stages; 5. they refuse to attribute motion or power to Being; 6. they are
the enemies of sense;--whether they are the 'friends of ideas,' who carry
on the polemic against sense, is uncertain; probably under this remarkable
expression Plato designates those who more nearly approached himself, and
may be criticizing an earlier form of his own doctrines. We may observe
(1) that he professes only to give us a few opinions out of many which were
at that time current in Greece; (2) that he nowhere alludes to the ethical
teaching of the Cynics--unless the argument in the Protagoras, that the
virtues are one and not many, may be supposed to contain a reference to
their views, as well as to those of Socrates; and unless they are the
school alluded to in the Philebus, which is described as 'being very
skilful in physics, and as maintaining pleasure to be the absence of pain.'
That Antisthenes wrote a book called 'Physicus,' is hardly a sufficient
reason for describing them as skilful in physics, which appear to have been
very alien to the tendency of the Cynics.

The Idealism of the fourth century before Christ in Greece, as in other
ages and countries, seems to have provoked a reaction towards Materialism.
The maintainers of this doctrine are described in the Theaetetus as
obstinate persons who will believe in nothing which they cannot hold in
their hands, and in the Sophist as incapable of argument. They are
probably the same who are said in the Tenth Book of the Laws to attribute
the course of events to nature, art, and chance. Who they were, we have no
means of determining except from Plato's description of them. His silence
respecting the Atomists might lead us to suppose that here we have a trace
of them. But the Atomists were not Materialists in the grosser sense of
the term, nor were they incapable of reasoning; and Plato would hardly have
described a great genius like Democritus in the disdainful terms which he
uses of the Materialists. Upon the whole, we must infer that the persons
here spoken of are unknown to us, like the many other writers and talkers