blest youth of
Greece of such an absolute collapse of belief. The philosophic
scepticism did not deprive them of their appetites or passions; it did
not in the least alter their estimate of the prizes of success, or the
desirability of wealth and power. All it did was to shatter the
invisible social bonds of reverence and honour and truth and justice,
which in greater or less degree act as a restraining force upon the
purely selfish appetites of men. Not only belief in divine government
disappeared, but belief in any government external or internal; justice
became a cheating device to deprive a man of what was ready to his
grasp; good-faith was stupidity when it was not a more subtle form of
deceit; morality was at best a mere convention which a man might cancel
if {96} he pleased; the one reality was the appetite of the moment, the
one thing needful its gratification; society, therefore, was universal
war, only with subtler weapons.

Of course Protagoras and Gorgias were only notable types of a whole
horde of able men who in various ways, and with probably less clear
notions than these men of the drift or philosophic significance of
their activity, helped all over Greece in the promulgation of this new
gospel of self-interest. Many Sophists no doubt troubled themselves
very little with philosophical questions; they were 'agnostics,'
know-nothings; all they professed to do was to teach some practical
skill of a verbal or rhetorical character. They had nothing to do with
the nature or value of ideals; they did not profess to say whether any
end or aim was in itself good or bad, but given an end or aim, they
were prepared to help those who hired them to acquire a skill which
would be useful towards attaining it.

But whether a philosophy or ultimate theory of life be expressly stated
or realised by a nation or an individual, or be simply ignored by them,
there always is some such philosophy or theory underlying their action,
and that philosophy or theory tends to work itself out to its logical
issue in action, whether men openly profess it or no. And the theory
of negation of law in nature or in man which underlay {97} the
sophistic practice had its logical and necessary effect on the social
structure throughout Greece, in a loosening of the bonds of religion,
of family reverence and affection, of patriotism, of law, of honour.
Thucydides in a well-known passage (iii. 82) thus describes the
prevalent condition of