this way, Socrates revindicated for truth and morals the absolute and immutable and real nature of which they had been deprived by the argumentation of the Sophists.
16. In these remarks I have given you merely a very general sketch of the doctrines of the Sophists. I have indeed done little more than announce the leading principle of their philosophy, showing you very briefly how this principle—the maxim, namely, that man is the measure of all things—how this principle, if carried out as the Sophists interpreted it, must have the effect of unsettling both truth and morality. I have also indicated very briefly the counter-principle which Socrates opposed to theirs, and by means of which he reasserted the claims of absolute truth and absolute morality, this principle being the position that man is indeed the measure of the universe, but that he is this, not in his contingent and individual, but in his essential and universal character. I shall have occasion to go more fully into the details of this subject when I come to speak of Socrates and Plato. Meanwhile, the following may be accepted as a short summary of their position. The Sophists hold that man can know things only as they are related to his faculties of knowledge; an undeniable truth, which, however, they conjoined, virtually, if not expressly, with this more questionable position, that man has no faculty of the universal, that is, no faculty for the truth as it
