SOCRATES.
1. There were two ways in which the perplexities occasioned by the argumentations of the Sophists might be encountered and rebutted. The one way was by abjuring all inquiry, and by falling back, in blind faith, on the old traditional morality as a matter too sacred to be questioned or investigated. This was the course adopted by the orthodox or civic or conservative party in Athens, the party of whom Aristophanes may be taken as the mouthpiece and representative. Looking merely to the mischief which the agitation of the Sophists tended to produce, and had perhaps actually produced, they became clamorous in their denunciations of these new pretenders to wisdom. They set their faces against the freedom of thought and of inquiry which these innovators had inaugurated. Their subtlety they regarded as empty quibbling—as a quibbling, however, which was dangerous to the institutions and the interests of society; and their reasonings, they held, should be put down rather by persecution than by argument. That was their idea of the way in
