Sophist | Page 5

other of
'Being.' Transferring this to language and thought, we have no
difficulty in apprehending that a proposition may be false as well as
true. The Sophist, drawn out of the shelter which Cynic and Megarian
paradoxes have temporarily afforded him, is proved to be a dissembler
and juggler with words.
The chief points of interest in the dialogue are: (I) the character
attributed to the Sophist: (II) the dialectical method: (III) the nature of
the puzzle about 'Not-being:' (IV) the battle of the philosophers: (V) the
relation of the Sophist to other dialogues.
I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the charlatan,
the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who is not a
teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded, is the
opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal representative
of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and intellectual tendencies of
his own age; the adversary of the almost equally ideal Socrates. He
seems to be always growing in the fancy of Plato, now boastful, now
eristic, now clothing himself in rags of philosophy, now more akin to
the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing, now questioning, until the
final appearance in the Politicus of his departing shadow in the disguise
of a statesman. We are not to suppose that Plato intended by such a
description to depict Protagoras or Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus,
who all turn out to be 'very good sort of people when we know them,'
and all of them part on good terms with Socrates. But he is speaking of
a being as imaginary as the wise man of the Stoics, and whose
character varies in different dialogues. Like mythology, Greek

philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not
merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.),
but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is
reflected.
A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage
of the Republic, where they are described as the followers rather than
the leaders of the rest of mankind. Plato ridicules the notion that any
individuals can corrupt youth to a degree worth speaking of in
comparison with the greater influence of public opinion. But there is no
real inconsistency between this and other descriptions of the Sophist
which occur in the Platonic writings. For Plato is not justifying the
Sophists in the passage just quoted, but only representing their power to
be contemptible; they are to be despised rather than feared, and are no
worse than the rest of mankind. But a teacher or statesman may be
justly condemned, who is on a level with mankind when he ought to be
above them. There is another point of view in which this passage
should also be considered. The great enemy of Plato is the world, not
exactly in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly different--the
world as the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the
pursuit of gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together
against the few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. This
creature has many heads: rhetoricians, lawyers, statesmen, poets,
sophists. But the Sophist is the Proteus who takes the likeness of all of
them; all other deceivers have a piece of him in them. And sometimes
he is represented as the corrupter of the world; and sometimes the
world as the corrupter of him and of itself.
Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic defender in the
distinguished historian of Greece. He appears to maintain (1) that the
term 'Sophist' is not the name of a particular class, and would have been
applied indifferently to Socrates and Plato, as well as to Gorgias and
Protagoras; (2) that the bad sense was imprinted on the word by the
genius of Plato; (3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters
of youth (for the Athenian youth were no more corrupted in the age of
Demosthenes than in the age of Pericles), but honourable and estimable
persons, who supplied a training in literature which was generally
wanted at the time. We will briefly consider how far these statements
appear to be justified by facts: and, 1, about the meaning of the word

there arises an interesting question:--
Many words are used both in a general and a specific sense, and the
two senses are not always clearly distinguished. Sometimes the generic
meaning has been narrowed to the specific, while in other cases the
specific meaning has been enlarged or altered. Examples of the former
class are furnished by some ecclesiastical terms: apostles, prophets,
bishops, elders, catholics. Examples of the latter class may also