Different spirit shown towards Sokratês and to wards the Sophists.

That the professional teachers called Sophists in Greece were intellectual and moral corruptors—and that much corruption grew up under their teaching in the Athenian mind—are common statements which I have endeavoured to show to be erroneous. Corresponding to these statements is another, which represents Sokratês as one whose special merit it was to have rescued the Athenian mind from such demoralising influences;—a reputation, which he neither deserves nor requires. In general, the favourable interpretation of evidence, as exhibited towards Sokratês, has been scarcely less marked than the harshness of presumption against the Sophists. Of late, however, some authors have treated his history in an altered spirit, and have manifested a disposition to lower him down to that which they regard as the Sophistical level. M. Forchhammer's treatise—“The Athenians and Sokratês, or Lawful Dealing against Revolution”—goes even further, and maintains confidently that Sokratês was most justly condemned as a heretic, a traitor, and a corruptor of youth. His book, the conclusions of which I altogether reject, is a sort of retribution to the Sophists, as extending to their alleged opponent the same bitter and unfair spirit of construction with that under which they have so long unjustly suffered. But when we impartially consider the evidence, it will appear that Sokratês deserves our admiration and esteem, not indeed as an anti-Sophist, but as combining with the qualities of a good man, a force of character and an originality of speculation as well as of method, and a power of intellectually working on others—generically different from that of any professional teacher—without parallel either among contemporaries or successors.