Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/401

PROTAGORAS. 379 assigned to him in his harangue, includes some points better than that of Plato himself. For Plato seems to have conceived the ethical end, to each individual, as comprising nothing more than his own permanent happiness and moral health ; and in this very dialogue, he introduces Sokrates as maintaining virtue to consist only in a right calculation of a man's own personal happi- ness and misery. But here we find Protagoras speaking in a way which implies a larger, and, in my opinion, a juster, appreci- ation of the ethical end, as including not only reference to a man's own happiness, but also obligations towards the happiness of others. Without at all agreeing in the harsh terms of censure which various critics pronounce upon that theory which Sokrates is made to set forth in the Platonic Protagoras, I consider his conception of the ethical end essentially narrow and imperfect, not capable of being made to serve as basis for deduction of the best ethical precepts. Yet such is the prejudice with which the history of the sophists has been written, that the commentators on Plato accuse the sophists of having originated what they ignorantly term, " the base theory of utility," here propounded by Sokrates himself; complimenting the latter on having set forth those larger views which in this dialogue belong only to Protagoras. 1 ' Stallbaum, Prolegomena adPlatonis Menonem, p. 9 : " Etcnim sophistae, quum virtutis cxercitationem et ad utilitates externas referent, et facultate quftdam atque consuetudine ejus, quod utile videretur, reperiendi, absolvi itatucrent, Socrates ipse, rejecta utilitatis turpitudine, vim naturamque rirtutis unice ad id quod bonum honestumque est, rcvocavit; voluitque tsse in eo, ut quis recti bonique sensu ac scienti.i polleret, ad quam tanquam ad certissimam normam atque regulam actiones suas omnes dirigeret atque poncrct." Whoever will compare this criticism with the Protagoras of Plato, c. 36, 37, especially p. 357, B, wherein Sokrates identifies good with pleasure and evil with pain, and wherein he considers right conduct to consist in justly calculating the items of pleasuie and pain one against the other, ^ fjerprj- TIKI) TCXVIJ, will be astonished how a critic on Plato could write what is above cited I am aware that there are other parts of Plato's dialogues in which he maintains a doctrine different from that just alluded to. Accord- ingly, Stallbaum (in his Prolegomena to the Protagoras, p. 30) conteids that Plato is hero setting forth a doctrine not his own, but is reasoning on the principles of Protagoras, for the purpose of entrapping and confound- ing h ; jn: "Qua? hie de fortitudine disscruntur, ca item cavcndum est ns