The Sophists. 149 that we have sufficient evidence, direct and indirect, to show that their teaching may have been and if logically carried out to its natural consequences must have been mischievous and corrupting in its effects : that they may fairly be charged with a most culpable carelessness of the immediate consequences of their teaching, ethical, philosophical, and rhetorical 1 : that they heedlessly disseminated principles of reasoning the tendency, though not the object, of which was to undermine the foundation of men's religious, moral, social, and philosophical creed, and left it to others to deduce the consequences. That others were not slow to deduce them, appears from the case of Callicles a pupil of Gorgias, and therefore the very best instance that could be adduced to show the use that was likely to be made of their in- structions (see p. 531) who is represented in the Gorgias as advancing anti-social doctrines. What seems to me capable of being satisfactorily made out from the representations of the Greek writers themselves is, that in the latter half of the 5th century before Christ there existed in Greece a set of teachers who were distinguished from their predecessors and contemporaries by the profession of teaching virtue, with which they conjoined the new art of rhe- toric and certain exaggerated literary and philosophical preten- sions, and by receiving pay for their instructions in these arts ; and that their pretensions were devoid of any solid foundation : that they had certain common personal characteristics, and a common method of teaching and reasoning : and above all, that the opinions, philosophical, moral, and religious which they held and the instruction they imparted in these various branches were in the view not only of the Athenian public, but also of some of the wisest men and most competent judges that Greece and the world ever beheld, mischievous and dangerous in their 1 The object and effect of their true art of rhetoric,, and condemns it in teaching of rhetoric is expressed in the the most decided terms. It is no de- phrase rbv tjttu) yov KpeirTO) xoielv, fence of this practice to say that modern |!"to make the unjust or inferior cause lawyers do the same, (p. 501): this prevail over the just and true." could at the best go no further than to See on this point Arist. Rhet. II. 24. show that such kind of rhetorical prac- ult., who attributes the practice ex- tice is a necessary evil, not that it is no pressly to Protagoras, rb JJpurrayopov evil, or has no tendency to confound Trdyyefxa, distinguishes it from the men's notions of right and wrong.
