ng, not
man as a bundle of particular sensations, subjective impressions,
impulses, irrational prejudices, self-will, mere eccentricities,
oddities, foibles, and fancies.

Good examples of the right and wrong principles of the Sophists are to
be found in modern Protestantism and modern democracy. Protestantism,
it is often said, is founded upon the right of private judgment, and
this is simply the right of the subject, the right of the individual
to exercise his own reason. But if this is interpreted to mean that
each individual is entitled to set up his mere whims and fancies as
the law in religious matters, then we have the bad sort of
Protestantism. Again, democracy is simply political protestantism, and
democratic ideas are the direct offspring of the protestant
Reformation. The democratic principle is that no rational being can be
asked to obey a law to which his own reason has not assented. But the
law must be founded upon reason, upon the universal in man. I, as an
individual, as a mere ego, have no rights whatever. It is only as a
rational being, as a potentially universal being, as a member of the
commonwealth of reason, that I have any rights, that I can claim to
legislate for myself and others. But if each individual's capricious
self-will, his mere whims and fancies, are erected into a law, then
democracy turns into anarchism and bolshevism.

{124}

It is a great mistake to suppose that the doctrines of the Sophists
are merely antiquated ideas, dead and fossilized thoughts, of interest
only to historians, but of no importance to us. On the contrary,
modern popular thought positively reeks with the ideas and tendencies
of the Sophists. It is often said that a man ought to have strong
convictions, and some people even go so far as to say that it does not
much matter what a man believes, so long as what he believes he
believes strongly and firmly. Now certainly it is quite true that a
man with strong convictions is more interesting than a man without any
opinions. The former is at least a force in the world, while the
latter is colourless and ineffectual. But to put exclusive emphasis on
the mere fact of having convictions is wrong. After all, the final
test of worth must be whether the man's convictions are true or false.
There must be an objective standard of truth, and to forget this, to
talk of the mere fact of having strong opinions as in itself a merit,
is to fall into the error of the Sophists.

An