The Greeks 15 



This dualism of the Later lonians was carried further by the 

 Atomists, except that they rejected the behef in the intellectual 

 direction of the universe, and put in its place a blind necessity. 

 Democritus (b. circ. 460 B. C.) believed the world was made up 

 of atoms which had shape, order, position, size, and weight, and 

 which were in motion through natural necessity. In this pure 

 materialism there was neither room nor need for mind or pur- 

 pose. Even the soul itself is a rarer kind of matter. It follows, 

 necessarily, that the process of perception must consist of a 

 series of material contacts, and that there is no essential dif- 

 ference between thought and sensation. 



Such an interpretation of experience naturally prepares the 

 way for the Sophists (fl. 450-400 B. C.) who finding as little 

 validity in the reason as in the senses, came to despise knowl- 

 edge itself. They were chiefly concerned with an examination 

 of the conditions and the limits of knowledge, and, because of 

 their attitude, were the earliest of the European sceptics. Pro- 

 tagoras (b. circ. 480 B. C.) held that things existed only for 

 the individual who perceived them, and that therefore truth 

 could be only subjective. Hence man must be the measure of 

 all things, and knowledge can be only relative. There is no such 

 thing as objective truth, and all knowledge is merely a matter 

 of opinion, which is developed by the eristic method. This 

 negative interpretation of experience was given its extreme ex- 

 pression in Gorgias, who held that nothing exists, that even if 

 it did exist we could not know anything about it, and that even 

 if we could know something about it, we could not communicate 

 our knowledge to others. 



Such was the condition of the problem of the interpretation 

 of experience when Socrates (469-399 B. C.) took it up. The 

 Sophists had given up the search for truth, being unable to find 

 it either in the world around them or in their own minds. 

 Socrates found his method through the examination of his own 

 experience, and, with the motto yvw^i a-eavrov ever before him, 

 he developed his distinctly individual heuristic method. Start- 

 ing with the assumption that he knew nothing, Socrates aimed at 

 self-control through self-knowledge. There was therefore a 

 negative and a positive aspect to his method: the former con- 

 cerns itself with the process of conviction of ignorance as a 



