324 
[June, 
What is Religion ? 
perception is the measure of all things. This, he says, is 
trivial and of no value, though it sounds like something of 
importance.” — {In notis, Ibid.) 
Gorgias, a contemporary of Protagoras, wrote a treatise 
on Nature, or that which is not. He says, “ Firstly, that 
nothing exists ; secondly, if anything exists it cannot be 
known ; and thirdly, if anything exists and can be known 
the knowledge cannot be imparted.” Tennemann’s exposition 
of Gorgias is, first, that nothing real exists, because neither 
negative nor positive ; nor both at the same time can really 
exist ; but even granting that something real did exist, yet, 
second, it would not be cognisable, because if thoughts are 
not real things the real cannot be thought ; and if thoughts 
were real things that which is not real could not be thought ; 
consequently everything thought must be real in that case. 
Finally, even if something were cognisable, it could not be 
imparted by the medium of words, because words do not 
express things, and nobody thinks like his neighbour.” 
Grote says the teaching was “that nothing exists; that if 
anything exists it is unknowable ; and granting it even to 
exist, and to be knowable by any one man, he could never 
communicate it to others.” Grote observes that the modern 
historians of Philosophy denounce the scepticism of the 
Sophist, “ instead of explaining his thesis in immediate se- 
. quence with the speculations which preceded it.” “ In our 
sense of the words it is a monstrous paradox.” “ The word 
existence as they understood it (the Eleatic philosophers), 
did not mean phenomenal, but ultra-phenomenal, existence. 
They looked upon the phenomena of sense as alway coming 
and going, — as something essentially transitory, fluctuating, 
incapable of being surely known, and furnishing at best 
only grounds for conjecture. They searched by cogitation 
for what they presumed to be, the really existing something 
or substance — the noumenon, to use a Kantian phrase — 
lying behind or under the phenomena, which noumenon 
they recognised as the only appropriate objects of know- 
ledge ; they discussed much whether it was one or many.” 
This probably is the protoplastic substance of the Hylo- 
Idealists. “ The thesis of Gorgias related to this ultra- 
phenomenal existence, and bore closely upon the arguments 
of Zeno and Melissus.” “ Protagoras and Gorgias found 
predecessors indeed, but no binding precedents to. copy, so 
that each struck out more or less a road of their own.” 
“ We do not know how far Gorgias agreed in the opinion 
of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things.” — 
(Grote, Ibid.) 
