The Greek culture of the Sophists had grown out of all the Greek instincts; it belongs to the culture of the age of Pericles as necessarily as Plato does not: it has its predecessors in Heraclitus, Democritus, and in the scientific types of the old philosophy; it finds expression in the elevated culture of Thucydides, for instance. And--it has ultimately shown itself to be right: every step in the science of epistemology and morality has _confirmed the attitude_ of the Sophists.... Our modern attitude of mind is, to a great extent, Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean ... to say that it is _Protagorean_ is even sufficient: because Protagoras was in himself a synthesis of the two men Heraclitus and Democritus. (_Plato_: a _great Cagliostro,_--let us think of how Epicurus judged him; how Timon, Pyrrho's friend, judged him----Is Plato's integrity by any chance beyond question?... But we at least know what he wished to have _taught_ as absolute truth--namely, things which were to him not even relative truths: the separate and immortal life of "souls.") 429. The _Sophists_ are nothing more, nor less than realists: they elevate all the values and practices which are common property to the rank of values--they have the courage, peculiar to all strong intellects, which consists in _knowing_ their immorality.... Is it to be supposed that these small Greek independent republics, so filled with rage and envy that they would fain have devoured each other, were led by principles of humanity and honesty? Is Thucydides by any chance reproached with the words he puts into the mouths of the Athenian ambassadors when they were treating with the Melii anent the question of destruction or submission? Only the most perfect Tartuffes could have been able to speak of virtue in the midst of that dreadful strain--or if not Tartuffes, at least _detached philosophers,_ anchorites, exiles, and fleers from reality.... All of them, people who denied things in order to be able to exist. The Sophists were Greeks: when Socrates and Plato adopted the cause of virtue and justice, they were _Jews_ or I know not what. _Grote's_ tactics in the defence of the Sophists are false: he would like to raise them to the rank of men of honour and moralisers--but it was their honour not to indulge in any humbug with grand words and virtues. 430. The great reasonableness underlying all moral education lay in the fact that it always attempted to attain to _the certainty of an instinct_: so that neither good intentions nor good means, as such, first required to enter consciousness. Just as the soldier learns his exercises, so should man learn how to act in life. In truth this unconsciousness belongs to every kind of perfection: even the mathematician carries out his calculations unconsciously....