ed by
Aristotle; that is to say, he does not attempt to understand him from
his own point of view. But he entangles him in the meshes of a more
advanced logic. To which Protagoras is supposed to reply by Megarian
quibbles, which destroy logic, 'Not only man, but each man, and each
man at each moment.' In the arguments about sight and memory there is a
palpable unfairness which is worthy of the great 'brainless brothers,'
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, and may be compared with the egkekalummenos
('obvelatus') of Eubulides. For he who sees with one eye only cannot be
truly said both to see and not to see; nor is memory, which is liable
to forget, the immediate knowledge to which Protagoras applies the
term. Theodorus justly charges Socrates with going beyond the truth;
and Protagoras has equally right on his side when he protests against
Socrates arguing from the common use of words, which 'the vulgar pervert
in all manner of ways.'

III. The theory of Protagoras is connected by Aristotle as well as Plato
with the flux of Heracleitus. But Aristotle is only following Plato,
and Plato, as we have already seen, did not mean to imply that such a
connexion was admitted by Protagoras himself. His metaphysical genius
saw or seemed to see a common tendency in them, just as the modern
historian of ancient philosophy might perceive a parallelism between
two thinkers of which they were probably unconscious themselves. We must
remember throughout that Plato is not speaking of Heracleitus, but of
the Heracliteans, who succeeded him; nor of the great original ideas of
the master, but of the Eristic into which they had degenerated a hundred
years later. There is nothing in the fragments of Heracleitus which at
all justifies Plato's account of him. His philosophy may be resolved
into two elements--first, change, secondly, law or measure pervading
the change: these he saw everywhere, and often expressed in strange
mythological symbols. But he has no analysis of sensible perception such
as Plato attributes to him; nor is there any reason to suppose that
he pushed his philosophy into that absolute negation in which
Heracliteanism was sunk in the age of Plato. He never said that 'change
means every sort of change;' and he expressly distinguished between
'the general and particular understanding.' Like a poet, he surveyed
the elements of mythology, nature, thought, which lay before him, and
sometimes by the light of genius he saw or seemed to s