ee a mysterious
principle working behind them. But as has been the case with other great
philosophers, and with Plato and Aristotle themselves, what was really
permanent and original could not be understood by the next generation,
while a perverted logic carried out his chance expressions with an
illogical consistency. His simple and noble thoughts, like those of the
great Eleatic, soon degenerated into a mere strife of words. And when
thus reduced to mere words, they seem to have exercised a far wider
influence in the cities of Ionia (where the people 'were mad about
them') than in the life-time of Heracleitus--a phenomenon which, though
at first sight singular, is not without a parallel in the history of
philosophy and theology.

It is this perverted form of the Heraclitean philosophy which is
supposed to effect the final overthrow of Protagorean sensationalism.
For if all things are changing at every moment, in all sorts of ways,
then there is nothing fixed or defined at all, and therefore no sensible
perception, nor any true word by which that or anything else can be
described. Of course Protagoras would not have admitted the justice
of this argument any more than Heracleitus would have acknowledged the
'uneducated fanatics' who appealed to his writings. He might have said,
'The excellent Socrates has first confused me with Heracleitus, and
Heracleitus with his Ephesian successors, and has then disproved the
existence both of knowledge and sensation. But I am not responsible
for what I never said, nor will I admit that my common-sense account of
knowledge can be overthrown by unintelligible Heraclitean paradoxes.'

IV. Still at the bottom of the arguments there remains a truth, that
knowledge is something more than sensible perception;--this alone would
not distinguish man from a tadpole. The absoluteness of sensations
at each moment destroys the very consciousness of sensations (compare
Phileb.), or the power of comparing them. The senses are not mere holes
in a 'Trojan horse,' but the organs of a presiding nature, in which they
meet. A great advance has been made in psychology when the senses
are recognized as organs of sense, and we are admitted to see or feel
'through them' and not 'by them,' a distinction of words which, as
Socrates observes, is by no means pedantic. A still further step has
been made when the most abstract notions, such as Being and Not-being,
sameness and difference, unity and plurality, are