This brief review of the pre-Socratic and pre-Sophistic Philosophers appears to indicate that, if their ethical doctrines were not formulated with the scientific detail and precision of later schools, their speculations had a strongly ethical cast, and tended to work out into practical morality in the sphere of daily conduct. In spite of the numerous systems of Ethics which have been propounded in ancient and modern days, a scientific basis of Morality has not yet been truly laid, and it was, perhaps, a recognition of the difficulties menacing attempts in this direction, aided by a feeling that “moral progress has not to wait till an unimpeachable system of Ethics has been elaborated,”[74] which led the early Greek Schools to confine their utterances on Morals to “rugged maxims hewn from life,” which compensated for their lack of scientific precision by the inspiration they applied to the work of actual life. It must, however, be admitted that with the Sophists the concerns of practical life began to assume that predominant place in philosophical speculations which they afterwards wholly usurped; and the claim of the Sophists (whether or not Socrates is to be reckoned among them) to be regarded as the founders of Ethical Philosophy is not weakened by the fact that, when Philosophy and Ethics were identified,[75] the term Sophist was assigned to men whose lives were in diametrical opposition to everything connoted by the designation philosopher.[76] The Sophists of the Socratic age, whose varied teachings were lacking in any philosophical principle to give them unity and dignity, brought the business of common life into so marked a prominence, and recognized Conduct as so much larger a fraction of life than it had hitherto been consciously recognized, that the necessity of finding a scientific basis for Conduct became apparent, and a sphere was thus opened to the genius of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.