the theatre, and the funereal 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. Νεων και πλουσιων εμμισθοι θηρευται (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 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 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 understand

ing. 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, 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 saered 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 a language, in short: 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, meta, i.e. beyond or transcending) named the superior science, metaphysics. The Invisible was assumed as the sup

porter 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 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 bonâ 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