The Sophistic philosophy should be characterized as the clearing up reflection. It is, therefore, no philosophical system, for its doctrines and affirmations exhibit often so popular and even trivial a character that for their own sake they would merit no place at all in the history of philosophy. It is also no philosophical school in the ordinary sense of the term,—for Plato cites a vast number of persons under the common name of “Sophists,”—but it is an intellectual and widely spread direction of the age, which had struck its roots into the whole moral, political, and religious character of the Athenian life of that time, and which may be called the Athenian clearing up period. 2. RELATION OF THE SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY TO THE UNIVERSAL LIFE OF THAT AGE.—The Sophistic philosophy is, theoretically, what the whole Athenian life during the Peloponnesian war was practically. Plato justly remarks in his Republic that the doctrines of the Sophists only expressed the very principles which guided the course of the great mass of men of that time in their civil and social relations, and the hatred with which they were pursued by the practical statesmen, clearly indicates the jealousy with which the latter saw in them their rivals and the destroyers of their polity. If the absoluteness of the empirical subject—i. e. the view that the individual Ego can arbitrarily determine what is true, right and good,—is in fact the theoretical principle of the Sophistic philosophy, so does this in a practical direction, as an unlimited Egoism meet us in all the spheres of the public and private life of that age. The public life had become an arena of passion and selfishness; those party struggles which racked Athens during the Peloponnesian war had blunted and stifled the moral feeling; every individual accustomed himself to set up his own private interest above that of the state and the common weal, and to seek in his own arbitrariness and advantage the measuring rod for all his actions. The Protagorean sentence that “the man is the measure of all things” became practically carried out only too faithfully, and the influence of the orator in the assemblies of the people and the courts, the corruptibility of the great masses and their leaders, and the weak points which showed to the adroit student of human nature the covetousness, vanity, and factiousness of others around him, offered only too many opportunities to bring this rule into practice. Custom had lost its weight; the laws were regarded as only an agreement of the majority, the civil ordinance as an arbitrary restriction, the moral feeling as the effect of the policy of the state in education, the faith in the gods as a human invention to intimidate the free power of action, while piety was looked upon as a statute which some men have enacted and which every one else is justified in using all his eloquence to change. This degradation of a necessity, which is conformable to