eir views, as
well as to those of Socrates; and unless they are the school alluded to
in the Philebus, which is described as 'being very skilful in physics,
and as maintaining pleasure to be the absence of pain.' That Antisthenes
wrote a book called 'Physicus,' is hardly a sufficient reason for
describing them as skilful in physics, which appear to have been very
alien to the tendency of the Cynics.

The Idealism of the fourth century before Christ in Greece, as in
other ages and countries, seems to have provoked a reaction towards
Materialism. The maintainers of this doctrine are described in the
Theaetetus as obstinate persons who will believe in nothing which they
cannot hold in their hands, and in the Sophist as incapable of argument.
They are probably the same who are said in the Tenth Book of the Laws
to attribute the course of events to nature, art, and chance. Who they
were, we have no means of determining except from Plato's description of
them. His silence respecting the Atomists might lead us to suppose that
here we have a trace of them. But the Atomists were not Materialists in
the grosser sense of the term, nor were they incapable of reasoning; and
Plato would hardly have described a great genius like Democritus in the
disdainful terms which he uses of the Materialists. Upon the whole, we
must infer that the persons here spoken of are unknown to us, like the
many other writers and talkers at Athens and elsewhere, of whose endless
activity of mind Aristotle in his Metaphysics has preserved an anonymous
memorial.

V. The Sophist is the sequel of the Theaetetus, and is connected with
the Parmenides by a direct allusion (compare Introductions to Theaetetus
and Parmenides). In the Theaetetus we sought to discover the nature
of knowledge and false opinion. But the nature of false opinion seemed
impenetrable; for we were unable to understand how there could be any
reality in Not-being. In the Sophist the question is taken up again; the
nature of Not-being is detected, and there is no longer any metaphysical
impediment in the way of admitting the possibility of falsehood. To
the Parmenides, the Sophist stands in a less defined and more remote
relation. There human thought is in process of disorganization; no
absurdity or inconsistency is too great to be elicited from the
analysis of the simple ideas of Unity or Being. In the Sophist the same
contradictions are pursued to a certain extent, but only with a view
to