ot forget the many merits of the Sophists. Individually, they
were often estimable men. Nothing is known against the character of
Protagoras, and Prodicus was proverbial for his wisdom and the genuine
probity and uprightness of his principles. Moreover the Sophists
contributed much to the advance of learning. {122} They were the first
to direct attention to the study of words, sentences, style, prosody,
and rhythm. They were the founders of the science of rhetoric. They
spread education and culture far and wide in Greece, they gave a great
impulse to the study of ethical ideas, which made possible the
teaching of Socrates, and they stirred up a ferment of ideas without
which the great period of Plato and Aristotle could never have seen
the light. But, from the philosophical point of view, their merit is
for the first time to have brought into general recognition _the right
of the subject_. For there is, after all, much reason in these attacks
made by the Sophists upon authority, upon established things, upon
tradition, custom and dogma. Man, as a rational being, ought not to be
tyrannized over by authority, dogma, and tradition. He cannot be
subjected, thus violently, to the imposition of beliefs from an
external source. No man has the right to say to me, "you _shall_ think
this," or "you _shall_ think that." I, as a rational being, have the
right to use my reason, and judge for myself. If a man would convince
me, he must not appeal to force, but to reason. In doing so, he is not
imposing his opinions externally upon me; he is educing his opinions
from the internal sources of my own thought; he is showing me that his
opinions are in reality my own opinions, if I only knew it. But the
mistake of the Sophists was that, in thus recognizing the right of the
subject, they wholly ignored and forgot _the right of the object_. For
the truth has objective existence, and is what it is, whether I think
it or not. Their mistake was that though they rightly saw that for
truth and morality to be valid for me, they must be assented to by,
and developed out of, {123} me myself, not imposed from the outside,
yet they laid the emphasis on my merely accidental and particular
characteristics, my impulses, feelings, and sensations, and made these
the source of truth and morality, instead of emphasizing as the source
of truth and right the universal part of me, my reason. "Man is the
measure of all things"; certainly, but man as a rational bei