A History of Greek Philosophy / SOCRATES

Page 9

We may therefore conceive Socrates as arguing thus: “You clever Sophists, when we let you take us into the region of abstract talk, have a knack of so playing with words that in the end we don’t seem to know anything for certain, especially on such subjects as we have hitherto thought the most important, such as God and right and truth and justice and purity. We seem to be perfectly defenceless against you; and what is more, any smart youth, whose opinion on any practical matter no one would think of taking, can very soon pick up the trick from you, and bewilder plain people really far wiser than himself by his clever argumentation; all going to prove that there is nothing certain, nothing real, nothing binding; nothing but opinions and conventions and conscious or unconscious humbug in the universe.

“But when I go and have a quiet talk with any man who really is a known master of some craft or skill, about that craft or skill, I find no doubt whatever existing in his mind about there being a law, a something absolutely real and beautiful and true in connection with it. He, on the contrary, lives with no other purpose or hope or desire but as far as he can to realise in what he works at something of this real and beautiful and true, which was before him, will be after him, is the only valuable thing in him, but yet which honours him with the function of, in his day and generation, expressing it before the eyes of men.”

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