to some material principle, such as water, air, etc., it was
gradually driven, by force of logic, to distinguish Being from Seeming,
and to see that while the latter was dependent on the thinking subject,
the former could not be anything material. This result was reached by
both the materialistic and spiritualistic schools, and was only carried
one step further by the Sophists, who maintained that even the being of
things depended on the thinker. This necessarily led to skepticism,
individualism, and disruption of the old social and religious order.

Then arose Socrates, greatest of the Sophists, who, seeing that the
outer world had been shown to depend on the inner, adopted as his motto,
"Know Thyself," and devoted himself to the study of mind. By his
dialectic method he showed that skepticism and individualism, so far as
anarchic, can be overcome by carrying out thought to its implications;
when it proves to be the same for all, and to bring with it an authority
binding on all, and replacing that of the old external gods. Thus
Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty, a principle
necessarily hostile to the ancient State, which absorbed the man in the
citizen. Socrates was accordingly put to death as an atheist; and then
Plato, with good intentions but prejudiced insight, set to work to
restore the old tyranny of the State. This he did by placing truth, or
reality (which Socrates had found in complete thought, internal to the
mind), outside of both thought and nature, and making it consist of a
group of eternal schemes, or forms, of which natural things are merely
transient phantoms, and which can be reached by only a few aristocratic
souls, born to rule the rest. On the basis of this distortion he
constructed his Republic, in which complete despotism is exercised by
the philosophers through the military; man is reduced to a machine, his
affections and will being disregarded; community of women and of
property is the law; and science is scouted.

Aristotle's philosophy may be said to be a protest against this view,
and an attempt to show that reality is embodied in nature, which depends
on a supreme intelligence, and may be realized in other intelligences,
or thought-centres, such as the human mind. In other words, according to
Aristotle, truth is actual in the world and potential in all minds,
which may by experience put on its forms. Thus the individualism of the
Sophists and the despotism of Plato are over