of the mere body, the importance he attaches to insight or Wisdom, especially as releasing from the fear of death and what comes after death,-these have all their counterpart in the Epicurean doctrine. The main part, however, of the moral teaching of Democritus—so far as we can judge of it from the mere fragments handed down to us—seems to have been of the unsystematic kind that belongs to the preSocratic period; and many of his utterances—as, e.g. that it is worse to do than to suffer injustice, that not only wrong-doing but wrong-wishing is bad and hateful,- -seem the naive expression of an elevated strain of moral sentiment which has not been reduced to any rational coherence with his view of ultimate Good. On the whole, we may that what remains of the moral treatises of Democritus is sufficient to enable us to conjecture how the turn of Greek philosophy in the direction of ethics, which was actually due to Socrates, might have taken place without him; but it does not justify us in attributing to their author more than a rudimentary apprehension of the formal conditions which moral teaching must fulfil before it can lay claim to be treated as scientific.

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The truth is that a moral system could not be satisfactorily constructed until attention had been strongly directed to the vagueness and inconsistency of the common moral opinions of mankind; until this was done, the moral counsels of the philosopher, however supreme his contempt for the common herd, inevitably shared these defects. For this purpose there was needed the concentration of a philosophic intellect of the first order on the problems of practice. In Socrates, for the first time, we find the required combination of a paramount interest in conduct, and an ardent desire for knowledge; a desire, at the same time, that was repelled

from the physical and metaphysical inquiries which had absorbed the main attention of his predecessors, by a profound dissatisfaction with the results of their speculations, and a consequent disbelief in the possibility of penetrating the secret of the physical universe. The doctrines of these thinkers, he said, were at once so extravagant and so mutually contradictory, that they were "like madmen disputing." A similar negative attitude towards the whole antecedent series of dogmatic philosophers had already found expression in the sweeping scepticism of Gorgias, who declared that the essential nature of things which the philosophers investigated did not exist, or at any rate could not be known, or if known, could not be stated; and also in the famous proposition of Protagoras, that human apprehension is the only standard of what is and what is not. In the case of Socrates, however, such a view found further support in a naive piety that indisposed him to search. into things of which the gods seemed to have reserved the knowledge to themselves. The regulation of human action, on the other hand (except on occasions of special difficulty, for which omens and oracles might be vouchsafed), they had left to human reason; on this accordingly Socrates concentrated his efforts.

The demand for a reasoned theory of good conduct was § 2. The not, however, original in Socrates, though his conception of age of the Sophists the requisite knowledge was so in the highest degree. The (circ. 450-· 400 B.C.) thought of the most independent thinker is conditioned by that of his age; and we cannot disconnect the work of Socrates from the professional instruction in the art of conduct-given by a group of persons who have since been commonly described as "Sophists"-which is so striking a phenomenon of this period of Greek civilisation. Of the

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professional "teachers of virtue" or "human excellence," to whom this name was applied, the most brilliant and impressive appears to have been Protagoras of Abdera, to whose philosophic doctrine I just now referred; and it is not improbable that the original notion of imparting instruction in virtue by means of lectures was due to this vigorous and enterprising thinker, whom we may suppose to have been turned, like Socrates, to the study of human affairs in consequence of his negative attitude towards current ontological speculation. The instruction, however, that was actually given by Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippias, and other sophists, does not seem to have been based on any philosophical system, and was in fact of too popular a quality to be of much philosophical importance. It seems to have combined somewhat loosely the art of getting on in the world with the art of managing public affairs, and to have mingled encomiastic expositions of different virtues with prudential justifications of virtue, as a means of obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain; of these latter the best example that has come down to us is the fable of the Choice of Hercules, attributed to Prodicus. But however commonplace the teaching of the "sophists" may have been, the general fact of the appearance of this new profession to meet a new

1 οἱ φάσκοντες παιδεύειν ἀνθρώπους εἰς ἀρετήν (Plato, Gorg, p. 519), cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia, I., ch. ii. åpetǹv èπayyeλóμevos. It must not be supposed that this profession was made by all the popular lecturers to whom the name "Sophist" was currently given; but it was evidently made, in a marked and impressive manner, by an important group among them.

As I afterwards explain, the word ȧperý has a somewhat wider meaning than our "virtue"; I have therefore added "human excellence" as an alternative translation: still the term as applied to human beings would most prominently suggest the moral excellences which we call "virtues."

social need is sufficiently remarkable. In order to understand the originality of this work and the social impression produced by it, we have to conceive of a society full of eager intellectual activity, and with æsthetic sensibility stimulated and cultivated by works of contemporary art that have remained the wonder of the world, but entirely without any official or established teaching of morality: a society in which Homer, one may say, occupied the place of the Bible. Now Homer supplies nothing like the ten commandments: but he does supply more or less impressive notions of human excellences and defects of various kinds-qualities of conduct and character that drew strong utterances of liking and aversion from those who took note of them. And in the vigorous and concentrated social life developed since Homer's time in the city-states of Greece—and especially intense in Athens in the 5th century—the praise and blame attached to such qualities would naturally grow in fulness of expression and fineness of discrimination. In the genus of human excellence, Virtues or moral excellences would constitute the most prominent group; though not yet clearly distinguished from intellectual skills and gifts, and graces of social behaviour. And no well-bred Greek gentleman—no one deserving the name of “fair and good" (kaλokάyalós)—would doubt that the different species of moral excellence were qualities to be desired, objects that a man should aim at possessing. He might indeed have no very definite notion of their rank or place in the class of good or desirable things; he might be more or less troubled by the apparent incompatibility occasionally perceived between the exercise of virtue and the attainment of pleasure, wealth, or power; he might even doubt how far virtue, though admittedly good and desirable, was always worth the

sacrifice of other goods. Still such doubts would only occur transiently and occasionally to the few; in the view of impartial spectators the beauty of virtue would only be made more manifest by its triumphing over seductive desires directed to other objects; thus an ordinary well-trained Athenian would be as simply confident that it was good for a man to be virtuous-and the more virtuous the betteras that it was good for him to be wise, healthy, beautiful, and rich.

When, therefore, Protagoras or any other sophist came forward to teach Virtue or excellence of conduct, he would not find in his audience any general recognition of a possible divergence between Virtue and Self-interest properly conceived. They would understand that in proD fessing to show them "how to live well and manage well one's own affairs," he was claiming to guide them to the best way of living, from the points of view of both Virtue and Self-interest at once. It may, however, be asked how the need and advantage of such guidance came to be so generally recognised, as the success of the sophists shows it to have been. How came it that after so many centuries, in which the Greeks must have applied their moral notions in distributing praise and blame, with unhesitating confidence, —and must have attributed to any cause rather than imperfect knowledge the extensive failure of men to realise virtue, they should suddenly become persuaded that good conduct was something that could be learned from lectures? The answer to this question is partly to be found in that very fusion of the moral view of life with the prudential view, which I have just described, in consequence of which the virtues which the sophists professed to impart by teaching were not sharply distinguished by them from other