Thus the very thinkers who laid the imperishable foundations of philosophy and science regarded their labours as a youthful distraction. In order to establish for all time the fundamental errors of the sophists, their logical and ethical deficiencies, Plato was not above borrowing their loose, easy manner of dialogue. For, much as he deepened philosophy, he still saw it as a noble game. If both he and Aristotle deemed the fallacious arguments and quibbles of the sophists worthy of so serious and so elaborate a refutation, it could only because their own philosophic thought had not yet broken loose from the archaic sphere of play. But, may we ask, can philosophy ever do this? ……The agonistic factor in Greece was so strong that it allowed rhetoric to expand at the cost of pure philosophy, which was put in the shade by sophistication parading as the culture of the common man. Gorgias was typical of this deterioration of culture: he turned away from true philosophy to waste his spirit in the praise and misuse of glittering words and false wit. After Aristotle the level of philosophy sank; emulation carried to extremes and narrow doctrinarism won the day. A similar declension was to repeat itself in the later Middle Ages, when the age of the great scholastics who sought to understand the innermost meaning of things was followed by one in which words and formulae alone sufficed.