We do not ignore, in attributing this importance to Philosophy as the inspiration of goodness, either that fortunate class of people who, in Plato’s beautiful expression, are “good by the divine inspiration of their own nature,”[50] or that more numerous section of society who were directed into a certain common conventional goodness by the moral influence of the purer myths, and who were taught, like the youth in Browning’s poem, “whose Father was a scholar and knew Greek,” that “Their aim should be to loathe, like Peleus’ son, A lie as Hell’s Gate, love their wedded wife, Like Hector, and so on with all the rest.”[51] But there was another side to the myths, a side less favourable to the development of morals, and one which had been brought forward so conspicuously in the adverse criticisms of the philosophers that no one could pretend to ignore its existence.[52] The prevailing tendency of Greek myth was not moral, and it was only after the most careful pruning, such, for example, as that which Plutarch applies to it in his educational essays, that myth became safely available as a factor in ethical progress. The mainsprings of Conduct, of personal and private Morality, are to be found in Philosophy, and so great an importance did Philosophy acquire as the instrument of goodness, that that particular branch of Philosophy which exercised surveillance over the realm of Conduct became eventually recognized as Philosophy _par excellence_; the overwhelming significance attached by Greek philosophers, from the Sophists onwards, to the practical element in their teaching, led to a restriction of the terms “Philosophy” and “Philosopher” to an almost purely ethical connotation. The argument in the “Phædo” that, without Philosophy, Virtue is nothing more than a mere rough sketch, is so strongly emphasized in other quarters that there is formed a general conviction that the sole sphere of Philosophy is the sphere of human conduct.[53] CHAPTER II. _Importance of the ethical tendency in pre-Socratic Philosophy generally under-estimated—Development of this tendency from Thales to the Sophists, and from the Sophists to the Stoics and Epicureans—Special influence of these two Schools, aided by the failure of political interest, in establishing a practicable ideal of PERSONAL virtue—This ideal, conspicuous in Plutarch’s “Ethics,” and inculcated by the philosophers of the early Græco-Roman Empire generally._