SOPHENE, sii-yMegne, a district of Armenia. SOPHISTJE, so-fitis'-ter, a name under which a large number of persons are included, who had nothing more in common than the carry orals, politics, and religion, of ing RiVellectual tendency of their age. The original meaning of (roc p to- r was equivalent to our //Ware/Men and it is applied by Hero dotus to both Solon and Pythagoras : in Greece, in the 4th century D.C., every man who taught or gave lessons to audiences, more or less numerous, was so called, and in the Athenian law, enacted 307 B.C., against the philosophers and their schools, the philosophers generally are designated aocotorai. The moderns speak of the Sophists as if they were a pro fessional body of men, maintaining theses, and employing arguments which every one could easily detect as false ; but such a class never could have maintained its existence, and this character is assigned to them as they are usually depicted from their opponents' rnis representations. By Plato and his critics they are represented as having prostituted their talents for gain, in teaching and in political life, of having laid claim to universal know ledge, of having generated scepticism and uncertainty by their carrying out the negative dialectic,—the maintaining of opposite theses as equally true,— of having catered for popular favour, &c. ; but as regarded their negative dialectic, Socrates and Plato (except in his later days) were Sophists, and the claim to universal knowledge was then common to all philosophers. The Sophists really mark merely
a transition period, the clearing-up period, as necessarily preparatory to the dogmatic, and they were the natural result of the restlessness of the time. Of the Sophists, the Hegelian writer Dr. Scwhegler says :—" They threw among the people a fulness in every depart ment of knowledge ; they strewed about them a vast number of fruitful germs of develop ment; they called out investigations in the theory of knowledge, in logic, and in lan guage ; they laid the basis for the methodical treatment of many branches of human know ledge, and they partly founded and partly called forth that wonderful intellectual activity which characterized Athens at that time. Their greatest merit is their service in the depart ment of language ; they may be even said to have created and formed the Attic prose. . . With them, Athenian eloquence, which they first incited, begins." The Sophists are divisible into two classes,—those teachers who were of real value in regard to philosophy, as Protagiras, Gorgias the Leontine, Hippias of Elis, Prodicus, &c. ; and those to whom the usual meaning of Sophist applies, who "sank to a common level of buffoonery and disgrace ful strife for gain, and comprised their whole dialectic art in certain formula; for entangling fallacies."