l. "Anaxagoras," he
says, "uses mind as a _deus ex machina_ to account for the formation
of the world, and whenever he is at a loss to explain why anything
necessarily is, he drags it in by force. But in other cases he assigns
as a cause for things anything else in preference to mind." [Footnote
10]

[Footnote 10; Aristotle, _Metaphysics_, book i, chap. iv.]

{106}

CHAPTER IX

THE SOPHISTS

The first period of Greek philosophy closes with Anaxagoras. His
doctrine of the world-forming intelligence introduced a new principle
into philosophy, the principle of the antithesis between corporeal
matter and incorporeal mind, and therefore, by implication, the
antithesis between nature and man. And if the first period of
philosophy has for its problem the origin of the world, and the
explanation of the being and becoming of nature, the second period of
philosophy opens, in the Sophists, with the problem of the position of
man in the universe. The teaching of the earlier philosophers was
exclusively cosmological, that of the Sophists exclusively humanistic.
Later in this second period, these two modes of thought come together
and fructify one another. The problem of the mind and the problem of
nature are subordinated as factors of the great, universal,
all-embracing, world-systems of Plato and Aristotle.

It is not possible to understand the activities and teaching of the
Sophists without some knowledge of the religious, political, and
social conditions of the time. After long struggles between the people
and the nobles, democracy had almost everywhere triumphed. But in
Greece democracy did not mean what we now mean by {107} that word. It
did not mean representative institutions, government by the people
through their elected deputies. Ancient Greece was never a single
nation under a single government. Every city, almost every hamlet, was
an independent State, governed only by its own laws. Some of these
States were so small that they comprised merely a handful of citizens.
All were so small that all the citizens could meet together in one
place, and themselves in person enact the laws and transact public
business. There was no necessity for representation. Consequently in
Greece every citizen was himself a politician and a legislator. In
these circumstances, partisan feeling ran to extravagant lengths. Men
forgot the interests of the State in the interests of party, and this
ended in men forgetting the interests of