Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography/Volume 3/Protagoras
PROTAGORAS, one of the earliest of the Greek sophists, was born at Abdera in Thrace, about 480 b.c. He is said to have been originally a porter, and to have been relieved from this menial occupation by Democritus. But the story, says Dr. Smith, "seems to have arisen out of the statement of Aristotle that Protagoras invented a sort of porter's knot for the more convenient carrying of burdens." The sophists were a class of teachers and thinkers who made their appearance at the time when the great colonial philosophies, the Ionic Pythagorean, and Eleatic, were on the wane. This was soon after the triumph of the Greek arms over the mighty power of Persia, about the middle of the fifth century b.c. They stood between the older philosophers and Socrates and Plato during a period of great intellectual excitement, of which they were both the effect and the cause. They were the first who took payment for their lessons. They undertook to instruct the rising generations in all useful accomplishments, and particularly in the art of rhetoric; and it is probable that to a large extent they made good their professions.—(For an able account and defence of them see Grote's History of Greece, vol. viii.) But although it may be true that, as practical teachers, the sophists were useful in their generation, and that they have been visited with an indiscriminate vituperation which they do not merit, it is nevertheless certain that their principles were of a false and hurtful tendency, and that they are defensible only on the ground that they represent a crisis through which it was necessary that the human intelligence should pass. The saying of Protagoras, that "man is the measure of the universe," contains the marrow of their philosophy. It meant that our individual judgments and feelings were the standard of the true and false, of the right and wrong; that whatever each man regarded as right was right, and that whatever he regarded as true was true—a doctrine which obviously unsettles the foundations both of truth and of morality, and opens a wide door to every form of ignorance and licentiousness. But the ultimate principle of the fallacies of the sophists was, their assumption that sensation is the essential attribute of man. Let this be granted and all knowledge of absolute truth, and any other ethics than the morality of selfishness, are rendered impossible. In assuming this as their principle, Protagoras and the sophists appear to have forestalled the whole of the English and French philosophy which in the eighteenth century arose out of the doctrines of Locke, and which has probably still the majority of suffrages in its favour. Socrates and Plato confronted and overthrew the sophistical philosophy by showing that thought (something essentially different from sensation) is the fundamental attribute of man. By showing that ideas (number, resemblance, difference, the good, &c.) were the common property of all intelligence, while sensations were limited and particular, they proved that man is competent to the attainment of what is absolutely and universally true. Occupying this ground, and admitting that man is the measure of the universe in so far as he is a thinking, but not in so far as he is a sensational being, Socrates and Plato overruled the conclusions of Protagoras, and laid the foundations on which a sound doctrine both of absolute truth and of absolute morality might be reared. Protagoras died about 411 b.c., probably at Athens where he chiefly resided, and which was the head-quarters of the sophists generally, as the Greek colonies had been of the philosophers who preceded them.—J. F. F.