Sophist | Page 6

be
found in a similar field: jesuits, puritans, methodists, and the like.
Sometimes the meaning is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or
bad sense will subsist side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect
is produced on the meaning of a word when the very term which is
stigmatized by the world (e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious
or derided class; this tends to define the meaning. Or, again, the
opposite result is produced, when the world refuses to allow some sect
or body of men the possession of an honourable name which they have
assumed, or applies it to them only in mockery or irony.
The term 'Sophist' is one of those words of which the meaning has been
both contracted and enlarged. Passages may be quoted from Herodotus
and the tragedians, in which the word is used in a neutral sense for a
contriver or deviser or inventor, without including any ethical idea of
goodness or badness. Poets as well as philosophers were called
Sophists in the fifth century before Christ. In Plato himself the term is
applied in the sense of a 'master in art,' without any bad meaning
attaching to it (Symp.; Meno). In the later Greek, again, 'sophist' and
'philosopher' became almost indistinguishable. There was no reproach
conveyed by the word; the additional association, if any, was only that
of rhetorician or teacher. Philosophy had become eclecticism and
imitation: in the decline of Greek thought there was no original voice
lifted up 'which reached to a thousand years because of the god.' Hence
the two words, like the characters represented by them, tended to pass
into one another. Yet even here some differences appeared; for the term
'Sophist' would hardly have been applied to the greater names, such as
Plotinus, and would have been more often used of a professor of
philosophy in general than of a maintainer of particular tenets.
But the real question is, not whether the word 'Sophist' has all these
senses, but whether there is not also a specific bad sense in which the
term is applied to certain contemporaries of Socrates. Would an

Athenian, as Mr. Grote supposes, in the fifth century before Christ,
have included Socrates and Plato, as well as Gorgias and Protagoras,
under the specific class of Sophists? To this question we must answer,
No: if ever the term is applied to Socrates and Plato, either the
application is made by an enemy out of mere spite, or the sense in
which it is used is neutral. Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, all
give a bad import to the word; and the Sophists are regarded as a
separate class in all of them. And in later Greek literature, the
distinction is quite marked between the succession of philosophers
from Thales to Aristotle, and the Sophists of the age of Socrates, who
appeared like meteors for a short time in different parts of Greece. For
the purposes of comedy, Socrates may have been identified with the
Sophists, and he seems to complain of this in the Apology. But there is
no reason to suppose that Socrates, differing by so many outward
marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of Anytus, or
Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid foreigners
who from time to time visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic
games. The man of genius, the great original thinker, the disinterested
seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in
an argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian,
by an 'interval which no geometry can express,' from the balancer of
sentences, the interpreter and reciter of the poets, the divider of the
meanings of words, the teacher of rhetoric, the professor of morals and
manners.
2. The use of the term 'Sophist' in the dialogues of Plato also shows that
the bad sense was not affixed by his genius, but already current. When
Protagoras says, 'I confess that I am a Sophist,' he implies that the art
which he professes has already a bad name; and the words of the young
Hippocrates, when with a blush upon his face which is just seen by the
light of dawn he admits that he is going to be made 'a Sophist,' would
lose their point, unless the term had been discredited. There is nothing
surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that, whether deserved
or not, was a natural consequence of their vocation. That they were
foreigners, that they made fortunes, that they taught novelties, that they
excited the minds of youth, are quite sufficient reasons to account for
the opprobrium which attached to them. The genius of Plato could not
have stamped the word anew, or have imparted the associations which

occur in