The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
"
THE SOCRATIC IMPULSE 13
sense-perception, the basis of morality, the dependence
of virtue on education), giving explicit utterance to them
and offering a solution of them from the standpoint of
individual consciousness and of practical experience ;
and although their philosophy was in many ways un
satisfactory and inadequate,
it was a distinct advance
in the march of human thinking. No doubt, the dis
putation by
which it was
operated was of a peculiar
kind it was what is known as Eristic or wrangling, or
the art of
popular and approximate debate
;
but that
is not to be condemned without discrimination, even
though, in the hands of degenerate teachers (say, dur
ing the latter part of Plato s life and in the days of
Aristotle), it became what we nowadays know by the
disparaging name of sophistry
criticism and quibbling, of arguing
of cavilling, of captious
for the sake of
victory, or attempting against all comers to "make the
worse appear the better reason." For that simply
means that it shared the fate of many other good things,
which have been brought into disrepute by being un
worthily handled, and cannot reasonably be held
for men s abuse of it.
responsible
On the side of politics, on the other hand, the effort
of the professional Sophists about the time of Socrates
was to get men to think and act in an independent
fashion, to feel dissatisfied with inherited custom and
mere authority, and to subject common opinion and
popular belief to a thorough sifting. For this purpose,
they did, in the spirit of free inquiry, treat of such
things as government and positive institutions and law,
and they handled the political virtues (justice and the
like), not forgetting, however, the training of the in-