All these things, which now happen constantly in our universities, are the exact counterparts of what happened in Greece in the days of the Sophists. They taught clever young men such surface-knowledge of science as disgusted the deeper experts, and, what was more, they taught them that the experts were pursuing a vain shadow, and attempting insoluble problems. They taught them to avoid becoming specialists, and to apply themselves to public life. Just as the English universities can boast of many great politicians and literary men, rather than of specialists in the sciences, and as they might hold that to produce a Gladstone or a Cornewall Lewis is better than to produce a Faraday, so the Sophists made general culture their professed object, and so far quarrelled with deeper philosophy. § 56. The same sort of proceeding in morals brought them into contact with Socrates, whose daily teaching may be regarded as the best university teaching of the day. Socrates was in all external respects a sophist, and commonly regarded as such. He did not, indeed, travel about, being luckily a citizen of the largest and most enlightened city in Greece. He despised, too, wealth and ostentation of the ordinary kind, though he made himself no less remarkable by his voluntary poverty. But in more important respects, in despising abstract science and speculative philosophy, and sifting traditional theories of morals and society, in radically shaking up and often upsetting all preconceived notions, Socrates was a sophist, and one of the most dangerous of them. He sought, indeed, to do what they had not done--to find some better and surer positive basis for morals, but the negative part of his work was far the most successful and striking. Hence the conservative public at Athens not only suspected and disliked him, but at the prosecution of their mouthpiece, Anytus, a most respectable and earnest man, condemned him to death, when he showed clearly that no verdict of theirs would restrain him from pursuing his occupation. This sentence on Socrates, which the orthodox party at Athens never regretted, and even justified, should indeed be a warning to those who calumniate their fellows in the interests of orthodoxy. But with this we are not now concerned.