t among the concepts and their characters
until the contradictions which arose from these unsystematized
speculations brought the Greek mind up to the problems of criticism and
scientific method. Criticism led to the separation of the many from the
one, the imperfect copy from the perfect type, the sensuous and
passionate from the rational and the intrinsically good, the impermanent
particular from the incorruptible universal. The line of demarcation ran
between the lasting reality that answered to critical objective thought
and the realm of perishing imperfect instances, of partially realized
forms full of unmeaning differences due to distortion and imperfection,
the realm answering to a sensuous passionate unreflective experience. It
would be a quite inexcusable mistake to put all that falls on the wrong
side of the line into a subjective experience, for these characters
belonged not alone to the experience, but also to the passing show, to
the world of imperfectly developed matter which belonged to the
perceptual passionate experience. While it may not then be classed as
subjective, the Greeks of the Sophistic period felt that this phase of
existence was an experience which belongs to the man in his individual
life, that life in which he revolts from the conventions of society, in
which he questions accepted doctrine, in which he differentiates himself
from his fellows. Protagoras seems even to have undertaken to make this
experience of the individual, the stuff of the known world. It is
difficult adequately to assess Protagoras' undertaking. He seems to be
insisting both that the man's experience as his own must be the measure
of reality as known and on the other hand that these experiences present
norms which offer a choice in conduct. If this is true Protagoras
conceived of the individual's experience in its atypical and
revolutionary form as not only real but the possible source of fuller
realities than the world of convention. The undertaking failed both in
philosophic doctrine and in practical politics. It failed in both fields
because the subjectivist, both in theory and practice, did not succeed
in finding a place for the universal character of the object, its
meaning, in the mind of the individual and thus in finding in this
experience the hypothesis for the reconstruction of the real world. In
the ancient world the atypical individual, the revolutionist, the
non-conformist was a self-seeking adventurer or an