We must found them upon the concept, as Socrates did. Socrates did not deny the principle of the Sophists that all institutions, all ideals, all existing and established things must justify themselves before the tribunal of reason. He accepted this without question. He took up the challenge of thought, and won the battle of reason in his day. The Sophists brought to light the principle of subjectivity, the principle that the truth must be _my_ truth, {153} and the right _my_ right. They must be the products of my own thinking, not standards forcibly imposed upon me from without. But the mistake of the Sophists was to imagine that the truth must be mine, merely in my capacity as a percipient creature of sense, which means that I have a private truth of my own. Socrates corrected this by admitting that the truth must be my truth, but mine in my capacity as a rational being, which means, since reason is the universal, that it is not my private truth, but universal truth which is shared by and valid for all rational beings. Truth is thus established as being not mere subjective appearance, but objective reality, independent of the sensations, whims, and self-will of the individual. The whole period of Socrates and the Sophists is full of instruction. Its essential lesson is that to deny the supremacy of reason, to set up any other process of consciousness above reason, must inevitably end in scepticism and the denial of the objectivity of truth and morality. Many theosophists and others, at the present day, teach the doctrine of what they call "intuition." The supreme kind of religious knowledge, they think, is to be reached by intuition, which is conceived as something higher than reason. But this is simply to make the mistake of Protagoras over again. It is true that this so-called intuition is not merely sense-perception, as was the case with Protagoras. It is, however, a form of immediate spiritual perception. It is immediate apprehension of the object as being present to me, as having _thereness_. It is therefore of the nature of perception. It is spiritual and super-sensuous, as opposed to material and sensuous, perception. But it makes no difference at all whether perception is sensuous {154} or super-sensuous. To place the truth in any sort of perception is, in principle, to do as Protagoras did, to yield oneself up a helpless prey to the subjective impressions of the individual. I intuit one thing; another man intuits the opposite. What I intuit must be true for me, what he intuits true for him. For we have denied reason, we have placed it below intuition, and have thereby discarded that which alone can subject the varying impressions of each individual to the rule of a universal and objective standard. The logical conclusion is that, since each man's intuition is true for him, there is no such thing as an objective truth. Nor can there be such a thing, in these circumstances, as an objective goodness.