The veritable sophist then, the dynamic sophist, was the Athenian public of the day; those ostensible or professional Sophists being not so much its intellectual directors as the pupils or followers of it. They did but make it, as the French say, abound the more in its own sense, like the keeper (it is Plato's own image) of some wild beast, which he knows how to command by a well-considered obedience to all its varying humours. If the Sophists are partly the cause they are still more the effect of the social environment. They had discovered, had ascertained with much acuteness, the actual momentum of the society which maintained them, and they meant only, by regulating, to maintain it. Protagoras, the chief of Sophists, had avowedly applied to ethics the physics or metaphysics of Heraclitus. And now it was as if the disintegrating Heraclitean fire had taken hold on actual life, on men's very thoughts, on the emotions and the will. That so faulty natural tendency, as Plato holds [108] it to be, in the world around them, they formulate carefully as its proper conscious theory: a theory how things must, nay, ought, to be. "Just that," they seem to say--"Just that versatility, that mutable spirit, shall become by adoption the child of knowledge, shall be carefully nurtured, brought to great fortune. We'll make you, and your thoughts, as fluid, as shifty, as things themselves: will bring you, like some perfectly accomplished implement, to this carrière ouverte, this open quarry, for the furtherance of your personal interests in the world." And if old- fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better than they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for the control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to it, in regard to one's self? "It will break up,--this or that ethical deposit in your mind, Ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear, when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to know their place." Yes! says Plato (for a moment we may anticipate what is at least the spirit of his answer) but there are some presuppositions after all, which it will make us very vulgar to have dismissed from us. "There are moreover," [109] those others proceed to say, "teachers of persuasion (peithous didaskaloi)+ who impart skill in popular and forensic oratory; and so by fair means or by unfair we shall gain our ends." It is with the dêmos,+ with the vulgar, insubordinate, tag-rag of one's own nature--how to rule that, by obeying it--that these professors of rhetoric begin. They are still notwithstanding the only teachers of morals ingenuous Greece is aware of; and wisdom, as seems likely, "must die with them!"--