6. TRANSITION TO SOCRATES AND CHARACTERISTIC OF THE FOLLOWING PERIOD.—That which is true in the Sophistic philosophy is the truth of the subjectivity, of the self-consciousness, _i. e._ the demand that every thing which I am to admit must be shown as rational before my own consciousness—that which is false in it is its apprehension of this subjectivity as nothing farther than finite, empirical egoistic subjectivity, _i. e._ the demand that my accidental will and opinion should determine what is rational; its truth is that it set up the principle of freedom, of self-certainty; its untruth is that it established the accidental will and notion of the individual upon the throne. To carry out now the principle of freedom and self-consciousness to its truth, to gain a true world of objective thought with a real and distinct content, by the same means of reflection which the Sophists had only used to destroy it, to establish the objective will, the rational thinking, the absolute or ideal in the place of the empirical subjectivity was the problem of the next advent in philosophy, the problem which Socrates took up and solved. To make the absolute or ideal subjectivity instead of the empirical for a principle, is to affirm that the true measure of all things is not _my_ (_i. e._ the individual person’s) opinion, fancy and will; that what is true, right and good, does not depend upon my caprice and arbitrary determination, or upon that of any other empirical subject; but while it is _my_ thinking, it is my _thinking_, the rational within me, which has to decide upon all those points. But my thinking, my reason, is not something specially belonging to me, but something common to every rational being; something universal, and in so far as I am a rational and thinking being, is my subjectivity a universal one. But every thinking individual has the consciousness that what he holds as right, as duty, as good or evil, does not appear as such to him alone but to every rational being, and that consequently his thinking has the character of universality, of universal validity, in a word—of objectivity. This then in opposition to the Sophistic philosophy is the standpoint of Socrates, and therefore with him the _philosophy of objective thought_ begins. What Socrates could do in opposition to the Sophists was to show that reflection led to the same results as faith or obedience, hitherto without reflection, had done, and that the thinking man guided by his free consciousness and his own conviction, would learn to form the same judgments and take the same course to which life and custom had already and unconsciously induced the ordinary man. The position, that while the man is the measure of all things, it is the man as universal, as thinking, as rational, is the fundamental thought of the Socratic philosophy, which is, by virtue of this thought, the positive complement of the Sophistic principle.