K SMALL LETTER ETA WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, and taught for pay. He came to
Athens early in life, and gave to the settlers who left it for Thurium,
B.C. 445, a code of laws, or perhaps adapted the old laws of Charondas to
their use. He was a friend of Pericles. After some time he was impeached
for impiety in saying, That respecting the Gods he did not know whether
they existed or not; and banished from Athens (see De Nat. Deor. i. 23).
He was a very prolific author: his most peculiar doctrines excited Plato
to write the Theaetetus to oppose them.

His fundamental principle was, that everything is motion, and that that is
the efficient cause of everything; that nothing _exists_, but that
everything is continually _coming into existence_. He divided motion
(besides numerous subordinate divisions) into active and passive; though
he did not consider either of these characteristics as permanent. From the
concurrence of two such motions he taught that sensations and perceptions
arose, according to the rapidity of the motion. Therefore he said that
there is or exists for each individual, only that of which he has a
sensation or perception; and that as sensation, like its objects, is
engaged in a perpetual change of motion, opposite assertions might exist
according to the difference of the perception respecting such object.
Moral worth he attributed to taking pleasure in the beautiful; and virtue
he referred to a certain sense of shame implanted in man by nature; and to
a certain conscious feeling of justice, which secures the bonds of
connexion in private and political life.

_Socrates_, the son of Sophroniscus, a statuary, and Phaenarete, a midwife,
was born B.C. 468. He lived all his life at Athens, serving indeed as a
soldier at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and in the battle of Delium; but with
these exceptions he never left the city; where he lived as a teacher of
philosophy; not, however, founding a school or giving lectures, but
frequenting the market-place and all other places of public resort,
talking with every one who chose to address him, and putting questions to
every one of every rank and profession, so that Grote calls him "a public
talker for instruction." He believed himself to have a special religious
mission from the Gods to bring his countrymen to knowledge and virtue. He
was at last impeached before the legal tribunals, on the ground of
"corrupting the youth of the city, and not worshipping th