(for the Athenian youth were no more corrupted in the age of Demosthenes
than in the age of Pericles), but honourable and estimable persons, who
supplied a training in literature which was generally wanted at the time.
We will briefly consider how far these statements appear to be justified by
facts: and, 1, about the meaning of the word there arises an interesting
question:--

Many words are used both in a general and a specific sense, and the two
senses are not always clearly distinguished. Sometimes the generic meaning
has been narrowed to the specific, while in other cases the specific
meaning has been enlarged or altered. Examples of the former class are
furnished by some ecclesiastical terms: apostles, prophets, bishops,
elders, catholics. Examples of the latter class may also be found in a
similar field: jesuits, puritans, methodists, and the like. Sometimes the
meaning is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or bad sense will subsist
side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect is produced on the
meaning of a word when the very term which is stigmatized by the world
(e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious or derided class; this tends
to define the meaning. Or, again, the opposite result is produced, when
the world refuses to allow some sect or body of men the possession of an
honourable name which they have assumed, or applies it to them only in
mockery or irony.

The term 'Sophist' is one of those words of which the meaning has been both
contracted and enlarged. Passages may be quoted from Herodotus and the
tragedians, in which the word is used in a neutral sense for a contriver or
deviser or inventor, without including any ethical idea of goodness or
badness. Poets as well as philosophers were called Sophists in the fifth
century before Christ. In Plato himself the term is applied in the sense
of a 'master in art,' without any bad meaning attaching to it (Symp.;