and it was, perhaps, a recognition of the difficulties menacing attempts in this direction, aided by a feeling that "moral progress has not to wait till an unimpeachable system of Ethics has been elaborated,"[1] which led the early Greek Schools to confine their utterances on Morals to "rugged maxims hewn from life," which compensated for their lack of scientific precision by the inspiration they applied to the work of actual life.
It must, however, be admitted that with the Sophists the concerns of practical life began to assume that predominant place in philosophical speculations which they afterwards wholly usurped; and the claim of the Sophists (whether or not Socrates is to be reckoned among them) to be regarded as the founders of Ethical Philosophy is not weakened by the fact that, when Philosophy and Ethics were identified,[2] the term Sophist was assigned to men whose lives were in diametrical opposition to everything connoted by the designation philosopher.[3] The Sophists of the Socratic*
- ↑ Leslie Stephen: The Science of Ethics (concluding sentence).
- ↑ For a brief expression of this identity, see Dion. Ch. De Exilio, xiii. p. 249.—"To seek and strive earnestly after Virtue—that is Philosophy." Cf. Seneca: Epist., i. 37; et passim.
- ↑ See Martha: La prédication morale populaire ("Les moralistes sous l'empire romain," pp. 240, 241).—"A cette époque la philosophie était une espèce de religion qui imposait à ses adeptes au moins l'extérieur de la vertu. Les sophistes se reconnaissent à leur mœurs licencieuses et à leurs manières arrogantes, les philosophes à la dignité de leur conduite et de leur maintien. On entrait dans la philosophie par une sorte de conversion édéfiante: on ne pouvait en sortir que par une apostasie scandaleuse." See the passages referred to by M. Martha, and, in addition, Dion's account of his "conversion" in Oratio xiii. (De Exilio), and his comparisons between the
