These authors both say, that the Protagorean canon, properly understood, is right, but that Protagoras laid it down wrongly. They admit the principle of Subjectivity, as an essential aspect of the case, in regard to truth; but they say that Protagoras was wrong in appealing to individual, empirical, accidental, subjectivity of each man at every varying moment, whereas he ought to have appealed to an ideal or universal subjectivity. "What ought to be held true, right, good, &c.," (says Schwegler) "must be decided doubtless by _me_, but by _me_ so far forth as a rational, and thinking being. Now _my_ thinking, _my_ reason, is not something specially belonging to me, but something common to all rational beings, something universal; so far therefore as I proceed as a rational and thinking person, my subjectivity is an universal subjectivity. Every thinking person has the consciousness that what he regards as right, duty, good, evil, &c., presents itself not merely to him as such, but also to every rational person, and that, consequently, his judgment possesses the character of universality, universal validity: in one word, Objectivity." Here it is explicitly asserted, that wherever a number of individual men employ their reason, the specialities of each disappear, and they arrive at the same conclusions--Reason being a guide impersonal as well as infallible. And this same view is expressed by Prantl in other language, when he reforms the Protagorean doctrine by saying, "Das Denken ist der Mass der Dinge". To me this assertion appears so distinctly at variance with notorious facts, that I am surprised when I find it advanced by learned historians of philosophy, who recount the very facts which contradict it. Can it really be necessary to repeat that the reason of one man differs most materially from that of another--and the reason of the same person from itself, at different times--in respect of the arguments accepted, the authorities obeyed, the conclusions embraced? The impersonal Reason is a mere fiction; the universal Reason is an abstraction, belonging alike to all particular reasoners, consentient or dissentient, sound or unsound, &c. Schwegler admits the Protagorean canon only under a reserve which nullifies its meaning. To say that the Universal Reason is the measure of truth is to assign no measure at all. The Universal Reason can only make itself known through an interpreter. The interpreters are dissentient; and which of them is to hold the privilege of infallibility? Neither Schwegler nor Prantl are forward to specify who the interpreter is, who is entitled to put dissentients to silence; both of them keep in the safe obscurity of an abstraction--"Das Denken"--the Universal Reason. Protagoras recognises in each dissentient an equal right to exercise his own reason, and to judge for himself.