One is reminded, in reading of it, of the splendid years of the Renaissance in Italy, of the awakening of the human mind to a vigorous life which cast off the bonds of tradition and insisted upon the right of free and unfettered development.

Athens was the center of this intellectual activity.
In this century arose the Sophists, public teachers who busied themselves with all departments of human knowledge, but seemed to lay no little emphasis upon certain questions that touched very nearly the life of man.

Can man attain to truth at all--to a truth that is more than a mere truth to him, a seeming truth?
Whence do the laws derive their authority?
Is there such a thing as justice, as right?
It was with such questions as these that the Sophists occupied themselves, and such questions as these have held the attention of mankind ever since.
When they make their appearance in the life of a people or of an individual man, it means that there has been a rebirth, a birth into the life of reflection.
When Socrates, that greatest of teachers, felt called upon to refute the arguments of these men, he met them, so to speak, on their own ground, recognizing that the subjects of which they discoursed were, indeed, matter for scientific investigation.

His attitude seemed to many conservative persons in his day a dangerous one; he was regarded as an innovator; he taught men to think and to raise questions where, before, the traditions of the fathers had seemed a sufficient guide to men's actions.
And, indeed, he could not do otherwise.

Men had learned to reflect, and there had come into existence at least the beginnings of what we now sometimes rather loosely call the mental and moral sciences.