because society is less real, less cogent than Nature; and where the two commands are at variance, where Nature pulls one way and social morality another way, Nature must be yielded to, because nature is weightier, and in every way more venerable, than convention. That doctrine, you will observe (and it is a doctrine which carries with it a good deal of plausibility), opens a door to the inroads of every species of licentiousness. I do not believe that the Sophists themselves ever opened that door very wide; but they indicated its existence, and some of them certainly left it ajar, to the perplexity and alarm of all right-minded citizens. This consideration may serve to show that the estimate usually formed as to the dangerous and pernicious tendency of the Sophistical speculators, although exaggerated, is not altogether wrong. This remark is somewhat digressive. I return to the psychology of the Sophists, on which I shall say a very few words.
21. This prime question of moral philosophy, as I have called it, is no easy one to answer, for it is no easy matter to effect the discrimination out of which the answer must proceed. It is a question, perhaps, to which no complete, but only an approximate, answer can be returned. One common mistake is to ascribe more to the natural man than properly belongs to him, to ascribe to him attributes and endowments which belong only to the social and artificial man. Some writers—Hutcheson, for example, and he
