The sophists have other claims to consideration than their service to the development of logic. In the history of the origins of logic the sophistic age is simply the age of the free play of thought in which men were aware that in a sense anything can be debated and not yet aware of the sense in which The Sophists. all things cannot be so. It is the age of discussion used as a universal solvent, before it has been brought to book by a deliberate unfolding of the principles of the structure of thought determining and limiting the movement of thought itself. The sophists furthered the transition from dialectic to logic in two ways. In the first place they made it possible. Incessant questioning leads to answers. Hair-splitting, even when mischievous in intent, leads to distinctions of value. Paradoxical insistence on the accidents of speech-forms and thought-forms leads in the end to perception of the essentials. Secondly they made it necessary. The spirit of debate run riot evokes a counter-spirit to order and control it. The result is a self-limiting dialectic. This higher dialectic is a logic. It is no accident that the first of the philosophical sophists, Gorgias, on the one hand, is Eleatic in his affinities, and on the other raises in the characteristic formula of his intellectual nihilism[1] issues which are as much logical and epistemological as ontological. The meaning of the copula and the relation of thoughts to the objects of which they are the thoughts are as much involved as the nature of being. It is equally no accident that the name of Protagoras is to be connected, in Plato’s view at least, with the rival school of Heracliteans. The problems raised by the relativism of Protagoras are no less fundamentally problems of the nature of knowledge and of the structure of thought. The Theaetetus indeed, in which Plato essays to deal with them, is in the broad sense of the word logical, the first distinctively logical treatise that has come down to us. Other sophists, of course, with more practical interests, or of humbler attainments, were content to move on a lower plane of philosophical speculation. As presented to us, for example, in Plato’s surely not altogether hostile caricature in the Euthydemus, they mark the intellectual preparation for, and the moral need for, the advance of the next generation.
Among the pioneers of the sophistic age Socrates stands apart. He has no other instrument than the dialectic of his compeers, and he is as far off as the rest from a criticism of the instrument, but he uses it differently and with a difference of aim. He construes the give and take of the debate-game with extreme Socrates. rigour. The rhetorical element must be exorcised. The set harangue of teacher to pupil, in which steps in argument are slurred and the semblance of co-inquiry is rendered nugatory, must be eliminated. The interlocutors must in truth render an account under the stimulus of organized heckling from their equals or superiors in debating ability. And the aim is heuristic, though often enough the search ends in no overt positive conclusion. Something can be found and something is found. Common names are fitted for use by the would-be users being first delivered from abortive conceptions, and thereupon enabled to bring to the birth living and organic notions.
Aristotle would assign to Socrates the elaboration of two logical functions:—general definition and inductive method.[2] Rightly, if we add that he gives no theory of either, and that his practical use of the latter depends for its value on selection.[3] It is rather in virtue of his general faith in the possibility of construction, which he still does not undertake, and because of his consequent insistence on the elucidation of general concepts, which in common with some of his contemporaries, he may have thought of as endued with a certain objectivity, that he induces the controversies of what are called the Socratic schools as to the nature of predication. These result in the formulation of a new dialectic or logic by Plato. Manifestly Socrates’ use of certain forms of argumentation, like their abuse by the sophists, tended to evoke their logical analysis. The use and abuse, confronted one with the other, could not but evoke it.
The one in the many, the formula which lies at the base of the possibility of predication, is involved in the Socratic doctrine of general concepts or ideas. The nihilism of Gorgias from the Eleatic point of view of bare identity, and the speechlessness of Cratylus from the Heraclitean ground of absolute difference, are alike disowned. But the one in the many, the identity in difference, is so far only postulated, not established. When the personality of Socrates is removed, the difficulty as to the nature of the Socratic universal, developed in the medium of the individual processes of individual minds, carries disciples of diverse general sympathies, united only through the practical inspiration of the master’s life, towards the identity-formula or the difference-formula of other teachers. The paradox of predication, that it seems to deny identity, or to deny difference, becomes a pons asinorum. Knowledge involves synthesis or nexus. Yet from the points of view alike of an absolute pluralism, of a flux, and of a formula of bare identity—and a fortiori with any blending of these principles sufficiently within the bounds of plausibility to find an exponent—all knowledge, because all predication of unity, in difference, must be held to be impossible. Plato’s problem was to find a way of escape from this impasse, and among his Socratic contemporaries he seems to have singled out Antisthenes[4] as most in need of refutation. Antisthenes, starting with the doctrine of Antisthenes. identity without difference, recognizes as the only expression proper to anything its own peculiar sign, its name. This extreme of nominalism for which predication is impossible is, however, compromised by two concessions. A thing can be described as like something else. And a compound can have a λόγος or account given of it by the (literally) adequate enumeration of the names of its simple elements or πρῶτα.[5] This analytical λόγος he offers as his substitute for knowledge.[6] The simple elements still remain, sensed and named but not known. The expressions of them are simply the speech-signs for them. The account of the compound simply sets itself taken piecemeal as equivalent to itself taken as aggregate. The subject-predicate relation fails really to arise. Euclides[7] found no difficulty in fixing Antisthenes’ mode of illustrating his simple elements by comparison, and therewith perhaps the “induction” of Socrates, with the dilemma; so far as the example is dissimilar, the comparison is invalid; so far as it is similar, it is useless. It is better to say what the thing is. Between Euclides and Antisthenes the Socratic induction and universal definition were alike discredited from the point of view of the Eleatic logic. It is with the other point of doctrine that Plato comes to grips, that which allows of a certainty or knowledge consisting in an analysis of a compound into simple elements themselves not known. The syllable or combination is, he shows, not known by resolution of it into letters or elements themselves not known. An aggregate analysed into its mechanical parts is as much and as little known as they. A whole which is more than its parts is from Antisthenes’ point of view inconceivable. Propositions analytical of a combination in the sense alleged do not give knowledge. Yet knowledge is possible. The development of a positive theory of predication has become quite crucial.
Plato’s logic supplies a theory of universals in the doctrine of ideas. Upon this it bases a theory of predication, which, however, is compatible with more than one reading of the metaphysical import of the ideas. And it sets forth a dialectic with a twofold movement, towards differentiation Plato. and integration severally, which amounts to a formulation of inference. The more fully analysed movement, that which proceeds downward from less determinate to more determinate universals, is named Division. Its associations, accordingly, are to the modern ear almost inevitably those of a doctrine of classification only. Aristotle, however, treats it as a dialectical rival to syllogism, and it influenced Galilei and Bacon in their views of inference after the Renaissance. If we add to this logic of “idea,” judgment and inference, a doctrine of categories in the modern sense of the word which makes the Theaetetus, in which it first occurs, a forerunner of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we have clearly a very significant contribution to logic even in technical regard. Its general philosophical setting may be said to enhance its value even as logic.
(a) Of the idea we may say that whatever else it is, and apart from all puzzles as to ideas of relations such as smallness, of negative qualities such as injustice, or of human inventions such as beds, it is opposed to that of which it is the idea as its intelligible formula or law, the truth The “Idea.” or validity—Herbart’s word—of the phenomenon from the point of view of nexus or system. The thing of sense in its relative isolation is unstable. It is and is not. What gives stability is the insensible principle or principles which it holds, as it were, in solution. These are the ideas, and their mode of being is naturally quite other than that of the sensible phenomena which they order. The formula for an indefinite number of particular things in particular places at particular times, and all of them presentable in sensuous imagery of a given time and place, is not itself presentable in sensuous imagery side by side with the individual members of the group it orders. The law, e.g., of the equality of the radii of a circle cannot be exhibited to sense, even if equal radii may be so exhibited. It is the wealth of illustration with which Plato expresses his meaning, and the range of application which he gives the idea—to the class-concepts
- ↑ Nothing is. If anything is, it cannot be known. If anything is known it cannot be communicated.
- ↑ Metaphys. μ. 1078b 28 sqq.
- ↑ Cf. Arist. Top. θ. i. 1 ad fin.
- ↑ For whom see Dümmler, Antisthenica (1882, reprinted in his Kleine Schriften, 1901).
- ↑ Aristotle, Metaphys. 1024b 32 sqq.
- ↑ Plato, Theaetetus, 201 E. sqq., where, however, Antisthenes is not named, and the reference to him is sometimes doubted. But cf. Aristotle, Met. H 3. 1043b 24-28.
- ↑ Diog. Laërt. ii. 107.
