintained: (1) Nothing is; (2) If anything
is, it cannot be thought; (3) Even if it can be thought, it cannot be
communicated. The knowledge of the thing is different from the thing;
the expression of the thought in words is different from the thought
itself.
=The Ethics of the Sophists.――The Application of their Critical
Theory to Political Life.= The ethical-political life was of paramount
importance to the Greek. When the later Sophists began to scrutinize
it from the point of view of the individual, their skepticism became
a direct menace to Greek political institutions. The individual became
a law unto himself, and the citizen set himself up as superior to
society. Since the time of the Gnomic poets the content of both moral
and political laws had become more and more a subject of reflection;
and at the time of the Sophists the whole foundation of law was called
in question. When the individual man is declared to be the measure
of all things, all legal and moral institutions hang in the balance.
All rules of conduct and all laws become then artificial and merely
conventional products; and just as there is no standard of truth or
error in knowledge, so there is no standard of good citizenship or
morality. The good man is the prudent man; the good citizen is the
successful and powerful man. Might is right.
Thus the Sophists came to teach such doctrines as these: Laws are
made by the strongest, represent their will, and must be obeyed if
they cannot be disobeyed; it takes a strong man to make a law, but a
stronger to break it; the laws are only conventions invented either
by the many to restrain the powerful few, or by the few to enslave the
many. Even religions are devices of the crafty to enchain the people.
Obedience to law is therefore a matter of personal interest. Happiness
is the most important consideration of the individual. Sometimes
personal interest conflicts with law and law does not then bring
happiness, for criminals are often the most happy. It is not obedience
to law that brings happiness but (Polus) a shrewd calculation of ends
with no regard to right or law. The Sophists made no attempt to put
their theories into execution. They expressed the sentiments of the
Greek people, and Greek public opinion then pointed to segregation and
individualism. Plato said that, after all, the Greek public was the
great Sophist.
It was thus that the distinction arose between positive law and natural
law. Reflecting upon the differences among the constitutions of the
Greek states and upon the constant alterations in these constitutions,
the Sophist concluded that the greater part of them were of human
invention. They were positive laws and were to be contrasted with
natural law, which was such law as is binding on all men equally.
Natural law is therefore of greater worth than positive law, and is
set in antithesis to it. Sir Henry Maine says in his _Ancient Law_ that
the Greeks did not found any system of jurisprudence, because natural
law was always referred to by them in arguing any question. The only
way to find natural law is to strip it of the mass of conventional laws.
The word “nature” has been in its history one of the most ambiguous
of words; and Protagoras’ teaching that “nature” consists of primary
ethical feelings is hardly a complete and satisfactory definition. The
more the theory of the Sophists limited “nature” to human nature, and
to human nature in its capricious and individual aspects, so much the
more did statute laws appear antagonistic to natural law and seem to be
detrimental to it.
Summary.
1. Although a skepticism and a criticism, Sophistry was a relative
advance over the traditionalism and dogmatism of the Cosmologists.
2. Sophistry turned the attention to man and his interests as the
principal object of inquiry.
3. The Sophists stood for freedom of thought by pointing to individual
consciousness as the final court of appeal.
4. Although the Sophists differed very much in their teaching, they had
a mutual dependence and common presuppositions.
5. The Sophists disregarded the likenesses and emphasized the
differences among men.
6. The Sophists built up their doctrines upon the basis of a
sensationalist psychology.