1884.] 
Hylo-Idealism ? 
321 
Consequences,” leads to an advanced thought : it is too 
hopeful an idea to suppose that these large talkers could 
grasp it. 
I have thought it well to parade the opinions of the 
Sophists on which this dodtrine of Egos, non-Egos, and 
“ thinks ” are founded, and set forth some opinions of 
Berkeley, the great Idealist, and his commentators. Unfor- 
tunately, although the Hylo-Idealists claim Idealism it is 
not the Idealism of Berkeley, who centres the whole of his 
assumptions in the consciousness of God. 
As to Protogoras, who is assumed to be the base of the 
pillar, what was his teaching ? Protagoras of Abdera 
(480 B.C.) His saying “ that man is the measure of the 
Universe ” contains the marrow of the philosophy of the 
Sophists, — i.e., “that our individual judgments and feelings 
were the standards of the true and the false, of the right 
and the wrong ; that whatever each man regarded as right 
was right, and that whatever he regarded as true was true,” 
which dodtrine, Dr. Ferrier rightly says, “ obviously un- 
settles the foundations both of truth and of morality, and 
opens a wide door to every form of ignorance and licen- 
tiousness.” The ultimate assumption of the Sophists was 
“ that sensation is the essential attribute of man.” This 
assumption was grappled with and overthrown by Socrates 
and Plato, who showed that thought (something essentially 
different from sensation) is the fundamental attribute of 
man, by showing that ideas were the common property of 
all intelligence, whilst sensation is limited and particular, 
and thus they asserted that man is competent to the attain- 
ment of that which is absolutely and universally true ; they 
admitted that man is “ the measure of the Universe ” in so 
far as he is a thinking, but not in so far as he is a sensa- 
tional, being. 
G. H. Lewes (“Biographical History of Philosophy”) 
says, let us suppose that Protagoras accepted the dodtrine of 
Democritus excepting “ the atomic and reflective : these two 
imply each other; refledtion is necessary for the idea of 
atoms ; and it is from the idea of atoms, not perceived by 
the sense, that the existence of refledtion is proved.” “ He 
said thought was sensation, and all knowledge consequently 
individual.” Lewes seems to suppose that Protagoras de- 
rived his dodtrine from Heraclitus, who maintained “ the 
dodtrine of thought being identical with and limited by 
sensation. Now this dodtrine implies that everything is 
true relatively , — every sensation is a true sensation, and, as 
there is nothing but sensation, knowledge is evidently 
