which the Sophists should be dealt with. This party took its stand on the ancient beliefs, it clung to the social order and to the prescriptive morals which it had inherited from time immemorial, as a divinely appointed system. It reverenced them all the more on account of the obscurity in which their origin was shrouded; and it threatened vengeance against all who, by intellectual sophistications, would infringe or imperil institutions so venerable and so benign.
2. The other way of dealing with the Sophists was that which Socrates followed out. Unlike the orthodox party, he was far from being at variance with the Sophists in regard to the fundamental position which they had taken up; on the contrary, he cordially agreed with them as to the propriety, indeed the necessity, of subjecting the institutions of society and everything in which man was interested, or about which man could speculate, to the ordeal of a rigorous examination. No Sophist was ever more keenly bent on free and searching inquiry than he: and this is the reason why he has frequently, and not erroneously, been identified to a large extent with that party. If Socrates had been compelled to make his option between the Sophists and the old stubborn citizen party at Athens, there is little doubt which side he would have chosen. He would have thrown in his lot with the Sophists; for this party was at any rate awake and flexible with intellectual
