a training in literature which was generally
wanted at the time. We will briefly consider how far these statements
appear to be justified by facts: and, 1, about the meaning of the word
there arises an interesting question:--

Many words are used both in a general and a specific sense, and the
two senses are not always clearly distinguished. Sometimes the generic
meaning has been narrowed to the specific, while in other cases the
specific meaning has been enlarged or altered. Examples of the former
class are furnished by some ecclesiastical terms: apostles, prophets,
bishops, elders, catholics. Examples of the latter class may also be
found in a similar field: jesuits, puritans, methodists, and the like.
Sometimes the meaning is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or bad
sense will subsist side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect
is produced on the meaning of a word when the very term which is
stigmatized by the world (e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious
or derided class; this tends to define the meaning. Or, again, the
opposite result is produced, when the world refuses to allow some sect
or body of men the possession of an honourable name which they have
assumed, or applies it to them only in mockery or irony.

The term 'Sophist' is one of those words of which the meaning has been
both contracted and enlarged. Passages may be quoted from Herodotus
and the tragedians, in which the word is used in a neutral sense for a
contriver or deviser or inventor, without including any ethical idea of
goodness or badness. Poets as well as philosophers were called Sophists
in the fifth century before Christ. In Plato himself the term is applied
in the sense of a 'master in art,' without any bad meaning attaching to
it (Symp.; Meno). In the later Greek, again, 'sophist' and 'philosopher'
became almost indistinguishable. There was no reproach conveyed by the
word; the additional association, if any, was only that of rhetorician
or teacher. Philosophy had become eclecticism and imitation: in the
decline of Greek thought there was no original voice lifted up 'which
reached to a thousand years because of the god.' Hence the two words,
like the characters represented by them, tended to pass into one
another. Yet even here some differences appeared; for the term 'Sophist'
would hardly have been applied to the greater names, such as Plotinus,
and would have been more often used of a professor of philosophy in
general