cation of the citizens at large, sustained and increased by the continued allusions to their recent exploits, in the flatteries of the theatre, and the funeral panegyrics; the rage for amusement and public shows; and lastly the destruction of the Athenian constitution by the ascendancy of its democratic element. During the operation of these causes, at an early period of the process, and no unimportant part of it, the sophists made their first appearance. Some of these applied the lessons of their art in their own persons, and traded for gain and gainful influence in the character of demagogues and public orators; but the greater number offered themselves as instructors, in the arts of persuasion and temporary impression, to as many as could come up to the high prices, at which they rated their services. Νέων πλουσίων θήρα σοφισTun*—(these are Plato's words)-hireling hunters of the young and rich,-they offered to the vanity of youth and the ambition of wealth a substitute for that authority, which by the institutions of Solon had been attached to high birth and property, or rather to the moral discipline, the habits, attainments, and directing motives, on which the great legislator had calculated (not indeed as necessary or constant accompaniments, but yet) as the regular and ordinary results of comparative opulence and renowned ancestry.

The loss of this stable and salutary influence

* Sophistes, s. 17.-Ed.

was to be supplied by the arts of popularity. But in order to the success of this scheme, it was necessary that the people themselves should be degraded into a populace. The cupidity for dissipation and sensual pleasure in all ranks had kept pace with the increasing inequality in the means of gratifying it. The restless spirit of republican ambition, engendered by their success in a just war, and by the romantic character of that success, had already formed a close alliance with luxury; with luxury, too, in its early and most vigorous state, when it acts as an appetite to enkindle, and before it has exhausted and dulled the vital energies by the habit of enjoyment. But this corruption was now to be introduced into the citadel of the moral being, and to be openly defended by the very arms and instruments, which had been given for the purpose of preventing or chastising its approach. The understanding was to be corrupted by the perversion of the reason, and the feelings through the medium of the understanding. For this purpose all fixed principles, whether grounded on reason, religion, law, or antiquity, were to be undermined, and then, as now, chiefly by the sophistry of submitting all positions alike, however heterogeneous, to the criterion of the mere understanding;—the sophists meantime disguising or concealing the fact, that the rules which alone they applied were abstracted from the objects of the senses, and applicable exclusively

to things of quantity and relation. At all events, the minds of men were to be sensualized; and even if the arguments themselves failed, yet the principles so attacked were to be brought into doubt by the mere frequency of hearing all things doubted, and the most sacred of all now openly denied, and now insulted by sneer and ridicule. For by the constitution of our nature, as far as it is human nature, so awful is truth, that as long as we have faith in its attainability and hopes of its attainment, there exists no bribe strong enough to tempt us wholly and permanently from our allegiance.

Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and habit of reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ourselves and in nature. To this the senses and their immediate objects are to be made subservient, the one as its organs, the other as its exponents; and as such therefore, having on their own account no true value, because no inherent worth. They are, in short, a language; and taken independently of their representative function, from words they become mere empty sounds, and differ from noise only by exciting expectations which they cannot gratify-fit ingredients of the idolatrous charm, the potent abracadabra, of a sophisticated race, who had sacrificed the religion of faith to the superstition of the senses, a race of animals, in whom the presence of reason is manifested solely by the absence of instinct. The same principle, which in its application to

the whole of our being becomes religion, considered speculatively is the basis of metaphysical science, that, namely, which requires an evidence beyond that of sensible concretes, which latter the ancients generalized in the word, physica, and therefore, prefixing the preposition μerà, beyond or transcending, named the superior science, metaphysics. The invisible was assumed as the supporter of the apparent, τῶν φαινομένων-as their substance, a term which, in any other interpretation, expresses only the striving of the imaginative power under conditions that involve the necessity of its frustration. If the invisible be denied, or (which is equivalent) considered invisible from the defect of the senses and not in its own nature, the sciences even of observation and experiment lose their essential copula. The component parts can never be reduced into an harmonious whole, but must owe their systematic arrangement to the accidents of an ever-shifting perspective. Much more then must this apply to the moral world disjoined from religion. Instead of morality, we can at best have only a scheme of prudence, and this too a prudence fallible and short-sighted: for were it of such a kind as to be bona fide coincident with morals in reference to the agent as well as to the outward action, its first act would be that of abjuring its own usurped primacy. By celestial observations alone can even terrestrial charts be constructed scientifically.

The first attempt therefore of the sophists was to separate ethics from the faith in the invisible, and to stab morality through the side of religion; an attempt to which the idolatrous polytheism of Greece furnished too many facilities. To the zeal with which he counteracted this plan by endeavours to purify and ennoble that popular belief, which, from obedience to the laws, he did not deem himself permitted to subvert, Socrates owed his martyr-cup of hemlock. Still while any one principle of morality remained, religion in some form or other must remain inclusively. Therefore, as they commenced by assailing the former through the latter, so did they continue their warfare by reversing the operation. The principle was confounded with the particular acts, in which under the guidance of the understanding or judgment it was to manifest itself.

Thus the rule of expediency, which properly belonged to one and the lower part of morality, was made to be the whole. And so far there was at least a consistency in this: for in two ways only could it subsist. It must either be the mere servant of religion, or its usurper and substitute. Viewed as principles, they were so utterly heterogeneous, that by no grooving could the two be fitted into each other; by no intermediate could they be preserved in lasting adhesion. The one or the other was sure to decompose the cement. We cannot have a stronger historical authority for the truth of