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CHAPTER II.

THE SENSATIONALISM OF THE SOPHISTS AND ARISTIPPOS'S ETHICAL MATERIALISM.

WHAT stuff or matter is in the outer world of nature, sensation is in the inner life of man. If we believe that consciousness can exist without sensation, this is due to a subtle confusion. It is possible to have a very lively consciousness, which busies itself with the highest and most important things, and yet at the same time to have sensations of an evanescent sensuous strength. But sensations there always are; and from their relations, their harmony or want of harmony, are formed the contents and meaning of consciousness; just as the cathedral is built of the rough stone, or the significant drawing is composed of fine material lines, or the flower of organised matter. As, then, the Materialist, looking into external nature, follows out the forms of things from the materials of which they are composed, and with them lays the foundations of his philosophy, so the Sensationalist refers the whole of consciousness back to sensations. Sensationalism and Materialism, therefore, agree at bottom in laying stress on matter in opposition to form: the question then arises, how are their mutual relations to be explained?

Obviously not by a mere convention, which at once sets a man down as a Sensationalist in regard to the internal, and a Materialist in regard to the external world. Although this standpoint is the commonest in our inconsequent practice, it is anything but a philosophical one.

Much rather will the consequent Materialist deny that sensation exists independently of matter, and will accord

ingly, even in the facts of consciousness, find only effects of ordinary material changes, and regard these in the same light as the other material facts of the external world: the Sensationalist will, on the other hand, be obliged to deny that we know anything whatever of matter, or of the things of the external world in general, since we have only our own perception of the things, and cannot know how this stands related to the things in themselves. Sensation is to him not only the material (Stoff) of all the facts of consciousness, but also the only immediately given material, since we have and know the things of the external world only in our sensations. As a result of the undeniable correctness of this proposition, which is at once an advance upon the ordinary consciousness, and already presupposes a conception of the world as a unity, Sensationalism must appear a natural development of Materialism.30 This development was brought about among the Greeks through that very school which in general struck deepest into ancient life, alike in its constructive. and destructive influences,-by means of the Sophists.

It was said in later antiquity that the sage Demokritos once saw a porter in his native town packing together in a very ingenious manner the wood blocks he had to carry. Demokritos talked to him, and was so surprised by his quickness that he took him as a pupil. This porter was the man who furnished the occasion for a great revolution in the position of philosophy: he became a teacher of

30 Compare, in the modern history of philosophy, the relation of Locke to Hobbes, or of Condillac to Lamettrie. This does not, of course, mean that we must always expect a chronological series of this kind, and yet it is the most natural, and therefore the most frequent. We must, however, observe how the sensationalistic elements are, as a rule, already present in the deeper Materialists; and very expressly, in especial in the

case of Hobbes and Demokritos. Fur ther, we see easily that Sensationalism is at bottom only a transition to Idealism - as, for example, Locke stands on untenable ground between Hobbes and Berkeley; for so soon as the sense-perception is the strictly given, not only will the quality of the object be uncertain, but its very existence must appear doubtful. And yet this step was not taken by antiquity.

wisdom for gold. He was Protagoras, the first of the Sophists.31

Hippias, Prodikos, Gorgias, and a long series of less famous men, chiefly known through Plato's writings, were soon travelling through the cities of Greece, teaching and disputing, and in some cases they made great fortunes. Everywhere the cleverest youths flocked to them; to partake of their instructions soon became the mark of fashion; their doctrines and speeches became the daily topics of the upper classes, and their fame spread with incredible rapidity.

This was a new thing in Greece, and the old Maratho

31 The porter story must probably be considered fabulous, although this is a case where the traces of some such tale reach very far back. Comp. Brandis, Gesch. d. griech. röm. Philos., i. 523 ff., and, on the other side, Zeller, i. 866, Anm. 1, where certainly too much stress is laid upon the "scurrility" of Epikuros. The question whether Protagoras was a pupil of Demokritos hangs together with the difficult question of age discussed in note 10. We prefer here also to leave it undecided. But even in case the predominant view, which makes Protagoras some twenty years older than Demokritos, should ever be sufficiently proved, the influence of Demokritos upon the Protagorean theory of knowledge remains ex tremely probable, and we must then assume that Protagoras, originally a mere rhetorician and teacher of politics, developed his own system later, indeed during his second stay at Athens, in intellectual intercourse with his opponent Sokrates, at a time when the writings of Demokritos might already have had their influence. Zeller's attempt, following Frei (Quaestiones Protagoreae, Bonnae, 1845), to deduce the philosophy of Protagoras wholly from Herakleitos, disregarding Demokritos, splits on the want of a sufficient point of sup

port for the subjective direction of Protagoras in the theory of knowledge. If it is proposed to regard as Herakleitic the origin of sensation from a mutual motion of sense and object (comp. Zeller, i. 585), the resolution of sense qualities into subjective impressions is wholly wanting in Herakleitos. On the other hand, the ' νόμῳ γλυκὺ καὶ νόμῳ πικρόν,” and so on (Fragm. Phys., 1), of Demokritos forms the natural transition from the purely objective view of the world of the older physicists to the subjective one of the Sophists. Protagoras must indeed reverse the standpoint of Demokritos in order to reach his own; but this is also his position towards Herakleitos, who finds all truth in the universal, while Protagoras seeks it in the particular. The circumstance that the Platonic Sokrates (comp. Frei, Quaest. Prot., p. 79) makes the principle of Protagoras, that all is motion, to be the original of all things, is historically not decisive. Generally it may be said that the influence of Herakleitos on the doctrine of Protagoras is unmistakable, and it is at the same time probable that the elements due to this are the original elements to which Demokritos's reference of the sense qualities to subjective impressions was added later as a fermenting element.

nian warriors, the veterans of the liberation struggle, were not the only conservatives who shook their heads. The supporters of the Sophists themselves held towards them, with all their admiration, much the same position as, in our own day, the patrons of an opera-singer: the majority would, in the midst of their admiration, have disdained to follow in their steps. Sokrates used to embarrass the pupils of the Sophists by blunt questions as to the object of their teacher's profession. From Pheidias we learn sculpture, from Hippokrates medicine-what, then, from Protagoras? The pride and love of display of the Sophists were no substitute for the respectable and reserved attitude of the old philosophers. Aristocratic dilletanteism in philosophy was thought more respectable than their professional business.

We are not yet far removed from the time when only the darker side of the Sophistic system was known to us. The ridicule of Aristophanes and the moral earnestness of Plato have joined with the innumerable anecdotes of later times to concentrate upon the name of the Sophists all that was to be found of frivolous pedantry, of venal dialectic, and systematic immorality. Sophist became the designation of all pseudo-philosophy; and long after the vindication of Epikuros and the Epikureans was, to the general profit of men of culture, an accomplished fact, that reproach still clung to the name of the Sophists, and it remained an insoluble puzzle how Aristophanes could have represented Sokrates as the head of the Sophists.

Through Hegel and his school, in connection with the unprejudiced inquiries of modern philology, the way was cleared in Germany for a more accurate view. A still more decided position was taken by Grote in his "History of Greece," and before him Lewes had entered the lists for the honour of the Sophists. He maintains Plato's Euthydemus to be just as much an exaggeration as the Clouds of Aristophanes. "The caricature of Sokrates by Aristo

phanes is quite as near the truth as the caricature of the Sophists by Plato; with this difference, that in the one case it was inspired by political, in the other by speculative, antipathy." 32 Grote shows us that this fanatical hatred was thoroughly Platonic. Xenophon's Sokrates occupies a much less hostile position towards the Sophists.

Protagoras marks a great and decisive turning-point in the history of Greek philosophy. He is the first who started, not from the object-from external nature, but from the subject-from the spiritual nature of man.33 He is in this respect an undoubted predecessor of Sokrates; he stands, indeed, in a certain sense, at the head of the whole antimaterialistic development, which is usually made to begin with Sokrates. At the same time, however, Protagoras has, in addition, the most intimate relations to Materialism, through his starting from sensation as Demokritos started from matter; whilst he was very decidedly opposed to Plato and Aristotle in this, that to him-and this trait also is related to Materialism-the particular and the individual is the essential, not the universal, as with them. With the Sensationalism of Protagoras is combined a relativity which may remind us of Büchner and Moleschott. The expression that something is, always needs a further determination in relation to what it is or is becoming; otherwise our predication has no meaning. 34

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In precisely the same way Büchner says, in order to combat the thing in itself,' that all things exist only for each other, and have no significance apart from mutual relations; 35 and still more decidedly Moleschott: "Except in

32 Hist. of Phil., i. 106, 107. 33 Comp. Frei, Quaest. Prot., p. 110. "Multo plus vero ad philosophiam promovendam eo contulit Protagoras quod hominem dixit omnium rerum mensuram. Eo enim mentem sui consciam reddidit, rebusque superiorem praeposuit." But for this reason this must be regarded as the true

basis of the philosophy of Protagoras

in its completion and not the Heraklitean wávra þeî.

34 Frei, Quaest. Prot., p. 84 foll. 35 Comp. Büchner, Die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur, Leipz., 1870, p. cxvii. The expression of Moleschott will be more fully discussed in the Second Book.

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