THREE:Our readers have now before them everything of importance that is known about the Sophists, and something more that is not known for certain, but may, we think, be reasonably conjectured. Taking the whole class together, they represent a combination of three distinct tendencies, the endeavour to supply an encyclopaedic training for youth, the cultivation of political rhetoric as a special art, and the search after a scientific foundation for ethics derived from the results of previous philosophy. With regard to the last point, they agree in drawing a fundamental distinction between Nature and Law, but some take one and some the other for their guide. The partisans of Nature lean to the side of a more comprehensive education, while their opponents tend more and more to lay an exclusive stress on oratorical proficiency. Both schools are at last infected by the moral corruption of the day, natural right becoming identified with the interest of the stronger, and humanism leading to the denial of objective reality, the substitution of illusion for knowledge, and the confusion of momentary gratification with moral good. The dialectical habit of considering every question under contradictory aspects degenerates into eristic prize-fighting and deliberate disregard of the conditions which alone make argument possible. Finally, the component elements of Sophisti103cism are dissociated from one another, and are either separately developed or pass over into new combinations. Rhetoric, apart from speculation, absorbs the whole time and talent of an Isocrates; general culture is imparted by a professorial class without originality, but without reproach; naturalism and sensuous idealism are worked up into systematic completion for the sake of their philosophical interest alone; and the name of sophistry is unhappily fastened by Aristotle on paid exhibitions of verbal wrangling which the great Sophists would have regarded with indignation and disgust.