Socrates brought to the Greek mind a new awareness of the central significance of the soul, establishing it for the first time as the seat of the individual waking consciousness and of the moral and intellectual character.

passion to restore a former unity, to overcome the separation from the divine and become one with it.

by speaking of Ideas on one page and gods on another in such analogous terms, Plato resolved, tenuously yet with weighty and enduring consequences, the central tension in the classical Greek mind between myth and reason.

This decisive shift in the character of Greek thought, encouraged by the contemporary social and political situation,

beyond the appearance to the essence.

To evaluate one thing as “better” than another assumes the existence of an absolute good with which the two relative goods can be compared. Otherwise the word “good” would be only a word whose meaning had no stable basis in reality, and human morality would lack a secure foundation.

According to Sophists such as Protagoras, man was the measure of all things, and his own individual judgments concerning everyday human life should form the basis of his personal beliefs and conduct—not naive conformity to traditional religion nor indulgence in far-flung abstract speculation. Truth was relative, not absolute, and differed from

Qualities were subjective human perceptions, for the atoms possessed only quantitative differences.

Contemporary man now perceived himself as more a civilized product of progress from savagery than a degeneration from a mythical golden age.