George Grote

“ L’identité primitive des intelligences n’est qu’une fiction logique sans réalité — une simple abstraction de langage, qui ne repose que sur l’identité du mot avec lui-même. Tout se reduit à la possibilité abstraite des mêmes développemens, dans les mêmes conditions d’hérédité et d’éducation — mais aussi de développemens différens dans des circonstances différentes: c’est à dire, que l’intelligence de chacun n’est identique à celle de tous, qu’au moment où elle n’est pas encore proprement une intelligence. ”

“ Every respondent is the measure to himself. He answers suitably to his own belief; he defends by his own suggestions; he yields to the pressure of contradiction and inconsistency, when he feels them, and not before. Each dialogist is (to use the Protagorean phrase) the measure to himself of truth and falsehood, according as he himself believes it. Assent or dissent, whichever it may be, springs only from the free working of the individual mind, in its actual condition then and there. It is to the individual mind alone, that appeal is made, and this is what Protagoras asks for. ”

“ The sight of the living form, in such perfection, movement, and variety, awakened a powerful emotional sympathy, blended with aesthetic sentiment, which in the more susceptible natures was exalted into intense and passionate devotion. The terms in which this feeling is described, both by Plato and Xenophon, are among the strongest which the language affords — and are predicated even of Sokrates himself. Far from being ashamed of the feeling, they consider it admirable and beneficial ”

“ Au reste, quand même nous serions mieux renseignés sur sa vie, il resterait toujours pour nous le singulier spectacle d’un homme qui tantôt célèbre l’absorption de l’âme dans l’essence de Dieu, tantôt chante le vin et l’amour, sans grossièreté, il est vrai, mais avec un laisser aller et un naturel qui exclut toute idée de symbolisme — et qui généralement glisse de l’une dans l’autre de ces deux manières de sentir, qui nous paraissent si différentes, sans s’apercevoir lui-même qu’il change de sujet. ”

“ Engaged as we are in investigating philosophical truth, we stand in pointed contrast with politicians and rhetors in the public assembly or dikastery. We are like freemen; they, like slaves. They have before them the Dikasts, as their masters, to whose temper and approbation they are constrained to adapt themselves. They are also in presence of antagonists, ready to entrap and confute them. The personal interests, sometimes even the life, of an individual are at stake; so that every thing must be sacrificed to the purpose of obtaining a verdict. ”

“ A learned man like Schwegler, who both knows the views of other philosophers, and has himself reflected on philosophy, may perhaps find affirmative meaning in the Parmenides; just as Sokrates, in the Platonic Protagoras, finds his own ethical doctrine in the song of the poet Simonides. But I venture to say that no contemporary reader of Plato could have found such a meaning in the Parmenides; and that if Plato intended to communicate such a meaning, the whole structure of the dialogue would be only an elaborate puzzle calculated to prevent nearly all readers from reaching it. ”

“ Is the Universal Man distributed among all individual men, or is he one and entire in each of them? How is the Universal Beautiful (The Self-Beautiful — Beauty) in all and each beautiful thing? How does this one monad, unchangeable and imperishable, become embodied in a multitude of transitory individuals, each successively generated and perishing? ”

“ Your opinion (remarks Protarchus) does not agree with that of Gorgias. He affirms, that the power of persuasion (Rhetoric) is the greatest and best of all arts: inasmuch as it enables us to carry all our points, not by force, but with the free will and consent of others. I should be glad to avoid contradicting either him or you.
There is no real contradiction between us (replies Sokrates) . You may concede to Gorgias that his art or cognition is the greatest and best of all — the most in repute, as well as the most useful to mankind. ”

“ This is the sovereign purifier.
To meet this special and gravest case of ignorance, we must recognise a special division of the art of instruction or education. Exhortation, which is the common mode of instruction, and which was employed by our forefathers universally, is of no avail against this false persuasion of knowledge: which can only be approached and cured by the Elenchus, or philosophical cross-examination. So long as a man believes himself to be wise, you may lecture for ever without making impression upon him: you do no good by supplying food when the stomach is sick. ”

“ I might denounce opponents as worthless men, deficient in all the sentiments which distinguish men from brutes, and meriting punishment as well as disgrace. If I used all these harsh phrases, I should only imitate what many authors of repute think themselves entitled to say, about THEIR beliefs and convictions. Yet in reality, I should still be proclaiming nothing beyond my own feelings:— the force of emotional association, and antipathy towards opponents, which had grown round these convictions in my own mind. ”

“ The name Eros is confined to one special case of this large variety.
Such is Plato’s conception of Eros or Love and its object. He represents it as one special form or variety of the universal law of gravitation pervading all mankind. Every one loves, desires, or aspires to happiness: this is the fundamental or primordial law of human nature, beyond which we cannot push enquiry. Good, or good things, are nothing else but the means to happiness:7 accordingly, every man, loving happiness, loves good also, and desires not only full acquisition, but perpetual possession of good. ”

“ But while, on this point, Plato’s didactic theories deserve admiration, we must remark on the other hand that they are pitched so high as to exceed human force, and to overpass all possibility of being realised.127 They mark out an idéal, which no person ever attained, either then or since — like the Platonic theory of rhetoric. To be master of any subject, in the extent and perfection required for sustaining and administering a Sokratic cross-examination — is a condition which scarce any one can ever fulfil: certainly no one, except upon a small range of subjects. ”

“ But (urges the Eleate) can they really believe that Ens is eternally the same and unchanged, — that it has neither life, nor mind, nor intelligence, nor change, nor movement? This is incredible. They must concede that Change, and the Changeable, are to be reckoned as Entia or Realities: for if these be not so reckoned, and if all Entia are unchangeable, no Ens can be an object of knowledge to any mind. But though the changeable belongs to Ens, we must not affirm that all Ens is changeable. There cannot be either intellect or knowledge, without something constant and unchangeable. ”

“ This is the reality of the case, which the Protagorean formula brings into full view; but which most men dislike to recognise, and disguise from themselves as well as from others in the common elliptical forms of speech. In most instances a believer entirely forgets that his own mind is the product of a given time and place, and of a conjunction of circumstances always peculiar, amidst the aggregate of mankind — for the most part narrow. He cannot be content (like Protagoras) to be a measure for himself and for those whom his arguments may satisfy. ”

“ If any man calls upon me to give him absolute truth, and to lay down the canon of evidence for identifying it — I cannot comply with the request, any farther than to deliver my own best judgment, what is truth — and to declare what is the canon of evidence which guides my own mind. ”

“ Knowledge means a state of mind: the knowledge of material things is a mental thing. We are incapable of discussing the existence of an independent material world: the very act is a contradiction. We can speak only of a world presented to our own minds. By an illusion of language we fancy that we are capable of contemplating a world which does not enter into our own mental existence: but the attempt belies itself, for this contemplation is an effort of mind. ”

“ The doctrine of Protagoras maintains that all things are relative to the percipient, cogitant, concipient, mind: that all Object is implicated with a Subject: that as things appear to me, so they are to me — as they appear to you, so they are to you. Plato denies this, and says: “All things have a fixed essence of their own, absolutely and in themselves, not relative to any percipient or cogitant — nor dependent upon any one’s appreciative understanding, or emotional susceptibility, or will. ”

“ A pupil who, having got all these by heart, supposed himself to have completed his course of philosophy, so that nothing farther remained to be done, would fall very short of the Platonic exigency. The life of the philosopher — as Plato here conceives it — is a perpetual search after truth, by dialectic debate and mutual cross-examination between two minds, aiding each other to disembroil that confusion and inconsistency which grows up naturally in the ordinary mind. ”

“ Analogy between Cognition and Pleasure: in each, there are gradations of truth and purity.
We thus make out (continues Sokrates) that there is a difference between one variety and another variety of science or knowledge, analogous to that which we have traced between the varieties of pleasure. One pleasure is true and pure; another is not so, or is inseparably connected with pain and non-pleasurable elements — there being in each case a difference in degree. ”

“ Every philosopher wove his own tissue of theory for himself, without any restraint upon his intellectual impulse, in regard to all the problems then afloat. What the theories of the Sophists were, we do not know: but Plato, author of the Timæus, Republic, Leges, Kratylus, Menon — who affirmed the pre-existence as well as post-existence of the mind, and the eternal self-existence of Ideas — has no fair ground for reproaching them with blamable rashness in the extent and diversity of topics which they presumed to discuss. ”

“ C’est d’ailleurs peut-être un problème qui ne répugne pas seulement à la nature de notre esprit mais à l’essence même des choses. Quand même en effet on supprimerait par la pensée tous les sujets sentants, il faudrait encore admettre que nul corps ne manifesterait ses propriétés autrement qu’en relation avec un sujet quelconque, et dans ce cas ses propriétés ne seraient encore que relatives: en sorte qu’il me paraît fort raisonnable d’admettre que les propriétés déterminées des corps n’existent pas indépendamment d’un sujet quelconque. ”

“ The grounds of belief, according to Protagoras, relative to the individual, are not the same with all men at all times. But it does not follow (nor does Protagoras appear to have asserted) that they vary according to the will or inclination of the individual. Plato, in impugning this doctrine, reasons as if these two things were one and the same — as if, according to Protagoras, a man believed whatever he chose.26 This, however, is not an exact representation of the doctrine “Homo Mensura”: which does not assert the voluntary or the arbitrary, but simply the relative as against the absolute. ”

“ Each man believes others to be wiser on various points than himself — Belief on authority — not inconsistent with the affirmation of Protagoras.
This doctrine is not refuted by the fact, that every man believes others to be wiser than himself on various points. A man is just as much a measure to himself when he acts upon the advice of others, or believes a fact upon the affirmation of others, as when he judges upon his own unassisted sense or reasoning. He is a measure to himself when he agrees with others, as much as when he disagrees with them. ”

“ Cognition is sensible perception.
I shall first notice what he advances against Homo Mensura.
Arguments advanced by the Platonic Sokrates against the Protagorean doctrine. He says that it puts the wise and foolish on a par — that it contradicts the common consciousness. Not every one, but the wise man only, is a measure.
It puts every man (he says) on a par as to wisdom and intelligence: and not only every man, but every horse, dog, frog, and other animal along with him. ”

“ Sokrates claims for dialectic debate the valuable privilege, that it is constant action and re-action between two individual minds — an appeal by the inherent force and actual condition of each, to the like elements in the other — an ever shifting presentation of the same topics, accommodated to the measure of intelligence and cast of emotion in the talkers and at the moment. The individuality of each mind — both questioner and respondent — is here kept in view as the governing condition of the process. No two minds can be approached by the same road or by the same interrogation. ”

“ A man cannot realise to himself that which the hypothesis promises; much less can he realise it without those accompaniments which it assumes him to renounce. The loss stands out far more palpably than the gain. It is no refutation of the theory of Philêbus; who, announcing pleasure as the Summum Bonum, is entitled to call for pleasure in all its varieties, and for exemption from all pains. Sokrates himself had previously insisted on the great variety as well as on the great dissimilarity of the modes of pleasure and pain. ”