In this connexion, notice may be taken of another expression and
condition of freedom, the absence of sacerdotalism. The priests of the
temples never became powerful castes, tyrannizing over the community in
their own interests and able to silence voices raised against religious
beliefs. The civil authorities

[25] kept the general control of public worship in their own hands, and,
if some priestly families might have considerable influence, yet as a
rule the priests were virtually State servants whose voice carried no
weight except concerning the technical details of ritual.

To return to the early philosophers, who were mostly materialists, the
record of their speculations is an interesting chapter in the history of
rationalism. Two great names may be selected, Heraclitus and Democritus,
because they did more perhaps than any of the others, by sheer hard
thinking, to train reason to look upon the universe in new ways and to
shock the unreasoned conceptions of common sense. It was startling to be
taught, for the first time, by Heraclitus, that the appearance of
stability and permanence which material things present to our senses is
a false appearance, and that the world and everything in it are changing
every instant. Democritus performed the amazing feat of working out an
atomic theory of the universe, which was revived in the seventeenth
century and is connected, in the history of speculation, with the most
modern physical and chemical theories of matter. No fantastic tales of
creation, imposed by sacred authority, hampered these powerful brains.

All this philosophical speculation prepared

[26] the way for the educationalists who were known as the Sophists.
They begin to appear after the middle of the fifth century. They worked