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deceit . Certain Church of England writers , in the * Quarterly Review ' and other publications , have , for the base purpose of discrediting free institutions and freedom of inquiry , on the one hand exaggerated grossly the mischievous tendency ot what the Sophists taught ; and on the other , represented them as enjoying great favour and importance in the free States of Greece , and particularly at Athens ; just as the same
writers have represented the persons called Sycophants ( that is , people who stirred up vexatious prosecutions in the Athenian courts of justice ) as especial favourites with the * sovereign multitude / in the face of the overwhelming evidence which the whole mass of Athenian literature affords , that these persons were as odious to the people as the lowest class of pettifogging attorneys , or even common informers , in our own country . With regard to the Sophists , this very dialogue of Plato
affords ( as will be seen ) strong evidence that when he began to write , they were already in very ill repute ; while all that is really known of them tends to throw great doubt upon their having , as a class , really deserved that degree of obloquy . All inquirers into abstract truth , except mathematicians—all who were afterwards called Philosophers , ( a term of which Socrates is believed to have been the inventor , ) had , before his time , been confounded together under that older name : and such
are seldom popular with the mass of mankind ; witness the House of Commons , and most public assemblies in this country . Among the Sophists were comprised all the earlier inquirers into physical nature , along with all the earliest moralists and metaphysicians ; and though there were among the latter , as was inevitable in the infancy of science , as there are in Plato himself , much fallacy and verbal quibbling , there by no means appears to have been a greater proportion of doctrines having a pernicious tendency , than has existed in all ages .
It does not seem to be the object of the present dialogue to expose the errors or false pretensions of the Sophists in general , or of Protagoras in Earticular ; for although Protagoras is confuted , and made to contradict imself again and again , after the usual manner of Plato , and is occasionally made somewhat ridiculous , for being only able to harangue , and not to discuss ; ( the complaint which Plato never ceases to urge against the Sophists ;) yet , when he is Buffered to state his sentiments at length , what
he utters is by no means either absurd or immoral , but , on the contrary , sound and useful good sense , forcibly expressed , or , at the lowest , an able pleading in favour of the side he espouses , on whatever question the discussion happens for the moment to turn upon ; and this , too , although the opinions of Protagoras on the nature , sources , and limits of human knowledge , are , in other places , the subject of Plato ' s warm , but not disrespectful , attacks * . If it be possible , therefore , to assign any specific and decided
• The metaphysical doctrines of Protagoras seem to have been , in their fundamental points , not very remote from those of David Hume . Diogenes Laertius enumerates his principal tenets thus : ' That man is the measure of all truth ; ( or , in other words , that all things are only what they appear to the percipient mind ;) and that the mind itself is nothing but a series of sensations . ' ( if Ac yi n f&ti&v « " «< ^ v ^ v « v * ra { ras «/ V 9-n < ri / f . One of his works commenced thus : — ' Concerning the gods , 1 am unable to know
whether they exist or do not exist ; for there are many hinderances to such knowledgethe obscurity of the subject , and the shortness of human life . ' «•¦ # ) / ui » £ i £ » * lx t % » ilaivtti , i 7 d' * t uV ) y , it ? » g ovk licit . < roX . \ ac y *( < r « x » x 6 avr <* u'diw */ , jf ti aln \»* rnfy *«' & ( "XUf *» * & *•* r » Z * v&e ~ irov . For these sceptical" doctrines the biographer adds that Protagoras was , at an advanced age , banished from Athens , and his writings collected from all who possessed them , and burnt in the public market-place ; an
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92 Plato ' s Dialogues ; the Protagoras *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1834, page 92, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2630/page/4/
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