608 PSYCHOLOGY 



(1) The Sophistic principle, homo mensura omnium (Protagoras), 

 formulates the thought of an active and constructive centre in the 

 individual. The individual's or human nature's reaction to the world 

 gives all the measure there is for things. In Socrates this principle 

 was developed in an anti-individualistic or social sense. 1 



(2) The contrast between "opinion" (86ga) and "reason" (vows), 

 sharply brought out by the dialogue method in the hands of the 

 master, Socrates, and developed by his disciples, now becomes more 

 positive. 



(3) The view that truth is in general a thing of thought in so far 

 eternal and immutable, not, as in the earlier transition stage, a 

 function of a principle of change essentially indeterminate in char- 

 acter. This is the germ of Plato's "idea" in which reality becomes 

 explicitly an ideal postulate. 



(4) In Socrates the way is opened to the form of dualism of mind 

 and matter found in Plato's doctrine of matter (vAi?) . 



Not stopping to develop these points, time does not allow, - 

 we may still say that Socrates was mainly a Sophist, not a clear 

 subjectivist. He reached subjectivism only so far as it was involved 

 in a dualism of the general (truth) and the particular (appearance), 

 and that in an experimental and controversial way. 2 He did not 

 realize the thought of mind as a psychic content in distinction from 

 body. 



Had Plato been possessed of the scientific interest, this distinction 

 might have been made then and there; for Plato deduced a prin- 

 ciple of matter. But, like Anaxagoras, with his postulate of mind, 

 Plato's "matter" remained a logical contrast principle, over against 

 "form," a particular over against the general, not a concrete 

 reality; and the philosophy of reality was to remain a rule of vibra- 

 tion between logical poles, rather than a synthesis of reflection. 



So far as a science of psychology goes, Plato must be classed with 

 Socrates in what we may call the period of "experimental sub- 

 jectivity." 



In Aristotle, no less than in Plato, it is the outward movement 

 of thought into reality that has the emphasis, not the development 



1 Against the individualistic interpretation for the Sophists generally, espe- 

 cially Protagoras, see Gomperz, loc. tit. i, 451 ff. 



It is confirmatory of the parallel made in the text between the Sophist's and 

 a stage in the individual's thought to note that Socrates' position was not in its 

 nature individualistic, but was reached and maintained in the midst of social 

 opposition and discussion. The Socratic method was a social dialectic, or give 

 and take. I do not know of any adequate exposition of the social political, 

 religious, etc. factors which produced the Sophistic movement; but an account 

 of a later analogous period the rise of the Post- Aristotelian schools is 

 given in admirable terms by Caird in his Development of Theology in the Great 

 Philosophers, n, lect. xv. 



2 The way which, when illustrated in the individual's development, I have called 

 the construction of a " semblant" object a matter of psychic experimentation 

 with materials, akin to the child's playful and esthetic imaginative constructions. 



