The same account holds good of the best of the so-called Sophists, as Gorgias the Sicilian (? 485-380), who was a nihilistic skeptic; Hippias of Elis, who, setting up an emphatic distinction between Nature and Convention, impugned the political laws and prejudices which estranged men of thought and culture; and Prodikos of Kos (fl. 435), author of the fable of Herakles at the Parting of the Ways, who seems to have privately criticized the current Gods as mere deifications of useful things and forces, and was later misconceived as teaching that the things and forces were Gods. Cp. Cicero, De nat. Deorum, i, 42; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 52; Ueberweg, vol. i, p. 78; Renouvier, i, 291-93. Cicero saw very well that if men came to see in Dêmêtêr merely a deification of corn or bread, in Dionysos wine, in Hephaistos fire, and in Poseidon only water, there was not much left in religion. On the score of their systematic skepticism, that is, their insistence on the subjectivity of all opinion, Prof. Drews pronounces the Sophists at once the "Aufklärer" and the Pragmatists of ancient Greece (Gesch. des Monismus, p. 209). But their thought was scarcely homogeneous. 1. Sokrates [468-399] was fundamentally and practically a freethinker, insofar as in most things he thought for himself, definitely turning away from the old ideal of mere transmitted authority in morals. [647] Starting in all inquiries from a position of professed ignorance, he at least repudiated all dogmatics. [648] Being, however, preoccupied with public life and conduct, he did not carry his critical thinking far beyond that sphere. In regard to the extension of solid science, one of the prime necessities of Greek intellectual life, he was quite reactionary, drawing a line between the phenomena which he thought intelligible and traceable and those which he thought past finding out. "Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena in which human research was insane, fruitless, and impious." [649] Yet at the same time he formulated, apparently of his own motion, the ordinary design argument. [650] The sound scientific view led up to by so many previous thinkers was set forth, even in religious phraseology, by his great contemporary Hippokrates, [651] and he opposed it. While partially separating himself in practice from the popular worships, he held by the belief in omens, though not in all the ordinary ones; and in one of the Platonic dialogues he is made to say he holds by the ordinary versions of all the myths, on the ground that it is a hopeless task to find rational explanations for them. [652] He hoped, in short, to rationalize conduct without seeking to rationalize creed--the dream of Plato and of a thousand religionists since.