Plato | Theaetetus - Full audiobook with accompanying text (AudioEbook)

Fayette ATIS I only just didn't from the country turkey on I have you been here some time I've been here a good while in fact I have been looking for you in the marketplace and wondering that I couldn't find you well you couldn't because I was not in the city where have you been then I went down to the harbor and as I was going I met Fayette ATIS being taken to Athens from the camp at Corinth alive or dead alive but that's about all one could say badly wounded for one thing but the real trouble is this sickness that has broken out in the army dysentery yes what a man to lose yes a fine man turkey on only just now was listening to some people singing his praises for the way he behaved in battle well there's nothing extraordinary about that much more to be wondered about if he hadn't distinguished himself but why didn't he put up here at Megara he was in a hurry to get home I kept asking him myself and advising him but he wouldn't so I saw him on his way and as I was coming back I thought of Socrates and what a remarkably good prophet he was as usual about theaetetus it was not long before his death if I remember rightly that he came across stea taters who was a boy at the time Socrates met him and had a talk with him and was very much struck with his natural ability and when I went to Athens he repeated to me the discussion they had had which was well worth listening to and he said to me then that we should inevitably hear more of Thera taters if he lived to grow up well he appears to have been right enough but what was the discussion did you tell it to me good lord no not from memory anyway but I made some notes of it at the time as soon as I got home then afterwards I recorded that my leisure I wrote it out and whenever I went to Athens I used to our Socrates about the points I couldn't remember and correct my version when I got home the result is that I have worked pretty well the whole discussion in writing yes of course I have heard you say that before and I've always been meaning to ask you to show it to me though I have been so long about it but is there any reason why we shouldn't go through it now I want to rest in any case after my journey in from the country well I shouldn't mind sitting down either I saw Thea taters as far as Iranian come along we will get the slave to read it to us while we rest right this is the book Turchin you see I've written it out like this I've not made Socrates relate the conversation as he related it to me but I represent him as speaking directly to the person with whom he said he had this conversation these were he told me Theodorus the geometer and Thea Titus I wanted in the written version to avoid the bother of having the bits of narrative in between the speeches I mean when Socrates whenever he mentions his own part in the discussion says and I maintained or I said or the person answering he agreed or he would not admit this that is why I've made him talk directly to them and have left out these formulae well that's quite an order Euclid ease now boy let us have it if Cyrene were first in my affections Theodorus I should be asking you how things are there and whether any of your young people are taking up geometry or any other branch of philosophy but as it is I love Athens better than Cyrene and so are more anxious to know which of our young men shows signs of turning out well that of course is what I'm always trying to find out myself as best I can and I keep asking other people to anyone round who might see the young men are inclined together now you of course are very much sought after and with good reason your geometry alone and tied with you to it and that is not your only claim so if you have come across anyone worth mentioning I should be glad to hear well Socrates I think you ought to be told and I think I to tell you about a remarkable boy I have met here one of your fellow countrymen and if he were beautiful I should be extremely nervous of speaking of him with enthusiasm for fear I might be suspect of being in love with him but as a matter of fact if you will excuse my saying such a thing he is not beautiful at all but his rather like you snub nose with eyes that stick out though these features are not quite so pronounced in him I speak without any qualms and I assure you that among all the people I have ever met and I have got to know a good many in my time I have never yet seen anyone so amazingly gifted along with a quickness beyond the capacity of most people he has an unusually gentle temper and to crown at all he is as manly a boy as any of his fellows I never thought such a combination could exist I don't see her arising elsewhere people are cute and keen and retentive as he is I have to be very unbalanced they get swept along with a rush like ships without ballast what stands for courage in their makeup is a kind of mad excitement while on the other hand the steady assault people are apt to come to their studies with minds that are sluggish somehow crated with a bad memory but this boy approaches his studies in a smooth Shore effective way and with great good temper it reminds one of the quiet flow of a stream of oil the result is that it is astonishing to see how he gets through his work at his age that is good news and he is an Athenian whose son is he I have heard the name but I don't remember it but he is the middle one of this group coming towards us he and his companions were greasing themselves outside just now it looks as if they have finished and are coming in here but look and see if you recognize him yes I know him he's the son of euphonious of sin 'i'm very much the kind of person my friend that you tell me his son is a distinguished man in many ways he left a considerable property - but I don't know the boy's name his name Socrates stea Titus as for the property that I think has been made away with by trustees all the same he's wonderfully open handed about money Socrates a thoroughbred evidently I wish you had asked him to come and sit with us over here all right taya Titus come here beside Socrates yes come along Theo Titus I want to see for myself what sort of a face I have Theodora says I am like you but look if you and I each had a liar and Theodorus had told us that they were both similarly tuned should we have taken his word for it straight away or should we have tried to find out if he was speaking with any expert knowledge of music oh we should have inquired into that and if we had found that he was a musician we should have believed what he said that if we found he had no such qualification we should have put no faith in him yes that's true and now I suppose if we are interested in this question of our faces being aligned we ought to consider whether he's speaking with any knowledge of drawing or not yes I should think so Denis Theodorus an artist no not so far as I know nor geometer either oh there's no doubt about his being that Socrates and isn't he was saw a master of astronomy and arithmetic and music and all that an educated man should know well he seemed to me to be then if he asserts that there is some physical resemblance between us with a complimenting I saw the reverse one ought not to pay much attention to him no perhaps not but supposing it were the soul of one of us that he was praising suppose he said one of us was good and wise Orton the one who heard that to be very anxious to examine the object of such praise and oughtn't the other to be very willing to show himself off yes certainly Socrates then my dear Theo Titus now is the time for you to show yourself and for me to examine you for although Theodorus often gives me flattering testimonials for people both Athenians and foreigners I assure you are have never before heard him praise anybody in the way he has just praised you that's all very well Socrates but take care he wasn't saying that for a joke that is not Theodorus his way now don't you try to get out of what we have agreed upon with the pretense that our friend is joking or he may make it necessary for him to give his evidence since no charge of perjury is ever likely to be brought against him so have the pluck to stand by your agreement all right I must then if that's what you've decided tell me now you are learning some geometry from Theodorus I expect yes I am and some astronomy and music and arithmetic well I'm very anxious to anyway and so am I and my son from Theodorus or from anyone who seems to me to know about these things but although I get on with them pretty well in most ways I have a small difficulty which I think ought to be investigated with your help and that of the rest of the company now isn't it true that to learn is to become wiser about the thing one is learning yes of course and what makes men wise I take it is wisdom yes and is this in any way different from knowledge what wisdom isn't it the things which they know that men are wise about well yes so knowledge and wisdom will be the same thing yes now this is just where my difficulty comes in I can't get a proper grasp of what on earth knowledge really is could we manage to put it into words would all of you say who will speak first anyone who makes a mistake shall sit down and be donkey as their children say when they are playing ball and anyone who comes through without a Miss shall be King and make us answer any question he likes well while they silence Theodorus i hope my love of argument is not making me forget my manners just because I'm so anxious to start a discussion and get us all friendly and talkative together no no Socrates that's the last thing one could call for getting your Mena's but do make one of the young people answer you I'm not used to this kind of discussion and I'm too old to get into the way of it but it would be suitable enough for them and they would profit more by it for youth can always profit that's true enough so do go on don't let Thea Tate us off but ask him some more questions well Thea taters you hear what Theodora says you won't want to disobey him I'm sure and certainly a wise man shouldn't be disobeyed by his juniors in matters of this kind it wouldn't be at all the proper thing now give me a good friend answer what do you think knowledge is well I ought to answer Socrates as you and Theodorus tell me to in any case you and he will put me right if I make a mistake we certainly will if we can and I think that the things Theodorus teaches our knowledge I mean geometry and the subjects you are numerated just now then again there are the craft such as Koblin whether you take them together or separately they must be knotted surely that is certainly a Frank and indeed generous answer my dear lad I asked you for one thing and you have given me many I wanted something simple and I have got a variety and what does that mean Socrates nothing I dare say but I'll tell you what I think when you talk about cobbling you mean just knowledge of the making of shoes yes that's all I mean by it and when you talk about carpentering you mean simply the knowledge of the making of wooden furniture yes that's all I mean again and in both cases you are putting into your definition what the knowledge is of yes but that is not what you are asked there Titus you are not asked to say what one may have knowledge of or how many branches of knowledge there are it was not with any idea of counting these up that the question was asked we wanted to know what knowledge itself is or am I talking nonsense no you are perfectly right now think about this - supposing we were asked about some commonplace everyday thing for example what is clay and supposing we were to answer clay of the potters and clay of the stove makers and clay of the brick makers wouldn't that be absurd of us well perhaps it would absurd to begin with I suppose to imagine that the person who asked the question would understand anything from our answers when we say clay whether we add that his his doll maker's clay or any other craftsmen or do you think that anyone can understand the name of a thing when he doesn't know what the thing is no certainly not and so a man who does not know what knowledge is will not understand knowledge of shoes either no he won't then a man who is ignorant of what knowledge is will not understand what cobbling is or any other craft that is so so when the question raised is what his knowledge to reply by naming one of the crafts is an absurd answer because it points out something that knowledge is of when this is not what the question was about so it seems again it goes no end of a long way round in any case where I take it a short and commonplace answer as possible in the question about clay for example it would presumably be possible to make this simple commonplace statement that it is Earth mixed with liquid and let the question of whose clay it is take care of itself that seems easier Socrates now you put it like that but I believe you're asking just a sort of question occurred to your namesake Socrates here and myself when we were having a discussion and little while ago and what was that fair taters Theodore's here was demonstrating to us with the aid of diagrams a point about powers he was showing us that the power of three square feet and the power of five square feet are not commensurable in length with the power of one square foot and he went on in this way taking each case in turn till he came to the power of 17 square feet there for some reason stopped so the idea occurred to us that since the powers were turning out to be unlimited in number we might try to collect the powers in question under one term which would aptly apply to them all and did you find the kind of thing you wanted I think we did but I'd like you to see if it's all right go on then we divided all numbers into two classes any number which can be produced by the multiplication of two equal numbers we compared to a square in shape and we called this a square or equilateral number good so far then we took the intermediate numbers such as 3 & 5 and any number which can't be produced by multiplication of 2 equals but only by multiplying together a greater and a less a number such that is always contained by a greater and a less side a number of this kind we compared to an oblong figure and called it an oblong number that's excellent but how did you go on we defined under the term length any line which produces in square an equilateral plain number while any line which produces in square an oblong number we defined under the term power for the reason that although it is in commensurable with the former in length it is commensurable in the plain figures which they respectively have the power to produce and there is another distinction of the same sort with regards to solids excellent my boys I don't think Theodorus is likely to be head up for false witness and yet Socrates I shouldn't be able to answer your question about knowledge in the same way that I answered the one about lengths and powers though you seemed to me to be looking for something of the same sort Sophia Doris turns out a false witness after all well but suppose now it was you're running he had praised suppose he had said that he had never met anyone among the young people who was such a runner as you and then suppose you were beaten by the champion runner in his prime would you think Theodorus is prey had lost any of its truth no I shouldn't but do you think the discovery of what knowledge is is really what I was saying just now a small thing don't you think that's a problem for the people at the top yes rather I do and the very top most of them then do have confidence in yourself and try to believe that Theodorus knew what he was talking about you must put your whole heart into what we are doing in particular into this matter of getting a statement of what knowledge really is if put in one's heart into it is all that is required Socrates the answer will come to light go on then you gave us a good lead just now try to imitate your answer about the powers there you bought together the many powers within a single form now I want you in the same way to give one single account of the many branches of knowledge but I assure you Socrates I have often tried to think this out when I have heard reports of the questions you ask but have you never persuade myself that anything I say will really do and I never hear anyone else state the matter in the way that you require and yet again you know I can't even stop worrying about it yes those are the pains of labour dear theaetetus it is because you are not barren but pregnant I don't know about that Socrates I'm only telling you what happened to me then do you mean to say you've never heard about my being the son of a good hefty midwife Finnerty oh yes I've heard that before and haven't you ever been told that I practice the same art myself no I certainly haven't but I do believe me only don't give me away to the rest of the world will you you see my friend it is a secret that I have this art that is not one of the things you hear people saying about me because they don't know but they do say that I am a very odd sort of person always causing people to get into difficulties you must have heard that surely yes I have and shall I tell you what is the explanation of that yes please do well if you would just of the general facts about the business of midwifery you will see more easily what I mean you know I suppose that women never practices midwives while they are still conceiving in bearing children themselves it is only those who are past childbearing who take this up oh yes they say it was our temas who was responsible for this custom it was because she undertook the patronage of childbirth was herself childless she didn't is true and Trust the duties of midwifery to barren women because human nature is too weak to acquire skill where it has no experience but she assigned the task to those who have become incapable of childbearing through age honoring their likeness to herself yes naturally and this too is very natural isn't it or perhaps necessary I mean that it is the midwives who can tell better than anyone else whether women are pregnant or not yes of course and then it is the midwives who have the power to bring on the pains and also if they think fit to relieve them they do it by the use of simple drugs and by singing incantations in difficult cases - they can bring about the birth or if they cancer it advisable they can promote a miscarriage yes that is so there's another thing to have been noticed this about them that they are the cleverest of matchmakers because they are marvelously knowing about the kind of couples whose marriage will produce the best children no that is not at all familiar to me but they are far prouder of this believe me then of cutting the umbilical cord think now there's an art which is concerned with the cultivation and harvesting of the crops now is it the same art which prescribes the best soil for planting or so in a given crop or is this a different one note is all the same art then applying this to women will there be one art of the sowing and another art of the harvesting that doesn't seem likely certainly no it doesn't but there is also an unlawful unscientific practice of bringing men and women together which we call procuring and because of that the midwives are most August body of women are very reluctant to undertake even lawful matchmaking they are afraid that if they practice this they may be suspected of the other and yet I suppose reliable matchmaking is a matter for no one but the true midwife apparently so the work of the midwives is a highly important one but it is not so important as my own performance and for this reason that there is not in midwifery the Ferber complication that the patients are sometimes delivered of phantoms and sometimes of realities and that the two are hard to distinguish if their word and the midwives greatest and noblest function would be to distinguish the true from the false offspring don't you agree yes I do now my art of midwifery is just like theirs in most respects the difference is that I attend men and not women and that I watch over the labor of their souls not of their bodies and the most important thing about my art is the ability to apply all possible tests to the offspring to determine whether the young mind is being delivered of a phantom that is an error or a fertile truth for one thing which I have in common with the ordinary midwives is that I myself and Baron of wisdom the common reproach against me is that I am always asking questions of other people but never express my own views about anything because there is no wisdom in me and that is true enough and the reason of it is this that God compels me to attend the travails of others but has forbidden me to procreate so that are not in any sense a wise man I cannot claim as the child of my own soul any discovery worth the name of wisdom but with those who associate with me it is different at first some of them they give the impression of being ignorant and stupid but as time goes on and our Association continues all whom God permits are seen to make progress a progress which is amazing both to other people and themselves and it is is clear that this is not due to anything they have learned from me it is that they discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things which they bring forth into the light but it is I with God's help who deliver them of this offspring and a proof of this may be seen in the many cases where people who did not realize this fact to call the credit to themselves and thought that I was no good they have then proceeded to leave me sooner than they should either of their own accord or through the influence of others and after they have gone away from me they have resorted to harmful company with the result that what remained within them has miscarried while they have neglected the children I helped them to bring forth and lost them because they set more value upon lies and phantoms than upon the truth finally they have been set down for ignorant fools both by themselves and by everybody else one of these people was Aristides the son of the Symmachus and there have been very many others sometimes they come back wanting my company again and ready to move heaven and earth to get it when that happens in some cases the divine sign that visits me forbids me to associate with them in others it permits me and then they begin again to make progress there is another point also in which those who associate with me are like women in childbirth they suffer the pains of labour and are filled day and night with distress indeed they suffer far more than women and this pain my art is able to bring on and also to allay well that's what happens to them but at times the attainers I come across people who do not seem to me somehow to be pregnant then I realized that they have no need of me and with the best will in the world I undertake the business of matchmaking and I think I'm good enough God willing at guessing with whom they might profitably keep company many of them I have given away to prodigious and a great number also to other wise and inspired persons well my dear lad this has been a long yarn but the reason was that I have a suspicion that you as you think yourself are pregnant and in labor so I want you to come to me as to one who is both the son of a midwife and himself skilled in the art and tried to answer the questions I shall ask you as well as you can and when I examine what you say I may perhaps think is his offend him and not truth and proceed to take it quietly from you and abandon it now if this happens you mustn't get savage with me like a mother over her firstborn child do you know people have often before now got into such a state with me as to be literally ready to bite when I take away some nonsense or other from them they never believed that I'm doing this in all goodwill they are so far from realizing that no God can which evil to man and that even I don't do this kind of thing out of malice but because it is not permitted to me to accept to lie and put away truth so begin again fear taters and tried to say what knowledge is and don't on any account tell me that you can't for if God is willing and you play the man you can well Socrates after such encouragement from you it would hardly be decent for anyone not to try his hardest to say what he has in him very warden it seems to me that a man who knows something perceives what he knows and the way it appears at present at any rate is that knowledge is simply perception there's a good frank answer my son that's the way to speak one's mind or come now let us look at this thing together and see whether what we have here is really fertile or a mere winded you hold that knowledge is perception yes but look here this is no ordinary account of knowledge you've come out with its what Protagoras used to maintained he said the very same thing only he put it in rather a different way for he says you know that man is the measure of all things of the things which are that they are and of the things which are not that not you have read this of course yes often then you know that he puts it something like this that has each thing appears to me so it is for me and as it appears to you so it is for you you and I each being a man yes that's what he says well it is not likely that a wise man would talk nonsense so let us follow him up now doesn't it sometimes happen that when the same wind is blowing one of us feels cold and the other not all that one of us feels rather cold and the other very cold that certainly does happen well then in that case are we going to say that the wind itself by itself is cold or not cold or shall we listen to Pythagoras and say it is cold for the one who feels cold and for the other not cold it looks as if we must say that and this is how it appears to each of us yes but this expression it appears means he perceives it yes it does the appearing of things then is the same as perception in the case of hot and things like that so it results apparently that things are for the individual such as he perceives them yes that seems all right perception then is always of what is an unerring as befits knowledge so it appears but I say look here was Protagoras one of those omniscient people did he perhaps put this out as a riddle for the common crowd of us while he revealed the truth as a secret doctrine to his own pupils what do you mean by that Socrates I'll tell you and this now is certainly no ordinary theory I mean the theory that there is nothing which in itself is just one thing nothing which you could rightly call anything or any kind of thing if you call a thing large it will reveal itself as small and if you call it heavy it is liable to appear as light and so on with everything because nothing is one or anything or any kind of thing what is really true is this the things of which we naturally say that they are or in a process of coming to be as the result of movement and change and blending with one another we are wrong when we say they are since nothing ever is but everything is coming to being and as regards this point of view let us take it as a fact that all the wise men of the past with the exception of Parmenides stand together let us take it that we find on this side for terrorists and error clintus and impenitence and also the masters of the two kinds of poetry epic armisen comedy and home in tragedy for in home and talked about ocean there get or of gods and tellus their mother he made all things the offspring of flux and motion or don't you think he meant that oh i think he did and if anyone proceeded to dispute the field with an army like that an army led by homer he could hardly help making a fool of himself could he it would not be an easy matter socrates it would not fit a toss you see there is good enough evidence for this theory that being or passes for such and becoming are a product of motion while not being impart in a way result from a state of rest there is evidence for this in the fact that the heat of fire which presumably generates and controls everything else is itself generated out of movement and friction these being motions or am i wrong in saying leaves are the original sources of fire oh no they certainly are moreover the growth of living creatures depends upon these same sources yes certainly and isn't it also true that bodily condition deteriorates with rest and idleness while by exertion and motion it can be preserved for a long time yes and what about the condition of the soul isn't it by learning and study which emotions that the soul gains knowledge and is preserved and becomes a better thing whereas in a state of rest that is when it will not study or learn it not only fails to acquire knowledge but forgets what it has already learned that certainly is so and so we may say that the one thing that his motion is beneficial to both body and soul while the other has the opposite effect yes that's what it looks like yes and I might go on to point out to you the effect of such conditions as still weather on land and coms on the sea I might show you how these conditions rot and destroy things while the opposite conditions make for preservation and finally to put the crown on my argument I might bring in Homer's golden cord and maintain that he means by this simply the Sun and is here explaining that so long as the revolution continues and the Sun is in motion all things are and are preserved both in heaven and in earth but that if all this should be bound fast as it were and come to a standstill all things would be destroyed and as the saying goes the world will be turned upside down do you agree with this yes Socrates I think that is the meaning of the passage then my friend you must understand our fear in this way in this fear of vision to begin with what you would naturally call a white color is not itself a distinct entity either outside your eyes or in your eyes you must not assign it any particular place for then of course it would be standing at its post it wouldn't be in process of becoming but what do you mean let us follow what we stated a moment ago and posit that there is nothing which is in itself one thing according to this theory black or white or any other color will turn out to have come into being through the impact of the eye upon the appropriate motion and what we naturally call a particular color is neither that which impinges nor that which is impinged upon well something which has come into being between the two and which is private to the individual recipient or would you be prepared to insist that every color appears to a dog or to any other animal the same as it appears you know I most certainly shouldn't well and do you even feel sure that anything appears to another human being laughs it appears to you wouldn't you be much more disposed to hold that it doesn't appear the same even to yourself because you never remain like yourself yes that seems to me nearer the truth than the other well now supposing such things as size or warmth or whiteness really belonged the object we measure ourselves against or touch it would never be found that this object had become different simply by coming into contact with another thing and without any change in itself on the other hand if he supposed them to belong to what is measuring or touching this again could never become different simply because something else had come into its neighborhood or because something had happened to the first thing nothing had been happened to itself as it is you see we may easily find ourselves forced into saying the most astonishing and ridiculous things as Protagoras would point out or anyone who undertook to expound the same views what do you mean was sort of ridiculous things let me give you a simple example of what I mean and you will see the rest for yourself here are six dice could fall beside them and they are more we say than the four that is half as many again but put 12 beside them and we say there are less that is half the number and there is no getting out of that or do you think there is no I don't well now suppose in Protagoras or anyone else were to ask you this question is it possible Thea taters for anything to become bigger or more in number in any other way than by being increased what is your answer to that well Socrates if I answer what seems true in relation to the present question I shall say no it is not possible but if I consider it in relation to the question that went before then in order to avoid contradicting myself I say yes it is that's a good answer my friend by Jove it is you are inspired but I think if you answer yes it will be liked that episode in Euripides the tongue will be saved from refutation that the mind or not that's true now if you and I were professional servants who had already analyzed the contents of our minds we should now spend our superfluous time trying each other out we should start a regular suffice set to with a great question of argument on argument but as it is we are only plain men and so our first aim will be to look at our thoughts themselves in relation to themselves and see what they are whether in our opinion they agree with one another or are entirely at variance that would certainly be my aim anyway and mine that being so as we are not in any way pressed for time don't you think the thing to do is to reconsider this matter quietly and patiently in all seriousness analyzing ourselves and asking what are these apparitions within us and when we come to review them I suppose we may begin with the statement that nothing can possibly have become either greater or less in bulk or in number so long as it is equal to itself isn't that so yes secondly we should say that a thing to which nothing is added and from which nothing is taken away neither increases nor diminishes but remains equal yes certainly thirdly that it is impossible that a thing should ever be what it was not before without having become and without any process of becoming yes I think so now it seems to me that these three statements that we have admitted are fighting one another in our souls when we speak of the example of the dice or when we say that within the space of a year I a full-grown man without having been either increased or diminished and now bigger than you or only a boy and later on smaller though I have lost nothing and it is only that you have grown for this means that I am at a later stage water was not before and that too without having become for without becoming it is not possible to have become and without suffering any loss in size I could never become less and there are innumerable other examples of the same thing if once we admit these you follow me I tell you Theo Titus I think you must be familiar with this kind of puzzle oh yes indeed Socrates I often wonder like mad what these things can mean sometimes when I'm looking at them I begin to feel quite giddy I dare say you do My dear boy it seems that Theodorus was not far from the truth when he discussed what kind of person you are for this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher this wondering this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else and the man who made Iris the child of thalmus was perhaps no bad genealogist but aren't you beginning to see now what is the explanation of these puzzles according to the theory which we are attributing to protect us I don't think I am yet then I dare say you will be grateful to me if I help you to discover the veiled truth in the thought of a great man or perhaps I should say of great men of course I shall be Socrates very grateful then you have a look around and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality they must be tough hard fellows Socrates they are my son very crude people but these others whose mysteries I'm going to tell you are a much more subtle type these mysteries begin from the principle on which all that we have just been saying also depends namely that everything is really motion and is nothing but motion motion has two forms each and infinite multitude but distinguished by their powers the one being active and the other passive and through the intercourse and mutual friction of these two there comes to be an offspring infinite in multitude but always twin births on the one hand what is perceived on the other the perception of it the perception in every case being generated together with what is perceived and emerging along with it for the perceptions we have such names as sight hearing smelling feeling cold and feeling hot also what are called pleasures and pains desires and fears and there are others besides a great number which have names an infinite number which have not and on the other side there is the race of things perceived for each of these perceptions perceived things born of the same parent is for all kinds of visions all kinds of colors for all kinds of hearings all kinds of sounds and so on for the other perceptions that other things perceive that come to be in kinship with them now what does this tale really mean from our point of view Thea Titus how does it bear on what we were saying before do you see not really Socrates look here then let us see if we can somehow round it off what it is trying to express presumably is this all these things are in motion just as we say and their motion is distinguished by its swiftness or slowness what is slow has its motion in one in the same place and in relation to the things in the immediate neighborhood in this way it generates and the offspring are swifter as they move through space and emotion takes the form of spatial movement thus the eye and some other thing one of the things commensurate with the eye which has come into its neighborhood generate both whiteness and the perception which is by nature United with it things which would never have come to be if it hadn't been anything else that I or object approach in this event motions arise in the intervening space side from the side of the eye and whiteness from the side of that which cooperates in the production of the color the eye is filled with sight at that moment it sees and becomes not indeed side but a seeing eye while its partner in the process of producing color is filled with whiteness and becomes not whiteness but white a white stick or stone or whatever it is that happens to be colored this sort of color we must understand this account as applying in the same way to hard and hot and everything else nothing as we were saying before is in itself any of these all of them of all kinds whatsoever are what things become through association with one another as the result of motion for even in the case of the active and passive motions it is impossible as they say for Thought taking them singly to pin them down to being anything there is no passive till it meets the active no active except in conjunction with the passive and what in conjunction with one thing is active reveals itself as passive when it falls in with something else and so wherever you turn there is nothing as we said at the outset which in itself is just one thing all things become relatively to something the verb to be must be totally abolished though indeed we have been led by habit and ignorance into using it ourselves more than once even in what we have just been saying that is wrong these wise men tell us nor should we allow the use of such words as something of something or mine they saw that or any other name that makes things stand still we ought rather to speak according to nature and refer to things as becoming being produced passing away changing for if we speak in such ways to make things stand still you will easily be refuted and this applies in speech in both of the individual case and of many aggregated together such as an aggregate I mean as people call man or stone or to which they give the names of the different animals and sorts of thing well theaetetus does this look to you a tempting me and could you take a bite of the delicious stuff I really don't know Socrates I can't even quite see what you're getting it whether the things you are saying or what you think yourself or whether you are just trying me out you are forgetting my friend I don't know anything about this kind of thing myself and I don't claim any of it as my own I am barren of theories my business is to attend you in your labor so I chant incantations over you and offer you little tidbits from each of the wise till I succeed a assisting you to bring your own belief forth into the light when it has been born I shall consider whether it is fertile or a wind egg but you must have courage and patience answer like a man whatever appears to you about the things I ask you alright go on with the questions tell me again then whether you like the suggestion that good and beautiful and all the things we were just speaking of cannot be said to be anything but are always coming to me well as far as I'm concerned while I'm listening to your exposition of it it seems to me an extraordinarily reasonable view and I feel that the way you have set out the matter has got to be accepted in that case we had better not pass over any point where our theory is still incomplete what we have not yet discussed is the question of dreams and of insanity and other diseases also what is called miss hearing or miss scene or other cases of miss perceiving you realize I suppose that it would be generally agreed that all these cases appear to provide a refutation of the theory we have just expanded for in these conditions we surely have false perceptions here it is far from being true that all things which appear to the individual also are on the country no one of the things which appear to him really is that is perfectly true Socrates well then my lad what argument is left for the person who maintains that knowledge is perception and that what appears to any individual also is for him to whom it appears to be well Socrates I hardly like to tell you that I don't know what to say seeing I've just got into trouble with you for that but I really shouldn't know how to dispute the suggestion that a madman believes what his fools when he thinks he is a God or a dreamer when he imagines he has wings and is flying in his sleep but there's a point here which is a matter of dispute especially as regards dreams and real stuff don't you see what do you mean there's a question you must often have heard people ask the question what evidence we could offer if we were asked whether in the present instance at this moment we are asleep in dreaming all our thoughts or awake and talking to each other in real life yes Socrates is certainly is difficult to find the proof we want here the two states seemed to correspond in all their characteristics there is nothing to prevent us from thinking when we are asleep that we are having the very same discussion that we have just had and when we dream that we are telling the story of a dream there is an extraordinary likeness between the two experiences you see then it is not difficult to find matter for dispute when it is disputed even whether this is real life or a dream indeed we may say that as our periods of sleeping and waking are of equal length and as in each period the soul contends that the beliefs of the moment are pre-eminently true the result is that for half our lives we assert the reality of the one set of objects and for half that of the other set we make our assertions with equal conviction in both cases that certainly is so and doesn't the same argument apply in the cases of disease and madness except that the periods of time are not equal yes that is so well now are we going to fix the limits of truth by the clock that would be a very funny thing to do but can you produce some other clear indication to show which of these beliefs are true I don't think I can then you listen to me and I'll tell you the kind of thing that might be said by those people who proposed it as a rule that whatever a man thinks at any time is the truth for him I can imagine them putting their position by asking you this question now thea taters suppose you have something which is an entirely different thing from something else can it have in any respect the same powers as the other thing and observe we are not to understand the question to refer to something which is the same in some respects while it is different in others but to that which is wholly different in that case then it is impossible that it should have anything the same either as regards its powers or in any other respect if it is a completely different thing and aren't we obliged to admit that such a thing is also unlike the other yes I think so now supposing a thing is coming to be like or unlike to something whether to itself or to something else are we to say that when it is growing like it is coming to be the same and when it is growing unlike it is coming to be a different thing yes that must be so now weren't we saying at an earlier stage that there is a number indeed an infinite number of both active and passive factors yes also this that one a thing mix is now with one thing and now with another it will not generate the same things each time but different things yes certainly now let us apply this same statement to you and me and things in general take for example Socrates ill and Socrates well shall we say Socrates in health is like or unlike Socrates in sickness you mean the ill Socrates as a whole compared with the well Socrates as a whole you get my point excellently that is just what I mean unlike there and I suppose and different also in so far as he is unlike yes that follows similarly you would say when he is asleep or in any of the conditions we enumerated just now yes I should then it must surely be true that when any one of the naturally active factors find Socrates well it will be dealing with one knee and when it finds Socrates ill with a different man yes surely then in these two events the combination of myself as passive and it has the active factor will generate different things of course now if I drink wine when I am well it appears to me pleasant and sweet yes going by what we earlier agreed that is so because the active and passive factors moving simultaneously generate both sweetness and a perception on the passive side the perception makes the tongue percipient while on the side of the wine sweetness moving about it makes it both be and appear sweet to the healthy tongue that's certainly the sense of what we agreed to before but when the active Factor find Socrates ill then to begin with it is not in strict truth the same man that it gets hold of is it because here as we saw it has come upon an unlike yes then this pair Socrates ill and the draught of wine generates presumably different things again a perception of bitterness in the region of the tongue and bitterness coming to be and moving in the region of the wine and then the wine becomes not bitterness but bitter and I become not perception but recipient yes quite and shall I never again become the specific of anything else a perception of something else is another perception and makes another and a changed Pacific Norah gain in the case of that which acts on me will it ever in conjunction with something else generate the same thing and itself becomes such as it now is from something else that will generate something else and itself become a changed thing that is so nor will I become such for myself or it such for itself no but I must necessarily become recipient of something when I become recipient it is impossible to become a sybian yet recipient of nothing and if again when it becomes sweet or bitter or anything of that kind must become so for somebody because it is impossible to become sweet and yet sweet for no one quite impossible it remains then that I earn it whether we are or whether we become are or become from each other for our being is by necessities decree tied to a partner yet we are tired neither to anything in the world nor to our respective selves it remains then that we are tied to each other hence whether you apply the term being to a thing or the term becoming you must always use the words for somebody or of something or relatively to something you must not speak of anything as in itself either being or becoming nor let anyone else use such expressions that is the meaning of the theory we have been expounding yes that's certainly true Socrates then since that which acts on me is for me and not for anyone else it is I who perceive it - and nobody else undoubtedly then my perception is true for me because it is always a perception of that being which is peculiarly mine and I am junked as Protagoras said of things that are that they are for me and of things that are not that they are not so it seems how then if I am thus unerring and never stumble in my thought about what is or what is coming to be how can I fail to be a knower of the things of which I am a perceiver there is no way you could fail then that was a grand idea of yours when you told us that knowledge is nothing more or less than perception so we find the various theories have converged to the same thing that of Homer and Heraclitus and all their tribe that all things flow like streams of Protagoras wisest of men that man is the measure of all things and of theaetetus that these things being so knowledge proves to be perception what about it thea taters shall we say we have here your firstborn child the result of my midwifery or what would you say oh there's no denying it Socrates this then it appears is what how efforts have at last brought forth whatever it really is and now that it has been born we must perform the rite of running around the hearth with it we must make it in good earnest go the round of discussion for we must take care that we don't overlook some defect in this thing that is entering into life it may be something not worth bringing up a wind egg or falsehood what do you say is it your opinion that your child ought in any case to be brought up and not exposed to die can you bear to see it found fault with and not get into a rage if your firstborn is stolen away from you saya tators will put up with it Socrates he is not at all one to lose his temper but tell me in heaven's name in what way is it not as it should be you are the complete lover of discussion Theodorus and it is too good of you to think I'm a sort of bag of arguments and can easily pick one out which will show you that this theory is wrong but you don't realize what is happening the arguments never come from me they always come from the person I am talking to all that I know such as it is is how to take an argument from someone else someone who is wise and give it a fair reception so now I proposed to try to get our answer out of theaters not to make any contribution of my own that's a better way of putting it Socrates do as you say well then Theodorus do you know what astonishes me about your friend Pythagoras no what is it well I was delighted with his general statement of the theory that a thing is for any individual what it seems to him to be but I was astonished at the way he began I was astonished that he did not state at the beginning of the truth that he is the measure of all things or baboon or some yet more out-of-the-way creature with the power of perception that would have made a most imposing and disdainful opening it would have made it clear to us at once that while we were standing astounded at his wisdom as though he were a God he was in reality no better authority than a temple let alone any other man or what are we to say Theodorus if whatever the individual judges by means of perception is true for him if no man can assess another's experience better than he will can claim authority to examine another man's judgment and see if it be right or wrong if as we have repeatedly said only the individual himself can judge of his own world and what he judges is always true and correct how could it ever be my friend that Protagoras was a wise man so wise as to think himself fit to be the teach of other men and worth large fees while we in comparison with him the ignorant ones needed to go and sit at his feet we who are ourselves each the measure of his own wisdom can we avoid conclusion that Protagoras was just planed to crowd when he said this I say nothing about my own case and my art of midwifery and how silly we look so - I think does the whole business of philosophical discussion to examine and try to refute each other's appearances and judgments when each person's are correct this is surely an extremely tiresome piece of nonsense if the truth of Protagoras is true and not a million Oracle speaking in jest from the impenetrable century of the book Protagoras was my friend Socrates at he has just remarked I could not consent to have him refuted through my admissions and yet I should not be prepared to resist you against my own judgment so take on theaetetus again he seemed to be following you very sympathetically just now now Theodorus supposing you went to sparta and were visiting the wrestling schools would you think it right to sit and watch other men exercising naked some of them not much to look at and refuse to strip yourself alongside of them and take your turn of letting people see what you look like why not if I could persuade them to leave the choice to me similarly I'm hoping to persuade you to allow me to be a spectator and not drag me into the arena now that I'm grown stiff but to take on someone who is younger and more supple well Theodorus what you like I'll not dislike as the saying goes so he must again resort to our wise theaetetus come theaetetus think to begin with of what we have just been saying and tell me if you are not yourself astonished and suddenly finding that you are the equal in wisdom of any man or even a god or do you think the Protagoras and measure isn't meant to be applied to gods as much as to men I most certainly don't and to answer your question yes I am very much astonished when we were working out the meaning of the principle that a thing is for each and what it seems to him to be it appeared to me a very sound one but now all in a minute it is quite the other way around yes because you are young dear lad and so you lend a ready ear to mob oratory and let it convince you for Protagoras or anyone speaking on his behalf will answer us like this my good people young and old he will say you sit here orating you dragon gods whose existence or non-existence I exclude for more discussion written or spoken you keep on saying whatever is likely to be acceptable to the mob telling them that it would be a shocking thing if no man were wiser than any cow in the field but of proof or necessity not a word you just rely on plausibility though if Theodorus or any other geometer were to do that in his branch of science it's a good-for-nothing geometer he would be so un Theodorus had better consider whether in matters of such importance you are going to accept arguments which are merely persuasive or plausible you wouldn't say we had any business to do that Socrates and neither should we then it seems you and Theodora say our criticism should take a different line yes it certainly should here then is another way in which we might consider whether knowledge and perception are the same or different things for that is the question which our argument has held in view throughout isn't it and it was for its sake that we have unearthed all this extraordinary stuff undoubtedly well now are we going to agree that when we perceive things by seeing or hearing them we always at the same time know them take for example the case of hearings people speak in a foreign language which we have not yet learned are we going to say that we do not hear the sound of their voices when they speak or that we both hear it and know what they are saying again supposing we do not know our letters are we going to insist that we do not see them when we look at them or shall we maintain that if we see them we know them we shall say Socrates that we know just that in them which we see in here we both see and know the shape and the color of the letters and with the spoken words we both hear and know the rise and fall of the voice but what school masters and interpreters tell us about them we don't perceive by seeing or hearing and we don't know either very good indeed theaetetus and it would not be right for me to stand in the way of your progress by raising objections to what you say but look there is another difficulty coming upon us you must think now how we are going to fend it off what kind of difficulty I mean something like this supposing you are asked if a man has once come to know a certain thing and continues to preserve the memory of it is it possible that at the moment when he remembers it he doesn't know this thing that he is remembering but I'm being long-winded I'm afraid what I'm trying to ask is can a man who has learned something not know it when he is remembering it how could that happen Socrates that would be a most extraordinary thing that I'm perhaps talking nonsense but think now you say that seeing his perceiving and sight is perception yes then a man who has seen something has come to know that which he saw according to the statement you made just now yes but you do say don't you that there is such a thing as memory yes memory of nothing or of something of something surely that is to say of things which one has learned that is perceived that kind of something of course and what a man has once seen he recalls I take it from time to time he does even if he shuts his eyes or does he forget it if he does this that would be a strange thing to say Socrates yes it is what we must say if we are to save our previous statement otherwise it's all up with it yes by Jove I began to have my suspicions too but I don't quite see it yet you explained this is why according to us the man who sees has acquired knowledge of what he sees a side perception and knowledge are agreed to be the same thing yes certainly but the man who sees and has acquired knowledge of the thing he saw if he shuts his eyes remembers but does not see it isn't that so yes but to say he doesn't see is to say he doesn't know if sees is knows true then we have this result that a man who has come to know something and still remembers it doesn't know it because he doesn't see it and that's what we said would be a most extraordinary thing to happen that's perfectly true then apparently we get an impossible result when knowledge and perception are identified it looks like it then we have got to say that perception is one thing and knowledge another yes I'm afraid so then what is knowledge we shall have to begin again at the beginning it seems and yet whatever are we thinking about thea taters what do you mean we appear to be behaving like a baseborn fighting jumped in a way off the theory and crowing before we have the victory over it how are we doing that we seem to have been adopting the methods of professional controversialists we've made an agreement aimed at getting words to agree consistently and we feel complacent now that we have defeated the theory by the use of a method of this kind we profess to be philosophers not champion controversialists and we don't realize that we are doing just what those clever fellows do I still don't quite see what you mean well I will try to explain what I have in mind here we were inquiring into the possibility that a man should not know something that he has learned and remembers and we showed that a man who has seen something and then shuts his eyes remembers but does not see it and that showed that he does not know the thing at the very time that he remembers it we said that this was impossible and so the tale of Protagoras comes to an untimely end yours too your tale about the identity of knowledge and perception so it appears but I don't think this would have happened my friend if the father of the other tale were alive he would find plenty of means of defending it as things are it is an orphan we are trampling in the mud not even the people Protagoras appointed its Guardians are prepared to come to its rescue for instance Theodorus here in the interest of justice it seems that we shall have to come to rescue ourselves I think you must it is not by you know Socrates but callias the son of hipponicus who is the guardian of Protagoras his relics as it happened I very soon inclined away from abstract discussion to geometry but I shall be very grateful if you can rescue the orphan good Theodorus now will you give your mind to this rescue work of mine what little I can do because one might be driven into making even more alarming admissions than we have just made if one paid is little attention to the words in which we express our assertions and denials as we are for the most part accustomed to doing shall I tell you how this might happen or shall I tell Thea taters tell us both Socrates but the younger had better answer it will not be so undignified for him to get tripped up Weldon he was the most alarming poser of all it goes something like this I think is it possible for a man who knows something not to know this thing which he knows what are we going to answer now Thea Titus that it is impossible I should think but it is not if you are going to premise that seeing is knowing for what are you going to do and some intrepid fellow has you trapped in the well shaft as they say with a question that leaves you no way out clapping his hand over one of your eyes he asks you whether you see his cloak with the ire that is covered how will you cope with that I shall say that I don't see it with this one but I do with the other so you both see and do not see the same thing at the same time well yes in that sort of way I do that's not the question I'm setting you he will say I was not asking you in what way it happened I was asking you does it happen that you don't know what you know you now appear to be seeing what you don't see and you have actually admitted that seeing is knowing and not to see is not to know I leave you to draw your conclusion well I draw a conclusion that contradicts my original suppositions and that is the kind of thing that might have happened to you more than once you wonderful fellow it might have happened if someone had gone on asking you whether it was possible to know something clearly and sometimes dimly or to know near at hand and not from a distance or to know the same thing both intensely and slightly and there are a million other questions with which one of the mercenary skirmishes of debate might ambush you once you had proposed that knowledge and perception are the same thing he would lay into hearing and smelling and other perceptions of that kind and would keep on refuting you and not let you go - you had been struck with wonder at his wisdom that answer to many prayers and had got yourself thoroughly tired up by him then when he had you tamed and bound he would set you free for a ransom whatever price seemed appropriate to the two of you but perhaps you'll ask what argument would protagonist himself bring to the help of his offspring shall we tried to state it yes surely well he will say all the things that we are saying in our attempt to defend him and then I imagine he will come to grips with us and no respectful spirit either I imagine him saying this good Socrates here what he did was to frighten a small boy by asking him if it were possible that the same man should at once remember and not know the same thing and when the boy in his fright answered no because he couldn't see what was coming then according to Socrates the law was against me in the argument you are too easygoing Socrates the true position is this when you are examining any doctrine of mine by the method of question and answer if the person being questioned answers as myself would answer and gets caught then it is I who am refuted but if his answers are other than I should give then it is he who is put in the wrong now to begin with do you expect someone to grant you that a man has a present memory of things he experienced in the past this being an experience rather like the original one unless he is still experiencing them that is very far from being true again do you suppose he will hesitate to admit that it is possible for the same man to know and not know the same thing or if he has misgivings about this do you expect him to concede to you that the man who is in process of becoming unlike is the same as he was before the process began do you expect him even to speak of the man rather than of the men indeed of an infinite number of these men coming to be in succession assuming this process of becoming unlike not if we really must take every precaution against each other's verbal traps show a little more spirit my good man he will say and attack my actual statement itself and refute it if you can by showing that each man's perceptions are not his own private events or that if they are his own private events it does not follow that the thing which appears becomes or if we may speak of being is only for the man to whom it appears you keep talking about pigs and baboons you show the mentality of a pig yourself in the way you deal with my writings and you persuade your audience to follow your example that is not the way to behave I take my stand on the truth being as I have written it each one of us is the measure both of what is and or what is not but there are countless differences between men for just this very reason that different things both are and appear to be different subjects I certainly do not deny the existence of both wisdom and wise men far from it but the man whom I call wise is the man who can change the appearances the man who in any case where bad things both appear and are for one of us works of change and makes good things appear and be for him and I must beg you this time not to confine your attack to the letter of my doctrine I am now going to make its meaning clearer to you for instance I would remind you of what we were saying before namely that to the sick man the things he eats both appear and are bitter while to the healthy man they both appear and are the opposite now what we have to do is not to make one of these two wiser than the other that is not even a possibility nor is it our business to make accusations calling the sick man ignorant for judging as he does and the healthy man wise because he judges differently what we have to do is to make a change from the one to the other because the other state is better in education to what we have to do is to change a worse state into a better state only whereas the doctor brings about the change by the use of drugs the professional teacher does it by the use of words what never happens is that a man who judges what his force is made to judge what is true for it is impossible to judge what is not or to judge anything other than what one is immediately experiencing and what one is immediately experiencing is always true this in my opinion is what really happens when a man's soul is in a pernicious state he judges things akin to it but giving him a sound state of the soul causes him to think different things things that are good in the latter event the things which appear to him or what some people who are still at a primitive stage call true my position however is that one kind are better than the others but in no way truer nor my dear Socrates should I dream of suggesting that we might look for wisdom among frogs I look for wisdom as regards animal bodies inductors as regards plant life in gardeners from quite prepared to maintain that gardeners to when they find a plant sickly proceed by causing it to have good and healthy that is true perceptions instead of bad ones similarly the wise and efficient politician is the man who makes wholesome things seemed just to a city instead of pernicious ones whatever in any city is regarded as just an admirable is just an admirable in that city and for so long as that convention maintains itself but the wise man replaces each pernicious convention by a wholesome one making this both be and seen just similarly the professional teacher who is able to educate his pupils on these lines is a wise man and is worth is large fees to them in this way we are enabled to hold both that some men are wiser than others and also that no man judges what is false and new - whether you like it or not must put up with being a measure for this is the line we must take if we are to save the theory if you feel prepared to go back to the beginning and make a case against this theory let us hear your objections set out in a connected argument or if you prefer the method of question and answer do it that way there is no reason to try to evade that method either indeed an intelligent person might well prefer it to any other only I beg that you will observe this condition do not be unjust in your questions it is the height of unreasonableness that a person who professes to care for moral goodness should be consistently unjust in discussion I mean by injustice in this connection the behavior of a man who does not take care to keep controversy distinct from discussion a man who forgets that in controversy he may play about and trip up his opponent as often as he can but that in discussion he must be serious he must keep on helping his opponent to his feet again and point out to him only those of his slips which are due to himself or to the intellectual society which he has previously frequented if you observe this distinction those who associate with you will blame themselves for their confusion and their difficulties not you they will seek your company and think of you as their friend but they will loathe themselves and seek refuge from themselves in philosophy in the hope that they may thereby become different people and be rid forever of the men that they once were but if you follow the common practice and do the opposite you will get the opposite result instead of philosophers you'll make your companions grow up to be the enemies of philosophy so if you take my advice as I said before you will sit down with us without ill-will or hostility and the kindly spirit he was genuinely tried to find out what our meaning is when we maintain a that all things are in motion and be for each person in each city things are what they seem to them to be and upon this basis you will enquire with the knowledge and perception are the same thing or different things but you will not proceed as you did just now you will not base your argument upon the use and want of language you will not follow the practice of most men who drag words this way and that at their pleasure so making every imaginable difficulty for one another well Theodorus here is my contribution to the rescue of your friend the best I can do with my resources and little enough that is if he were alive himself he would have come to the rescue of his offspring in a grander style that must be a joke Socrates it was a very spirited rescue you are kind my friend tell me now did you notice that Protagoras was complaining of us in the speech that we have just heard for addressing our arguments to a small boy and making the child's nervousness a weapon against his ideas and how he disparaged our method of arguments as merely an amusing game and how solemnly he upheld his measure of all things and commanded us to be serious when we dealt with his theory yes of course I noticed that Socrates then do you think we should obey his commands most certainly I do look at the company then they are all children but you so if we are to obey Protagoras it is you and I who have booked to be serious about his theory it is you and I who must question and answer one another then he will not have this against us at any rate that we turn the criticism of his philosophy into sport with boys well isn't our Thea taters better able to follow the investigation of a theory than many an old fellow with a long beard but not better than youth Theodorus do not go on imagining that it is my business to be straining every nerve to defend your dead friend while you do nothing come now my very good Theodorus come a little way with me come with me at any rate until we see whether in questions of geometrical proofs it is really you who should be the measure of whether all men are as sufficient to themselves as you are in astronomy and all the other sciences in which you have made your name Socrates it is not easy for a man who has sat down beside you to refuse to talk that was all nonsense just now when I was pretending that you were going to allow me to keep my coat on and not use compulsion like the Spartans so far from that you seem to me to have towards the method of skier on the Spartans tell one either to strip or to go away but you see rather to be playing the part of Antaeus you don't let any comer go to your stripped him and made him wrestle with you in an argument that Theodorus is an excellent civilly to describe what is the matter with me but I'm more of a fiend for exercised and skier on and Antaeus I have met with many and many are Heracles and two sailors in my time mighty men of words and they have well battered me but for all that I don't retire from the field so terrible a lust has come upon me for these exercises you must not grudge me this either trial fall with me and we shall both be the better all right I resigned myself take me with you where you like in any case I see I have got to put up with the Fate you spin for me and submit to your Inquisition but not further than the limits you have laid down beyond that I shall not be able to offer myself it will do if you'll go with me so far now there is one kind of mistake I want you to be specially on your guard against namely that we do not unconsciously slip into some childish form of argument we don't want to get into disgrace for this again I will do my best I promise you the first thing is to tackle the same point that we were dealing with before we were making a complaint now let us see whether we were right or wrong in holding it to be a defect in this theory that it made every man self-sufficient in wisdom and whether we were right or wrong when we made Protagoras concede that some men are superior to others in questions of better and worse these being the wise do you agree yes it would be a different matter if Protagoras were here in person and agreed with us instead of our having made this concession on his behalf in our attempt to help him in that case there will be no need to take this question up again and make sure about it in the circumstances how it might be decided that we had no authority on his behalf and so it is desirable that we should come to a clearer agreement on this point for it makes no small difference whether this is so or not true then don't let us obtain this concession through anybody else let us take the shortest way and appeal to his own statement how in this way he says does he know that things are for every man what they seemed to him to be yes that is what he says Walden pretty giris we too are expressing the judgments of a man I might say of all men when we say that there is no one in the world who doesn't believe that in some matters he is wiser than other men while in other matters they are wiser than he in emergencies if at no other time you see this belief when they are in distress on the battlefield or in sickness or in a storm at sea all men turned to their leaders in each sphere as towards and look to them for salvation because they are superior in precisely this one thing knowledge and wherever human life and work goes on you find everywhere men seeking teachers and masters for themselves and for other living creatures and for the direction of all human works you find also men who believe that they are able to teach and to take the lead in all these cases what else can we say but that men do believe in the existence of both wisdom and ignorance among themselves there can be no other conclusion and they believe that wisdom is true thinking while ignorant is a matter of false judgement yes of course what then Pythagoras are we to make of your argument are we to say that all men on every occasion judge what is true or that they judge sometimes truly and sometimes falsely whichever we say it comes to the same thing namely that men do not always judge what is true that human judgments are both true and false for think Theodorus would you would anyone of the school of Protagoras be prepared to contend that no one ever thinks his neighbor is ignorant or judging falsely no that's not the thing one could believe Socrates and yet it is to this that our theory has been driven this theory that man is the measure of all things how is that well suppose you come to a decision in your own mind and then express it judgment about something to me let us assume with Protagoras that your judgment is true for you but isn't it possible that the rest of us may criticize your verdict do we always agree that your judgment is true or does their rise up against you every time a vast army of persons who think the opposite who hold that your decisions and your thoughts are false heaven knows they do Socrates in their thousands and tens of thousands as Homer says and give me all the trouble that is humanly possible then do you want us to say that you are then judging what is true for yourself but false for the tens of thousands it looks as if that is what we must say according to the theory at any rate and what of Protagoras himself must he not say this that supposing he himself did not believe that man is the measure any more than the majority of people who indeed do not believe it then this truth which he wrote is true for no one on the other hand suppose he believed it himself but the majority of men do not agree with him then you see to begin with the more those to whom it does not seem to be the truth outnumber those to whom it does so much the more it isn't then it is that must be so if it is going to be or not be according to the individual judgment secondly it has this most exquisite feature Protagoras admits I presumed that the contrary opinion about his own opinion namely that his force must be true seeing he agrees that own George what is undoubtedly and in conceding the truth of the opinion of those who think him wrong he is really admitting the falsity of his own opinion yes inevitably but for their part the others do not admit that they are wrong no but Protagoras again admits this judgment to be true according to his written doctrine so it appears it will be disputed then by everyone beginning with Protagoras or rather it will be admitted by him when he grants to the person who contradicts him that he judges truly when he does that even Protagoras himself will be granting that neither a dog nor the man in the street is the measure of anything at all which he has not learned isn't that so it is so then since it is disputed by everyone the truth of Protagoras is not true for anyone at all not even for himself Socrates we are running my friend too hard but it is not at all clear my dear Theodorus that we are running off the right track hence it is likely that Protagoras being older than we are really is wiser as well and if he were here to stick up his head from below as far as the neck just here where we are he would in all likelihood convict me 20 times over of talking nonsense and show you up to four agreeing with me before he ducked down to rush off again but we have got to take ourselves as we are I suppose and go on saying the things which seemed to us to be at the moment then must have we maintained that any man would admit at least this that some men are wiser than their fellows and others more ignorant so it seems to me at any rate we may also suggest that the theory would stand firm most successfully in the position which we sketched out for it in our attempt to bring help to protect us I mean the position that most things are for the individual what they seemed to him to be for instance warm dry sweet and all this type of thing but if the theory is going to admit that there is any sphere in which one man is superior to another it might perhaps be prepared to grant it in questions of what is good or bad for one's health here it might well be admitted that it is not true that every creature woman or child or even animal is competent to recognize what is good for it and to heal its own sickness that here if anywhere one person is better than another do you agree yes that seems so to me then consider political questions some of these are questions of what may or may not fittingly be done of just an unjust of pious and impious and here the theory may be prepared to maintain that whatever view our city takes on these matters and establishes as its law or convention is truth and fact for that city in such matters neither any individual nor any city can claim superior wisdom but when it is a question of laying down what is to the interest of the state and what is not the matter is different the theory will again that MIT died here if anywhere one councillor is better than another here the decision of one city may be more in conformity with the truth than that of another it would certainly not have the hardihood to affirm that when a city decides that a certain thing is to its own interest that thing will undoubtedly turn out to be to its interest it is in those other questions I am talking about just an unjust pious and empires that men are ready to insist that no one of these things has by nature any being of its own in respect of these they say what seems to people collectively to be so is true at the time when it seems that way and for just as long as it so seems and even those who are not prepared to go all the way with Protagoras take some such view of wisdom but i seee Theodorus that we are becoming involved in a greater discussion emerging from the lesser well we have plenty of time haven't we Socrates we appear to that remark of yours my friend reminds me of an idea that has often occurred to me before how natural it is that men who have spent a great part of their lives in philosophical studies make such fools of themselves when they appear as speakers in the law courts how do you mean now well look at the man who has been knocking about in law courts in such places ever since he was a boy and compare him with the man brought up in philosophy in the life of a student it is surely like comparing the upbringing of a slave with that of a free man how is that now because the one man always has what you mentioned just now plenty of time when he talks he talks in peace and quiet and his time is his own it is so with us now here we are beginning on our third new discussion and he can do the same if he is like her and prefers the newcomer to the question in hand it does not matter to such men whether they talk for a day or a year if only they may hit upon that which is but the other the man of the law court is always in a hurry when he is talking he has to speak with one eye on the clock besides he can't make his speeches on any subject he likes he has his adversary's standing over him armed with compulsory powers and with the sworn statement which is read out point by point as he proceeds and must be kept - by the speaker the talk is always about a fellow slave and he is addressed to a master who sits there holding some suit or other in his hand and the struggle is never a matter of indifference it always direct and concerns the speaker and sometimes life itself is at stake such conditions make him keen and highly strung skilled and flattering the master and work in his way into favor but cause his soul to be small and warped his early servitude prevents him from making a free straight growth it forces him into doing crooked things by imposing dangers and upon a soul that is still tender he cannot meet these by just an honest practice and so resorts to lies and to the policy of repaying one wrong with another thus he is constantly being bent and distorted and in the end grows up to manhood with a mind that has no health in it having now become in his own eyes a man of ability and wisdom there is your practical man Theodorus what about our own set would you like us to have a review of them or shall we let them be and return to the argument we don't want to abuse this freedom to change our subject of which we were speaking just now no no Socrates let us review the Philosopher's what you said just now was quite right we who move in such circles are not the servants but the masters of our own discussions our arguments are our own like slaves each one must wait about for us to be finished whenever we think fit we have no jury and no audience as the dramatic poets have sitting in control over us ready to criticize and give orders very well then we must review them it seems since you have made up your mind but let us confine ourselves to the leaders why bother about the second-rate specimens to begin with den the philosopher grows up without knowing the way to the marketplace or the whereabouts of the law courts or the council chambers or any other place of public assembly law was in decrees published orally or in writing are things he never sees or hears the scrambling of political cliques for office social functions dinners parties with flute girls such doings never enter his head even in a dream so with questions of birth he has no more idea whether a fellow citizen is highborn or humble or whether he has inherited some taint from his forebears male or female then he has of the number of pints and the sea as they say and in all these matters he knows not even that he knows not for he does not hold in self aloof from them in order to get a reputation but because it is in reality only his body that lives and sleeps in the city his mind having come to the conclusion that all these things are of little or no account spurns them and pursues its wind way as Pindar says throughout the universe in the deep beneath the earth and geometries in its surfaces in the heights above the heaven astronomers and tracking down by every path the entire nature of each hole among the things that are never condescending to what lies near a hand what do you mean by that Socrates well here's an instance they say darlie's was studying the Stars Theodorus and gazing aloft when he fell into a well and a witty and amusing Thracian servant girl made fun of him but who she said he was wild to know about what was up in the sky but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet the same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy it really is true that the philosopher fails to see his next-door neighbor he not only doesn't notice what he is doing he scarcely knows whether he is a man or some other kind of creature the question he asks is what is man what actions and passions probably belong to human nature and distinguish it from all other beings this is what he wants to know and concerns himself to investigate you see what I mean Theodorus don't you yes and what you say is true this accounts my friend for the behavior of such a man when he comes into contact with his fellows either privately with individuals or in public life as I was saying at the beginning whenever he is obliged in a law court or elsewhere to discuss the things that lie at his feet and before his eyes he causes entertainment not only to Thracian servant girls but to all the common herd by tumbling into wells and every sort of difficulty through his lack of experience his clumsiness is all full and gets him a reputation for fetch you assess on occasions when personal scanned was the topic of conversation he never has anything at all of his own to contribute he knows nothing to the detriment of anyone never having paid any attention to this subject a lack of resource which makes him look very comic and again when compliments are in order and so flawed ation his evident amusement which is by no means opposed but perfectly genuine is regarded as idiotic when he hears the praises of a despot or a king being sung it sounds to his ears as if some stock breeder were being congratulated some keeper of pigs or sheep or cows that are giving him plenty of milk only he thinks that the rulers have a more difficult in treacherous animal to rear and milk and that such a man having no spare time is bound to become quite as coarse and uncultivated as the stock farmer for the castle of the one is as much a prison as the mountain-fold of the other when he hears talk of land that so and so has a property of ten thousand acres or more and what a vast property that is it sounds to him like a tiny plot used as he is to envisage the whole earth when his companions become lyric on the subject of great families and exclaim at the noble blood of one who can point to seven wealthy ancestors he thinks that such praise comes of a dim and limited vision an inability through lack of education to take a steady view of the whole and to calculate that every single man has countless hosts of ancestors near and remote among whom are to be found in every instance rich men and beggars kings and slaves Greeks and foreigners by the thousand when men pride themselves upon a pedigree of 25 ancestors and traced their descendants back to Heracles the son of Amphitryon they seemed to him to be taken a curious interest in trifles as for the 25th ancestor of amphoteric what he may have been is merely a matter of luck and similarly with the fiftieth before him again how ridiculous he thinks not to be able to work that out and get rid of the gaping vanity of a silly mind on all these occasions you see the philosopher is the object of general derision partly for what men take to be his superior manner and partly for his constant ignorance and lack of resource in dealing with the obvious what you say exactly describes what does happen Socrates but consider what happens my friend when he in his turn draws someone to a higher level and induces him to abandon questions of my injustice towards you or yours towards me for an examination of justice and injustice themselves what they are and how they differ from everything else and from each other or again when he gets him to leave such questions as whether a king who possesses much gold is happy for an inquiry into kingship and into human happiness and misery in general what these two things are and what for a human being is the proper method by which the one can be obtained and the other avoided when it is an account of matters like all these that is demanded of our friend with the small sharp legal mind the situation is reversed his head swims as suspended at such a height he gazes down from his place among the clouds disconcerted by the unusual experience he knows not what to do next and can only stammer when he speaks and that causes great entertainment not to Thracian servant girls or any other uneducated persons they do not see what is going on but to all men who have not been brought up like slaves these are the two types Theodorus there is the one who has been brought up in true freedom and leisure the man you call a philosopher a man to whom it is no disgrace to appear simple and good-for-nothing when he is confronted with menial tasks when for instance he doesn't know how to make a bid or how to sweeten a source or a flattering speech then you have the other the man who is keen and smart at doing all these jobs but does not know how to strike up a song in his term like a free man or how to tune the strings of common speech to the fitting praise of the life of gods and of the happy among men Socrates if your words convinced everyone as they do me there would be more peace and less evil on earth but it is not possible Theodorus that evil should be destroyed for there must always be something opposed to the good nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven but it must inevitably haunt human life and prowl about this earth that is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven and escape means becoming as like God as possible and a man becomes like God when he becomes Justin pious with understanding but it is not at all an easy matter my good friend to persuade men that it is not for the reasons commonly alleged that one should try to escape from wickedness and pursue virtue it is not in order to avoid a bad reputation and obtain a good one that virtue should be practice and advice that it seems to me is only what men call old wives talk let us try to put the truth in this way in God there is no sort of wrong whatsoever he is supremely just and the thing most like him is the man who has become as just as it lies in human nature to be and it is here that we see whether a man is truly able or truly a weakling and a nonentity for it is the realization of this that is genuine wisdom and goodness while the failure to realize it is manifest folly and wickedness everything else that passes for ability and wisdom has a sort of cominis in those who wield political power a poor cheap show in the manual work as a matter of mechanical routine if therefore one meets a man who practices injustice and is blasphemous in talk or in his life the best thing for him by far is that one should never grant that there is any sort of ability about his unscrupulousness such men are ready enough to glory in their approach and think that it means not that they are mere rubbish covering the ground to no purpose but that they have the kind of qualities that are necessary for survival in the community we must therefore tell them the truth that they're very ignorant of their true state fixes them the more firmly they're in for they do not know what is the penalty of injustice which is the last thing of which a man should be ignorant it is not what they suppose scourging and death things which they may entirely avail in spite of their wrongdoing it is a penalty from which there is no escape and what is that my friend there are two patterns set up in reality one is divine and supremely happy the other has nothing of God in it and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness this truth the evildoer does not see blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding he fails to perceive that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one and less and less like the other for this he pays the penalty of living the life that corresponds to the pattern he is coming to resemble and if we tell him that unless he is delivered from this ability of his when he dies the place that his pure of all evil will not receive him that he will forever go on living in this world a life after his own likeness a bad man tied to bad company he will but think this is the way fools talk to a clever rascal like me oh yes Socrates sure enough I know it my friend but there is one accident to which the unjust man is liable when it comes to giving and taking an account in a private discussion of the things he disparages when he's willing to stand his ground like a man for long enough instead of running away like a coward then my friend are not thing happens in the end of the things he says do not satisfy even in himself that famous eloquence of his somehow dries up and he is left looking nothing more than a child but we had better leave it there all this is really a digression and if we go on a flood of new subjects we'll pour in and overwhelm our original argument so if you don't mind we'll go back to what we were saying before as a matter of fact Socrates I like listening to this kind of talk it is easier for a man of my years to follow still if you like let us go back to the argument well then we were at somewhere about this point in the argument weren't we we were speaking of the people who assert a being that is in motion and who hold that for every individual things always are whatever they seemed to him to be and we said that they were prepared to stand upon their principle in almost every case not least in questions of what is just and right here they are perfectly ready to maintain that whatever any community decides to be just and right and establishes as such actually is what is just and right for that community and for as long as it remains so established on the other hand when it is a question of what things are good we no longer find anyone so heroic that he will venture to contend that whatever community thing's useful and establishes really is useful so long as it is the established order unless of course he means that it is called useful but that would be making a game of our argument wouldn't it it would indeed let us suppose then that he is not talking about the name useful but has imbued the thing to which it is applied agreed it is surely this that a government aims at when it legislates whatever name it calls it a community always makes such laws as are most useful to it so far as the limits of its judgment and capacity permit or do you think legislation may have some other object in view oh no not and as a community always achieve this object or are there always a number of failures it seems to me that there are faves now we might put this matter a rather different way and be still more likely to get people generally to agree with our conclusions I mean one might put a question about the whole class of things to which what is useful belongs these things are concerned I take it with future time thus when we legislate we make laws that are going to be useful in the time to come this kind of thing we may properly call future yes certainly come then let's put a question to Protagoras or to anyone who professes the same views now Protagoras man is the measure of all things as you people say of white and heavy and light and all that kind of thing without exception he has the criterion of these things within himself so when he thinks that they are as he experiences them he thinks what is true and what really is for him isn't that so it is then Protagoras we shall say what about things that are going to be in the future has a man the criterion of these within himself when he thinks certain things will be that they actually happened for him as he thought they would take heat for example suppose the ordinary man thinks he is going to take a fever and that his temperature will go up to a fever point while another man this time a doctor thinks the opposite do we hold that the future will confirm either the one judgment or the other or are we to say that it will confirm both that is that for the doctor the man will not have a temperature or be suffering from fever one for himself he will that would be absurd but when there is a question of the sweetness and Jonas of the next vintage I presume it would always be the growers judgment never to carry Authority rather than that of a musician of course nor again in any question of what will be in tune or out of tune with the judgement of a teacher of gymnastics being superior to that of a musician even about what is going to seem to be in tune to the gymnastic master himself no never or suppose the dinner is being prepared even the guest who is going to eat it if he has no knowledge of cooking will not be able to pronounce so authoritative a verdict as the professional cook on how nice it is going to be I say going to be because we had better not at this stage press our point as regards what is now pleasant to any individual or what has been in the past our question for the moment is whether the individual himself is the best judge for himself of what is going to seem and be for him in the future or we will ask would not you Protagoras predict better than any layman about the persuasive effect that speeches in a law court will have upon any one of us and in fact Socrates this at any rate is a point on which Protagoras used to make strong claims to superiority over other people of course he did my dear good fellow no one would have paid large fees for the privilege of talking with him if he had not been in the habit of persuading his pupils that he was a better judge than any fortune-teller or anyone else about what was going to be and seemed to be in the future that's sure enough legislation also and what is useful is concerned with the future and it would be generally admitted to be inevitable that a city when it legislates often fails to achieve what is the most useful yes surely then we shall be giving your master fair measure if we tell him that he has now got to admit that one man is wiser than another and that it is such a man who is the measure but that high the man with no special knowledge have not by any means got to be a measure apart which the recent speech his defense was trying to force upon me whether I liked it or not now that Socrates seems to me to be the chief point on which the theory is convicted of error though it stands convicted also when it makes other men's judgments carry Authority and these turn out to involve thinking that Protagoras statements are completely untrue there is more than one point besides these Theodorus on which a conviction might be secured and least so far it is a matter of proving that not every man's judgment is true but so long as we keep within the limits of that immediate present experience of the individual which gives rise to the sections and to the sensual judgments it is more difficult to convict with these latter of being untrue but perhaps I'm talking nonsense perhaps it is not possible to convict them at all perhaps those who profess that they are perfectly evident and are always knowledge may be saying what really is and may be that our theaetetus was not far from the mark with his proposition that knowledge and perception are the same thing we shall have to come to closer grips with the theory as the speech on behalf of Protagoras will cry us to do so we shall have to consider and test this moving being and find whether it rings true or sounds as if it had some flaw in it there is no small fight going on about it anyway and no shortage of fighting men no indeed but in Ionia it seems to be even growing and assuming lost dimensions on the side of this theory the Heracles Ian party is conducting a most vigorous campaign the more reason then my dear Theodore's why we should examine it by going back to its first principle which is the way they presented themselves I quite agree you know Socrates these Heraclea T and doctrines or as you say America are still more ancient you can't discuss them in person with any of the people at officious who profess to be edit any more than you could with a maniac they are just like the things they say in their books always on the move as for abiding by what is said or sticking to a question or quietly answering and asking questions in turn there is less than nothing of that in their capacity that's an exaggeration no doubt I mean there isn't so much as a tiny bit of repose in these people if you ask any one of them a question you will put out some little enigmatic phrase from his quiver and shoot it off at you and if he tried to make him give an account of what he has said you will only get hit by another full of strange turns of language you will never reach any conclusion with any of them ever indeed they never reach any conclusion with each other they are so very careful not to allow anything to be stable either in an argument or in their own souls I suppose they think that if they did it would be something that stands still this being what they are totally all with and what they are determined to banish from the universe as they can I daresay Theodorus you have seen these men only on the field of battle and never been with them in times of peace as you don't belong to their set I expect they keep such matters to be explained at leisure to their pupils whom they want to make like themselves pupils my good man there are no pupils and teachers among these people they just spring up on their own one here one there wherever they happen to catch their inspiration and no one of them will credit another with knowing anything as I was just going to say you will never get these men to give an account of themselves willingly or unwillingly what we must do is take their doctrine out of their hands and consider it for ourselves as we should a problem in geometry what you say is very reasonable this problem now we have inherited it have we not from the ancients they used poetical forms which concealed from the majority of men their real meaning namely that ocean and tethers the origin of all things are actually flowing streams and nothing standstill in more modern times the problem is presented to us by men who being more accomplished in these matters plainly demonstrate their meaning so that even shoemakers may hear and assimilate their wisdom and give up the silly idea that some things in this world stand still while others move learn that all things are in motion and recognized the greatness of their instructors but I was almost forgetting Theodorus that there are other thinkers who have announced the opposite view who tell us that unmoved is the universe another similar statements which we hear from a malicious or a par monedas as against the whole party of heraclea Tian's these philosophers insists that all things are one and that this one stands still itself within itself having no place in which to move what are we to do with all these people my friend we have been gradually advance until without realizing it we have got ourselves in between the two parties and if we don't in some way manage to put up a fight and make our escape we shall pay for it like the people who play that game on the line in the wrestling schools and get called by both parties and pulled in opposite directions now I think we ought to begin by examining the other party the fluent fellows we started to pursue if they appear to us to be talking sense we will help them drag us over to their side and try to escape the others but if those who make their stand for the hole appear to be nearer the truth we'll all take refuge with them from the men who move what should not be moved and if it appears that neither party has a reasonable Theory then we shall be very absurd if we think that insignificant people like ourselves can have anything to say after we have rejected the views of men who lived so long ago and possessed all wisdom think now Theodorus is it of any use for us to go forward upon such a dangerous venture we can't refuse to examine the doctrines of these twos Socrates that couldn't be allowed then we must examine them if you feel so strongly about it now it seems to me that the proper starting point of our criticism is the nature of motion what is this thing that they are talking about when they say that all things are in motion I mean for example are they referring to one form of motion only or as I think to two but don't let this be only what I think you commit yourself as well so that we may come to grief together if need be tell me do you call it motion when a thing changes from one place to another or turns around in the same place I do yes here then is one form of motion then supposing a thing remains in the same place but grows old or becomes black instead of white or hard instead of soft or undergoes any other alteration isn't it right to say that here we have motion in another form unquestionably then I now have two forms of motion alteration and spatial movement yes and that's quite correct then now that we have made this distinction let us have a talk with the people who allege that all things are in motion let us ask them do you hold that everything is in motion in both ways that is that it both moves through space and undergoes alteration or do you suggest that some things are in motion in both ways and some only in one or the other heaven knows I can't onto that I suppose they would say in both ways yes otherwise my friend it will turn out that in their view things are both moving and standing still and it will be no more correct to say that all things are in motion than to say that all things stand still that's perfectly true then since they must be in motion and there is no such thing anywhere as absence of motion it follows that all things are always in every kind of motion yes that must be so then I want you to consider this point in their theory as we were saying they hold that the genesis of things such as warmth and whiteness occurs when each of them is moving together with a perception in the space between the active and the passive factors the passive factor thereby becoming percipient but not a deception while the active factor becomes subtle such but not equality isn't that so but perhaps quality seemed a strange word to you perhaps you don't quite understand it as a general expression so I will talk about particular cases what I mean is that the active factor becomes not warmth or wildness but warm and white and so on you will remember perhaps that we said in the earlier stages of the argument that there is nothing which in itself is just one thing and that this applies also to the active and passive factors it is by the association of the two with one another that they generate perceptions and the things perceived and in so doing the act effect becomes such and such while the passive factor becomes percipient yes I remember that of course then we need not concern ourselves about other points in their doctrine whether they mean what we say or something else we must keep our eyes simply upon the object of our discussion we must ask them this question according to you all things move and flow isn't that so yes and they have both the motions that we distinguished that is to say they both move and alter that must be so if they are to be wholly and completely in motion now if they are only moving through space and not altering we should presumably be able to say what the moving things flow or how do we express it that's all right but since not even this abides that what flows flows white but rather it is in process of change so that there is flux of this very thing also the wideness and it's still passing over into another color lest it be convicted of standing still in this respect since that is so is it possible to give any name to a color which won't probably apply to it I don't see how one could Socrates know yet surely to anything else of that kind if being in flux it is always quietly slipping away as you speak and what about any particular kind of perception for example seeing or hearing does it ever abide and remain seeing or hearing it ought not to certainly if all things are in motion then we may not call anything seeing rather than not seeing nor indeed may we call it any other perception rather than not if it be admitted that all things are in motion in every way no we may not yet say I Titus and I said that knowledge was perception you did and so our answer to the question what is knowledge gave something which is no more knowledge than not it seems as if it did a fine way this turns out to be of making our answer right we were most anxious to prove that all things are in motion in order to make that answer come out correct but what has really emerged is that if all things are in motion every answer on whatever subject is equally correct both it is thus and it is not thus or if you like but comes as we don't want to use any expressions which will bring our friends to a standstill you are quite right well yes Theodorus except that I said thus and not us one must not use even the word thus for this das would no longer be a motion no yet not last for here again there is no motion the exponents of this theory need to establish some other language and it is they have no words that are consistent with their hypothesis unless it would perhaps suit them best to use not at all thus in a quite indefinite sense that would at least be an idiom most appropriate to them then we are set free from your friendly adores we do not yet concede to him that every man is measure of all things if he'd be not a man of understanding and we are not going to grant that knowledge is perception not at any rate on the line of inquiry which supposes that all things are in motion we are not going to grant it unless they're taters here has some other way of stating it that's very good hearing Socrates for when these matters were concluded I was to be set free from my task of answering you according to our agreement which specified the end of the discussion of Protagoras theory oh no indeed Theodorus not till you in Socrates have done what you proposed just now and dealt with the other side the people who say that the universe stands still what's this theaetetus you at your age teaching your owners to be unjust and break their agreements what you have got to do is to prepare to render account to Socrates yourself for the rest of the discussion all right if he likes but I would rather have listened to a discussion of these views well challenging Socrates to an argument is like inviting cavalry into the plane so ask your questions and you shall hear but I don't think Theodorus that I am going to be persuaded by theaetetus to do what he demands but what is it makes you unwilling shame I'm afraid how criticism might be a very cheap affair and if I feel like this before the many who have made the universe one and unmoved malicious and the rest of them I feel it's still more in the face of the one Parmenides hominid day seems to mean the words of Homer to be Reverend and awful I met him when I was very young and he was a very old man and he seemed to me to have a holly noble depth so I'm afraid we might not understand even what he says still less should we attain to his real thought above all I am afraid that the very object of our discussion the nature of knowledge might be left unexamined amid the crowd of theories that will rush in upon us if we admit them especially as this we have now brought up is one which involves unmanageably vast issues to treat it as a sideshow would be insult an injury while if it is adequately discussed it is likely to spread out until it completely eclipses the problems of knowledge we must not do either what we must do is to make use of our midwives are to deliver theaetetus of the thoughts which he has conceived about the nature of knowledge well if that is what you think proper it must be done now fea Titus I wouldn't need to think about one point in what has been said your answer was that knowledge is perception wasn't it yes now supposing you're asked with what does a man see white and black things and with what does he hear high and low notes you would reply I imagine with his eyes and ears I should yes now as a rule it is no sign of ill breathe to be easy in the use of language and take no particular care in one's choice of words it is rather the opposite that gives a man away but such exactness is sometimes necessary and it is necessary here for example to fasten upon something in your arm so that is not correct think now is it more correct to say that the eyes are that with which we see or that through which we see do we hear with there is or through these where I should think Socrates that it is through which we perceive in each case rather than with which yes my son it would be a very strange thing I must say if there were a number of perception sitting inside us as if we were wooden horses and there were not some single form soul or whatever one ought to call it to which all these converge something with which through those things as if there were instruments we perceive all that is perceptible that sounds to me better than the other way of putting it now the reason why I'm being so precise with you is this I want to know if it is with one and the same part of ourselves that we reach through our eyes to white and black things and through the other means to get further things and whether it asked you will be able to refer all these to the body but perhaps it would be better if you stated the answers yourself rather than that I should busy myself on your behalf tell me the instruments to which you perceive hot hard light sweet things do you thin siddur that they all belong to the body or can they be referred elsewhere no they all belong to the body and are you also willing to admit that what you perceive through one power you can't perceive through another for instance what you perceive through hearing you couldn't perceive through sight and similarly what you perceive through side you couldn't perceive through hearing I could hardly refuse to grant that and suppose you think something about both you can't possibly be having a perception about both either through one of these instruments or through the other No now take a sound under color first of all don't you think this same thing about both of them namely that they both are I do also that each of them is different from the other and the same as itself of course and that both thetaba are two and each of them is one yes I think that two are you also able to consider whether they are like or unlike each other yes I may be now what is it through which you think all these things about them it is not possible you see to grasp what is common to both either through site or through hearing let us consider another thing which will show the truth of what we are saying suppose it were possible to inquire whether both are saucy or not you can tell me of course with what you would examine them it would clearly be neither sight nor hearing but something else yes of course the power which functions through the tongue good now through what does that power function which reveals to you what is common in the case both of all things and of these two and mean that which you expressed by the words is and is not and the other terms used are now questions about them just now what kind of instruments will you assign for all these through what does that which is Pacific and in us perceive all of them you mean being and not-being likeness and unlikeliness same and different also one and any other number applied to them and obviously to your question is about odd and even and all that is involved with these attributes and you want to know through what bodily instruments we perceive all these with the soul you follow me exceedingly well theaetetus these are just the things I'm asking about but I couldn't possibly say all I can tell you is that it doesn't seem to me that for these things there is any special instrument at all as there is for the others it seems to me that in investigating the common features of everything the soul functions to itself yes they are tightest you would say that because you are handsome are not ugliest the odorous would have it for handsome is as handsome says-- and besides being handsome you have done me a good turn you have saved me a vast amount of talk if it seems to you that while the soul considers some things through the bodily powers there are others which it considers alone and through itself this was what I thought myself but I wanted you to think it too well it does seem to me to be so now in which class do you put being for that above all is something that accompanies everything I should put it among the things which the soul itself reaches out after by itself also like and unlike same and different yes what about beautiful and ugly good and bad yes these two in these above all I think the soul examines their being in comparison with one hour here it seems to be making a calculation within itself of past and present in relation to future not so fast now wouldn't you say that it is through touch that the soul perceives the hardness of what is hard and similarly the softness of what is soft yes but has regards there being the fact that they are their opposition to one another and the being again of this opposition the matter is different here the soul itself attempts to reach a decision for us by rising to compare them with one another yes undoubtedly and us there are some things which all creatures men and animals alike are naturally able to perceive as soon as they are born I mean the experiences which reach the soul through the body but calculations regarding their being and their advantageous 'no scum when they do only as the result of a long and arduous development involving a good deal of trouble and education yes that certainly is so now is it possible for someone who does not even get at being to get at truth no it's impossible and if a man fails to get at the truth of a thing will he ever be a person who knows that thing I don't see how Socrates their knowledge is to be found not in the experiences but in the process of reasoning about them it is here seemingly not in the experiences that it is possible to grasp being and truth so it appears then in the face of such differences would you call both by the same name one would certainly have no right to now what name do you give to the former seeing hearing smelling feeling cold or warm I call that perceiving what else could I call it so the whole lot taken together you call perception necessarily which we say has no share in the grasping of truth since it has none in the grasping of being no it has none so it has no share in knowledge either no then theaetetus perception and knowledge could never be the same thing no apparently not Socrates we have now got the clearest possible proof that knowledge is something different from perception but how object in beginning this discussion was not to find out what knowledge is not but to find out what it is however we have made a little progress we shall not now look for knowledge in sense perception at all but in whatever we call the activity of the soul when it is busy by itself about the things which are well the name Socrates I suppose is judgment your opinion my dear lad is correct now look back to the beginning wipe out all that we have said hitherto and see if you can see any better from where you have now progressed to tell me again what his knowledge well Socrates one can't say that it is judgment in general because there is also false judgment but true judgment may well be knowledge so let that be my answer if the same thing happens again and we find as we go on that it turns out not to be so we'll try something else and even so theaetetus you have answered me in the way one ought with a good will and not reluctantly as you did at first if we continue like this one of two things will happen either we shall find what we are going out after or we shall be less inclined to think we know things which we don't know at all and even that would be a reward we could not fairly be dissatisfied with now what is this that you say there are two forms of judgment true and false and your definition is that true judgment is yes that is how it looks to me now now I wonder if it's worthwhile at this stage to go back to an old point about judgment what point do you mean I have something on my mind which has often bothered me before and got me into great difficulty both in my own thought and in discussion with other people I mean I can't say what it is this experience we have and how it arises in us what experience judging what is force even now you know I'm still considering I'm in two minds whether to let it go or whether to look into it in a different manner from a short while ago why not Socrates if this appears for any reason to be the right thing to do as you and Theodorus were saying just now and quite rightly when you were talking about leisure we are not pressed for time in talk of this kind a very proper reminder perhaps it would not be a bad moment to go back upon our tracks it is better to accomplish a little well than a great deal unsatisfactorily yes it certainly is now how we to proceed and actually what is it that we are saying we claim don't we that force judgment repeatedly occurs and one of us judges falsely the other truly as if it was in the nature of things for this to happen that is what we claim now isn't it true about all things together or individually that we must either know them or not know them I'm ignoring for the moment the intermediate conditions of learning and forgetting as they don't affect the argument here of course Socrates in that case there is no alternative with each thing we either know it or we do not then when a man judges the objects of his judgment are necessarily either things which he knows or things which he doesn't know yes that must be so it if he knows a thing it is impossible that he should not know it or if he does not know it he cannot know it yes of course now takes a man who judges what is false is he thinking that things which he knows are not these things but some other things which he knows so that knowing both he is ignorant of both but that would be impossible Socrates then is he imagining that things which he doesn't know are other things which he doesn't know is it possible that a man who knows neither theaetetus nor Socrates should take it into his head that Socrates is dayit ATIS or say attainted socrates I don't see how that could happen but a man certainly doesn't think that things he knows are things he does not know or again that things he doesn't know are things he knows no that would be a very odd thing then in what way is false judgments still possible there is evidently no possibility of judgment outside the cases we have mentioned since everything is either a thing we know or a thing we don't know and within these limits there appears to be no place for false judgment to be possible that's perfectly true then perhaps we had better take up a different line of inquiry perhaps we should proceed not by way of knowing and not knowing but by way of being and not being how do you mean perhaps the simple fact is this it is when a man judges about anything things which are not that he is inevitably in judging falsely no matter what may be the nature of his thought in other respects that again is very plausible Socrates now how would that be what are we going to say saya tators if somebody sets about examining us and we are asked is what these words express possible for anyone can a man judge what is not either about one of the things which are or just by itself I suppose we shall reply yes when he is thinking but thinking what is not true or how shall we answer that's our answer now does this kind of thing happen elsewhere what kind of thing well for instance that a man sees something yet sees nothing how could he on the contrary in fact if he is seeing any one thing he must be seen a thing which is or do you think that a one can be found among the things which are not I certainly don't then a man who is seen any one thing is seen something which is apparently it also follows that a man who is hearing anything is hearing some one thing and something which is yes and a man who is touching anything is touching some one thing and a thing which is if it is one yes that also follows and a man who is judging is judging some one thing is he not necessarily and a man who is judging some one thing is judging something which is I grant that then that means that a man who is judging something which is not is judging nothing so it appears but a man who is judging nothing is not judging at all that seems clear and so it is not possible to judge what is not either about the things which are or just by itself apparently not false judgment then is something different from judging things which are not it looks as if it were then neither on this approach nor on the one we followed just now does false judgment exists in us no indeed then is it in this way that the thing we call by that name of Rises how we say that there is false judgment a kind of other judging when a man in place of one of the things that are has substituted in his thought another of the things that are an assert that it is in this way he is always judging something which is but judges one thing in place of another and having missed the thing which was the object of his consideration he might fairly be called one who judges falsely now you seem to me to have got it quite right when a man judges ugly instead of beautiful or beautiful instead of ugly then he is truly judging what is false evidently theaetetus you have not much of inion of me you don't find me at all alarming what in particular makes you say that well I suppose you don't think me capable of taking up your truly force and asking you whether it is possible that a thing should be slowly Swift or heavily liked or whether anything else can possibly occur in a way not in accordance with its own nature but in accordance with that of its opposite and contrary to itself but let that pass I don't want your boldness to go unrewarded you like the suggestion you say that force judgment is other judging yes I do then according to your judgment it is possible to set down a thing in one's thought as another thing and not itself surely it is now when a man's thought is accomplishing this isn't it essential that he should be thinking of either one or both of these two things it is essential either both together or each in turn very good now by thinking do you mean the same as I do what do you mean by it a talk which the soul has with itself about the objects under its consideration of course I'm only telling you my dear in all ignorance but this is the kind of picture I have of it it seems to me that the soul when it thinks is simply carrying on a discussion in which it asks itself questions and answers them itself affirms and denies and when it arrives at something definite either by a gradual process or a sudden link when it affirms one thing consistently and without divided counsel we call this it's judgment so in my view to judge is to make a statement and a judgment is a statement which is not addressed to another person spoken aloud but silently address to oneself and what do you think I agree with that so that when a man judges one thing to be another what he is doing apparently is to say to himself that the one thing is the other yes of course now try to think if you have ever said to yourself surely the beautiful is ugly or the unjust is certainly just or to put it in the most general terms have you ever tried to persuade yourself that surely one thing is another wouldn't the very opposite of this be the truth wouldn't the truth be that not even in your sleep have you ever gone so far as to say to yourself no doubt the odd is even or anything of that kind yes that so and do you think that anyone else in his right mind or out of it ever ventured seriously to tell himself with the hope of winning his own ascent that a cow must be a horse or two must be one no indeed I don't well then if to make a statement to oneself is to judge no one who makes a statement that is a judgment about both things getting hold of both with his soul can state or judge that one is the other and you and your turn must let this form of words pass what I mean by it is this no one judges the ugly is beautiful or makes any other such judgment alright Socrates I pass it and I think you're right thus a man who has both things before his mind when he judges cannot possibly judge that one is the other so it seems but if he has only one of them before his mind in judging and the other is not present to him at all he will never judge that one is the other that's true for he would have to have hold also of the one that is not present to his judgment then other judging is not possible for anyone either when he has both things present to him in judgment or when he has one only so if anyone is going to define forced judgment as heterodoxy he will be saying nothing the existence of false judgment in us cannot be shown in this way any more than by our previous approaches its seen as not and yet Fayette ATIS if it is not shown to exist we shall be driven into admitting a number of absurdities and what would they be I'm not going to tell you until I have tried every possible way of looking at this matter I should be ashamed to see us forced into making the kind of admissions I mean while we are still in difficulties if we find what we're after and become freemen then we would turn around and talk about how these things happen to other people having secured our own persons against ridicule while if we can't find any way of extricating ourselves then I suppose we shall be laid low like seasick passengers and give ourselves into the hands of the argument and let it trample all over us and do what it likes with us and now let me tell you where I see a way still open to this inquiry yes do tell me I'm going to maintain that we were wrong to agree that it is impossible for a man to be in error through judging that things he knows are things he doesn't know in a way it is possible now I wonder if you mean the same thing as I two suspected at the time when we suggested it was like that I mean that sometimes I who know Socrates have been someone else in the distance whom I don't know and taught it to be Socrates whom I do know in a case like that the sort of thing you are referring to does happen but didn't we were a coil from this suggestion because it made us not know when we do know things which we know yes we certainly did then don't let us put the in that way let's try another way it may prove amenable or it may be obstinate but the fact is we are in such an extremity that we need to turn every argument over and over and test it from all sides now see if there is anything in this is it possible to learn something you didn't know before surely it is and again another and yet another thing well why not now I want you to suppose for the sake of argument that we have in our souls a block of wax larger in one person smaller in another and of pure wax in one case dirtier in another in some men rather hard and in others rather soft while in some it is of the proper consistency all right I'm supposing that we may look upon it then as a gift of memory the mother of the muses we make impressions upon this of everything we wish to remember among the things we have seen or heard or thought of ourselves we hold the wax under our perceptions and thoughts and take a stamp from them in the way in which we take the imprints of Signet rings whatever is impressed upon the wax we remember and know so long as the image remains in the wax whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed we forget and do not know let that be a supposition don't take the case of a man who knows these things but is also considering something he is seeing or hearing and see if he might judge falsely in this way in what kind of way in thinking of things which he knows sometimes that there are things which he knows and sometimes that there are things which he doesn't know these cases being what at an earlier stage we wrongly admitted to be impossible and what do you say now we must begin this discussion by making certain distinctions we must make it clear that it is impossible to think one that a thing you know because you possess the record of it in your soul but which you are not to see is another thing which you know you have its imprint - but are not perceiving - that a thing you know is something you do not know and do not have the seal of three that a thing you don't know is another thing you don't know for that a thing you don't know is a thing you know again it is impossible to think one that a thing you are perceiving is another thing that you are perceiving to that a thing you are perceiving is a thing which you are not perceiving three that a thing you are not perceiving is another thing you are not perceiving for the other thing you are not perceiving is a thing you are perceiving yet again it is impossible to think one that a thing you both know and are perceiving when you are holding its imprint in line with your perception of it is another thing which you know and are perceiving and whose imprint you keep in line with the perception this indeed is even more impossible than the former cases if that can be - but a thing which you both know and are perceiving and the record of which you are keeping in its true line is another thing you know three that had thin you both know and are perceiving of which you have the record correctly in line as before is another thing you are perceiving for that a thing you neither know nor are perceiving is another thing you neither know nor perceive but a thing you neither know nor perceive is another thing you don't know 6:00 that a thing you neither know nor perceive is another thing you are not perceiving in all these cases it is a sheer impossibility that there should be forced judgment it remains that it arises if anywhere in the cases I'm just going to tell you what are they perhaps I may understand a little better from them at present I don't follow in these cases of things you know when you think one that they are other things you know and are perceiving - that they are things you don't know but are perceiving three the things you both know and are perceiving or other things you both know and are perceiving well now you have left me further behind than ever I'll go over it again in another way I know Theodorus and remember within myself what he is like and in the same way I know theaetetus but sometimes I am seeing them and sometimes not sometimes I am touching them and sometimes not or I may hear them or perceive them through some other sins while at other times I have no perception about you too at all but remember you nonetheless and know you within myself isn't that so yes certainly now please take this first point that I want to make clear to you that we sometimes perceive and sometimes do not perceive the things that we know that's true then as regards the things we don't know we often don't perceive them either but often we only perceive them that is so also now see if you can follow me a little better supposing Socrates knows both Theodorus and tare taters but is not seeing either of them or having any other perception about them he could never in that case judge within himself that fea taters was the odorous is that sentence or not yes that's quite true this then was the first of the cases I was speaking of it was secondly then supposing I am acquainted with one of you and not the other and I'm perceiving neither of you in that case I could never think the one I do know to be the one I don't know that is so thirdly supposing I am NOT acquainted with either of you and I'm not perceiving either of you I could not possibly think that one of you whom I don't know is another of you whom I don't know now will you please take it that you have heard all over again in succession the other cases described before the cases in which I shall never judge falsely about you and Theodorus either when I am familiar or when I am unfamiliar with both of you or when I know one and not the other and simile with perceptions you follow me I follow so there remains the possibility of false judgment in this case I know both you and theodora's I have your signs upon that block of wax like the imprints of rings then I see you both in the distance but I cannot see you well enough but I'm in a hurry to refer the proper sign to the proper visual perception and so I get this fitted into the trace of itself that recognition may take place this I failed to do I'll get them out of line applying the visual perception of the one to the sign of the other it is like people putting their shoes on the wrong feet or like what happens when we look at things in mirrors where left and right change places it is then that heterodoxy or false judgment arises yes that seems very likely Socrates it is an awfully good description of what happens to the judgment then again supposing I know both of you and I'm also perceiving one of you and not the other but I'm not keeping my knowledge of the former in line with my perception that's the expression I used before and you didn't understand me then no I certainly didn't well I was saying that if you know one man and perceive him as well and keep your knowledge of him in line with your perception you will never take him for some other person whom you know and are perceiving and the knowledge of whom you are holding straight with the perception wasn't that so yes they remained I take it the case we have just mentioned where false judgment arises in the following manner you know both men and you are looking at both or having some other perception of them and you don't hold the two signs each in line with its own perceptions but like a bad Archer you shoot beside the mark and miss which is precisely what we call falsehood naturally so and when for one of the signs there is also a present perception but there is not for the other and you try to fit the present perception the sign belonging to the absent perception in all such cases thought is an error we may sum up thus it seems that in the case of things we do not know and that'll perceive there is no possibility of error or of false judgment if what we are saying is at all sound it is in cases where we both know things and are perceiving them that judgment is erratic and varies between truth and falsity when it brings together the proper stamps and records directly and in straight lines it is true when it does so obliquely and crosswise it is false well isn't that beautiful Socrates ah when you've heard what is coming next you will say so all the more for true judgment is beautiful right enough and error is ugly no doubt about that well this then they say is why the two things occur in some men the wax in the soul is deep and abundant smooth and work to the proper consistency and when the things that come through the senses are imprinted upon this heart of the soul as Homer calls it hinting at the likeness to the wax the signs that are made in it are lasting because they are clear and have sufficient depth men with such Souls learn easily and remember what they learn they do not get the signs out of line with the perceptions but judge truly as the signs are distinct and there is plenty of room for them they could clear sign each thing to its own impress in the wax the things in question being of course what we call the things that are and these people being the ones we call wise or do you feel any doubts about this no I find it extraordinarily convincing but it is a different matter when a man's heart is shaggy the kind of heart are marvelously knowing poet praises or when it is dirty and of impure wax or when it is very soft or hard persons in whom the wax is soft or quick to learn but quick to forget when the wax is hard the opposite happens those in whom it is shaggy and rugged a stony thing with earth or filth mixed all through it have indistinct impressions so - if the wax is hard for then the impressions have no depth similarly they are indistinct if the wax is soft because they quickly run together and are blurred if in addition to all this the impresses in the wax are crowded upon each other for lack of space because it is only some little scrap of a soul they are even more indistinct all such people are liable to false judgement when they see or hear or think of anything they can't quickly a lot each thing to each impress they are slow and a lot of things to impress --is which do not belong to them missing miss hearing and miss thinking most of them and these in turn are the ones we describe as in error about the things that are and ignorant that's exactly it Socrates no man could improve on your account then are we to say that forced judgments do exist in us yes most emphatically and true ones of course and true ones and we think we have now reached a satisfactory agreement when we say that these two kinds of judgment certainly exists there's no earthly doubt about it Socrates theaetetus I'm afraid a garrulous man is really an awful nuisance why what are you talking about I'm annoyed at my own stupidity my own true carelessness what else could you call it when a man will keep dragging arguments up and down because he is too slow witted to reach any conviction and will not be pulled off any of them but why should you be annoyed I'm not annoyed I am alarmed I'm afraid of what I may say if someone asks me so Socrates you've discovered false judgment have you you have found that it arises not in the relation of perceptions to one another or of thoughts to one another but in the connecting of perception wid thought I believe I am very likely to say yes with an air of flattering myself upon our having made some beautiful discovery well Socrates what you have just shown us looks to me quite a presentable thing anyway you he goes on that we would never suppose that a man we are merely thinking of but not seeing is a horse which again we are not seeing or touching but just thinking of and not perceiving anything else about it I suppose I shall agree that we do mean this yes and quite rightly well then he goes on doesn't it follow from this theory that a man couldn't possibly suppose that 11:00 which he is merely thinking about his 12 which again he is merely thinking about come now you answer when my answer will be that someone who is seeing or touching them could suppose that 11 are 12 but not with those that he has in his thought he would never judge this in that way about them well now take the case where a man is considering five and seven within himself I don't mean seven men and five men or anything of that sort but five and seven themselves the records as we allege in the wax and block things among which it is not possible that there should be false judgment suppose he is talking to himself about them and asking himself how many they are do you think that in such a case it has ever happened that one man thought they were 11 and said so while another thought and said that they were 12 or the whole men say and all men to think that they are 12 oh good heavens no lots of people would take them 11 and with larger numbers they go wrong still more often for I suppose what you say is intended to apply to all numbers quite right and I want you to consider whether what happens here is not just this that a man thinks that 12 itself the one on the waxen block is 11 it certainly looks as if he does then haven't we come back to the things we were saying at the outset you see anyone to whom this happens is thinking that one thing he knows is another thing he knows and this we said was impossible in fact it was just this consideration which led us to exclude the possibility of false judgment but if admitted it would mean that the same man must at one in the same time both know and not know the same objects that's perfectly true then we shall have to say that false judgment is something other than a misapplication of thought to perception because if this was so we could never be in error so long as we remained within our thoughts themselves but as the meta now stands either there is no such thing as false judgment or a man may not know what he knows which do you choose you are offering me an impossible choice Socrates but I'm afraid the argument will not permit both still we must stop at nothing supposing now we were to set about being quite shameless how by consenting to say what knowledge is like and why should that be shameless you don't seem to realize that our whole discussion from the beginning has been an inquiry about knowledge on the assumption that we do not yet know what it is oh but I do well then don't you think it is a shameless thing that we who don't know what knowledge is should pronounce on what knowing is like but as a matter of fact thea taters for some time passed our whole method of discussion has been tainted time and again we have said we are acquainted with and we are not acquainted with we know and we do not know as if we cook to some extent understand one another while we are still ignorant of what knowledge is or here's another example with you like at this very moment we have again used the words to be ignorant of and to understand as if these were quite proper expressions for us when we are deprived of knowledge but how are you going to carry on the discussion at all Socrates if you keep off these words quite impossible for a man like me but if I were one of the experts in contradiction I might be able to if one of those gentlemen were present he would have commanded us to refrain from them and would keep coming down upon us heavily for the folks I'm referring to but since we are no good anyway why don't I make bold to tell you what knowing is like it seems to me that this might be of some help then do be bold please and if you don't keep from using these words we'll forgive you all right well then have you heard what people are saying nowadays that knowing is I dare say I have but I don't remember it at the moment well they say of course that it is the having of knowledge oh yes that's true let us make a slight change let us say the possession of knowledge and how would you say that was different from the first way of putting it perhaps it isn't at all but I will tell you what I think the difference is and then you must help me to examine it all right if I can well then to possess doesn't seem to me to be the same as to have for instance suppose a man has bought a coat and it is at his disposal but he is not wearing it he would not say that he has it on but he would say that he possesses it yes that would be correct now look here is it possible in this way to possess knowledge and not have it suppose a man were to hunt wild birds pigeons or something and make an Avery for them at his house and look after them there then in a sense I suppose we might say he has them all the time because of course he possesses them isn't that so yes but in another sense he has none of them it is only that he has acquired a certain power in respect of them because he has got them under his control in an enclosure of his own that is to say he has the power to hunt for anyone he likes at any time and take and have it whenever he chooses and let it go again and this he can do as often as he likes that is so well a little while ago we were equipping our souls with I don't know what sort of wax in the vise now let us make in eat Soula sort of Avery of all kinds of birds some in flocks separate from others some in small groups and others flying about singly here and there among all the rest all right let us suppose it made what then then we must say that when we are children this receptacle is empty and by the birds we must understand pieces of knowledge when anyone takes possession of a piece of knowledge and shuts it up in the pen we should say that he has learned or has found out the thing of which this is the knowledge and knowing we should say is his that's given them now think when he hunts again for any one of the pieces of knowledge that he chooses and takes it and has it then lets it go again what words are appropriate here the same as before when he took possession of the knowledge or different ones you will see my point more clearly in this way there is an art you call arithmetic isn't it yes now I want you to think of this as a hunt for pieces of knowledge concerning everything odd and even all right I will it is by virtue of this art I suppose that a man both has under his control pieces of knowledge concerned in numbers and also hands them over to others yes and we call it teaching when a man hands them over to others and learning when he gets them handed over to him and when he has them through possessing them in this Avery of ours we call that knowing yes certainly now he must give your attention to what is coming next it must surely be true that a man who has completely mastered arithmetic knows all numbers because there are pieces of knowledge covering all numbers in his soul of course and a man so trained may proceed to do some counting are the counting to himself the numbers themselves or counting something else one of the external things which have number yes surely and Counting we shall take to be simply a matter of concern how large a number actually is yes then it looks as if this man were considering something which he knows as if he did not know it for we have granted that he knows all numbers I've no doubt you've had such puzzles put to you I have yes then using our image of possessing and hunting for the pigeons we shall say that there are two phases of hunting one before you have possession in order to get possession and another when you already possess in order to catch and have in your hands what you previously acquired and in this way even with things you learned and got the knowledge of long ago and have known ever since it is possible to learn them these same things all over again you can take up again and have that knowledge of each of them which were acquired long ago but had not ready to hand in your thought can't you true now this is what I meant by my question a moment ago what terms ought we to use about them when we speak of what the arithmetician does when he proceeds to count or the scholar when he proceeds to read something here it seems a man who knows something is setting out to learn again from himself things which he already knows but that would be a very odd thing Socrates but are we to say that it is things which he does not know that such a man is going to read and count remembering that we have granted him knowledge of all letters and all numbers that wouldn't be reasonable either then would you like us to take this line suppose we say we do not mind at all about the names let people drag around the terms knowing and learning to their heart's content we have determined that to possess knowledge is one thing and to have it is another accordingly we maintain that it is impossible for anyone not to possess that which he has possession of and thus it never happens that he does not know something he knows but he may yet make a false judgments about it is because it is possible for him to have not the knowledge of this thing but another piece of knowledge instead when he is hunting for one piece of knowledge it may happen as they fly about that he makes a mistake and gets hold of one instead of another it was this that happened when he thought 11 was 12 he got hold of the knowledge of 11 that was in him instead of the knowledge of 12 as you might catch Aaron dove instead of a pigeon yes that is reasonable now but when he gets hold of the one he is trying to get hold of then he is free from error when he does that he is judging what is in this way both true and false judgment exists and the things that worried us before no longer stand in our way I dare say you will agree with me or if not what line will you take I agree yes we have now got rid of this not knowing what one knows for we now find that at no point does it happen that we do not possess what we possess whether we are in error about anything or not but it looks to me as if something else more alarming is by a way of coming upon us what's that I mean what is involved this forced judgment is going to become a matter of an interchange of pieces of knowledge what do you mean to begin with it follows that a man who has knowledge of something is ignorant of this very thing not through want of knowledge but actually in virtue of his knowledge secondly he judges that this is something else and that the other thing is it now surely this is utterly unreasonable it means that the soul when knowledge becomes present to it knows nothing and is wholly ignorant according to this argument there is no reason why an a session of ignorance should not make one know something or of blindness make one see something if knowledge is ever going to make a man ignorant well perhaps Socrates it wasn't a happy thought to make the birds only pieces of knowledge perhaps we ought to have supposed that there are pieces of ignorance also flying about in the soul along with them and what happens is that the hunter sometimes catches a piece of knowledge and sometimes a piece of ignorance concerning the same thing and eveness makes him judge falsely while the knowledge makes him judge truly I can hardly refrain from expression my admiration of uthia taters but do think again about that let us suppose it as you say then you maintain the man who captures a piece of ignorance or judge falsely is that it yes but presumably he will not think he is judging falsely no of course he won't he will think he is judging what is true and his attitude towards the thing about which he is in error will be as if he knew them of course he will think he has hunted down and has a piece of knowledge and not a piece of ignorance yes that's clear so after going a long way around we are back at our original difficulty our friendly expert in refutation will laugh my very good people he will say do you mean that a man who knows both knowledge and ignorance is thinking that one of them which he knows is the other which he knows or is it that he knows neither and judges the one he doesn't know to be the other which he doesn't know or is it that he knows one and not the other and judges that the one he knows is the one he doesn't know or does he think that the one he doesn't know is the one he does or are you going to start all over again and tell me that there's another set of pieces of knowledge concerning pieces of knowledge and ignorance which a man may possess shut up in some other ridiculous Averys or wax and devices which he knows so long as he possesses them though he may not have them ready to hand in his soul and in this way end up forced to come running round to the same place over and over again and never get any further what are we going to say to that theaetetus Oh dear me Socrates I don't know what one ought to say then don't you think my boy that the argument is perhaps dealing out a little proper chastisement and showing us that we were wrong to leave the question about knowledge and proceed to inquire into full judgment first well as a matter of fact it's impossible to know this until we have an adequate grasp of what knowledge is well at the moment Socrates I feel bound to believe you then to go back to the beginning what are we going to say knowledge --is we are not I suppose going to give up yet certainly not unless you give up yourself tell me then how could we define it with the least risk of contradicting ourselves in the way we were attempting before Socrates I can't think of any other in what way do you mean by saying that knowledge is true judgment judging truly is at least something free of mistakes I take it and everything that results from it is admirable and good well theaetetus as the man who was leading the way across the river said it will show you if we go on and track this down perhaps we may stumble on what we are looking for if we stay where we are nothing will come clear you're right let's go on and consider it well this won't take long to consider anyway there is a whole art indicating to you that knowledge is not what you say how's that what part do you mean the art of the greatest representatives of wisdom the men called orators and lawyers these men I take it use their art to produce conviction not by teaching people but by making them charge whatever they themselves choose or do you think there are any teachers so clever that within the short time allowed by the clock they can teach adequately to people who were not eye witnesses the truth of what happened to people who have been robbed or assaulted no I don't think they possibly could but they might be able to persuade them and by persuading them you causing them to judge don't you of course then suppose a jury has been justly persuaded of some matter which only an eyewitness could know and which cannot otherwise be known suppose they come to their decision upon hearsay forming a true judgment then they have decided the case without knowledge but granted they did their job well being correctly persuaded yes certainly but my dear lad they couldn't have done that if true judgment is the same thing as knowledge in that case the best jurymen in the world couldn't form a correct judgment without knowledge so it seems they must be different things oh yes Socrates that's just what I once heard a man say I had forgotten but now it's coming back to me he said that it is true judgment with an account that his knowledge true judgment without an account falls outside of knowledge and he said that the things of which there is no account are not knowable yes he actually called them that while those which have an account are knowable very good indeed now tell me how did he distinguish these knowable and unknowables I want to see if you and I have heard the same version I don't know if I can find that out but I think I could follow if someone explained it listen then to a dream in return for a dream in my dream too I thought I was listening to people saying that the primary elements as it were of which we and everything else are composed have no account each of them in itself can only be named it is not possible to say anything else of it either that it is or that it is not that would mean we were adding being or not being to it whereas we must not attach anything if we are to speak of that thing itself alone indeed we are not to apply to it even such words as itself or that each alone or this or any other of the many words of this kind for these go the and and are applied to all things alike being other than the things to which they are added whereas if it were possible to express the element itself and it had its own proprietary account it would have to be expressed without any other thing as it is however it is impossible that any of the primary should be expressed in an account it can only be named for a name is all that it has but with the things composed of these it is another matter here just in the same way as the elements themselves are woven together so their names may be woven together and become an account of something an account being essentially a complex of names thus the elements are unaccountable and unknowable but they are perceivable whereas the complexes are both knowable and expressible and can be the objects of true judgment now when a man gets a true judgment about something without an account his soul is in a state of truth as regards that thing but he does not know it for someone who cannot give and take an account of a thing is ignorant about it but when he has also got an account of it he is capable of all this and is made perfect in knowledge was the dream you've heard the same as this or a different one no it was the same in every respect do you like this then and do you suggest that knowledge is true judgment with an account yes certainly fea taters can it be that all in a moment you and I have today laid hands upon something which many a wise man has searched for in the past and gone gray before he found it well it does seem to me anyway Socrates that what has just been said puts the matter very well and it seems likely enough that the matter is really so for what knowledge could there be apart from an account and correct judgment but there is one of the things said which I don't like and what's that what looks like the subtlest point of all that the elements are unknowable and the complex is knowable and won't that do we must make sure occurs you see we do have as hostages for this theory the original models that were used when all these statements were made what models letters the elements of language and syllables it must have been these mustn't it that the author of our theory had in view it couldn't have been anything else no he must have been thinking of letters and syllables let's take and examine them then or rather let us examine ourselves and ask ourselves whether we really learned our letters in this way or not now to begin with one can give an account of the syllables but not of the letters is that it well perhaps it most certainly looks like that to me at any rate supposing you are asked about the first syllable of Socrates tell me Theo taters what is so what would you answer to that that is s and O and there you have an account of the syllable yes come along then and let us have an account of s in the same way how can anyone give the letters of a letter S is just one of the voiceless letters Socrates a may sound like a hissing of the tongue B again has neither voice nor sound and that's true of most letters so the statement that they themselves are unaccountable oh it's perfectly good even the seven clearest have only voiced no sort of account whatever can be given of them so here my friend we have established a point about knowledge we do appear to have done some Wolin we have shown that the syllable is knowable but not the letter is that all right it seems the natural conclusion anyway look here what do we mean by this syllable the two letters or if there are more all the letters or do we mean some single form produced by their combination I think we mean all the letters then take the case of the two letters s and O these two are the first syllable of my name if a man knows this syllable he must know both the letters of course so he knows s and o yes but can it be that he is ignorant of each one and knows the two of them without knowing either that would be a strange and unaccountable thing Socrates and yet supposing it is necessary to know each in order to know both then it is absolutely necessary that anyone who is ever to know a syllable must first get to know the letters and in admitting days we shall find that how beautiful theory has taken to its heels and got clean away from us and very suddenly - yes we are not keeping a proper watch on it perhaps we ought not to have supposed the syllable to be the letters perhaps we ought to have made it some single form produced out of them having its own single nature something different from the letters yes certainly that might be more like it we must look into the matter we have no right to betray a great and imposing theory in this faint-hearted manner certainly not then let it be as we are now suggesting let the complex be a single form resulting from the combination of the several elements when they fit together and let this hold both of language and of things in general yes certainly then it must have no parts why is that now because when a scene has parts the whole isn't necessarily all the parts or do you mean by the whole also a single form arising out of the parts yet different from all the parts I do now do you call some and hold the same thing or different things I don't feel at all certain but as you keep telling me to answer up with a good will I will take a risk and say that they are different your goodwill theaetetus is all that it should be now we must see if your answer is - we must of course as the argument stands at present the whole will be different from the Sun yes well now is there any difference between all the things and the Sun for instance when we say 1 2 3 4 5 6 or twice 3 or 3 times 2 4 & 2 3 & 2 & 1 are we speaking of the same thing in all these cases or different things the same thing that is 6 precisely then with each expression have we not spoken of all the 6 yes and when we speak of them all aren't we speaking of a son we must be that is 6 precisely then in all things made up of number at any rate by the sum and all of them we mean the same thing so it seems now let us talk about them in this way the number of an acre is the same thing as an acre isn't it yes similarly with a mile yes and the number of an army is the same as the arm and so always with things of this sort their total number is the sum that each of them is yes but is the number of each anything other than its parts no now things which have parts consist of parts that seems true and it is agreed that all the parts are the sum seeing that the total number is to be the Sun that is so then the whole does not consist of parts for if it did it would be all the parts and so would be a Sun it looks as if it doesn't but can a part as such be a part of anything but the whole yes of the Sun you are putting up a good fight anyway thea taters but this sum now isn't it just when they is nothing lacking that it is a sum yes necessarily and won't this very same thing that from which nothing anywhere is lacking be a whole while a thing from which something is absent is neither a whole Nora some the same consequence having followed from the same condition in both cases at once well it doesn't seem to me now that there can be any difference between whole and some very well now where are we not saying that in the case of a thing that has part both the whole and the sum will be all the parts yes certainly now come back to the thing I was trying to get at just now supposing the syllable is not just its letters doesn't it follow that it cannot contain the letters as parts of itself alternatively if it is the same as the letters it must be equally knowable with them that is so well wasn't it just in order to avoid this result that we supposed it different from the letters yes well then if the letters are not parts of the syllable can you tell me of any other things not its letters which are no indeed if I were to admit that it had component part Socrates it would be ridiculous of course to set aside the letters and look for other components then theaetetus according to our present argument a syllable is an absolutely single form indivisible in two parts it looks like it now my friend a little while ago if you remember we are inclined to accept a certain proposition which we thought put the matter very well I mean the statement that no account can be given of the primary's of which other things are constituted because each of them is in itself in composite and that it would be incorrect to apply even the term being to it when we spoke of it or the term this because these terms signified different and alien things and that is the reason why primary is an unaccountable and unknowable thing do you remember I remember and is that the reason also why it is single in form and indivisible in two parts or is there some other reason for that I can see no other myself no there really doesn't seem to be any other and hasn't the complex now fall into the same class as the primary seeing it has no parts and is a single form yes it certainly has well now if the complex is both many elements and a whole with them as its part then both complexes and elements are equally capable of being known and expressed since all the parts turned out to be the same thing as the whole yes surely but if on the other hand the complex is single and without parts then complexes and elements are equally unaccountable and unknowable both of them for the same reason I can't dispute that then if anyone tries to tell us that the complex can be known and expressed while the country is true of the element we had better not listen to him no it better not if we go along with the argument and more than this wouldn't you more easily believe somebody who made the contrary statement because of what you know of your experience in learning to read and write what kind of thing do you mean I mean that when you were learning you spent your time just precisely and trying to distinguish by both eye and ear each individual letter in itself so that you might not be bewildered by their different positions in written and spoken words that's perfectly true and that the music teachers wasn't the finished pupil the one who would follow each note and tell to which drink belonged the notes being generally admitted to be the elements in music yes that's just what it amounted to then if the proper procedure is to take elements and complexes as we ourselves have experience of and made an inference from them to the rest we shall say that the elements are much more clearly known and the knowledge of them is more decisive for the mastery of any branch of study the knowledge of the complex and if anyone maintains that the complex is by nature knowable and the element unknowable wish shall regard this as tomfoolery whether it is intended to be or not Oh quiet I think that might be proved in other ways too oh we mustn't let them distract us from the problem before us we wanted to see what can be meant by the proposition that it is in the addition of an account to a true judgment that knowledge is perfected well yes we must try to see that come then what are we intended to understand by an account I think it must be one of three meanings what are they the first would be making one store to parent vocally by means of words and verbal expressions when a man impresses an image of his judgment upon the stream of speech like reflections upon water or in a mirror don't you think this kind of thing is an account yes I do at least a man who does this is said to be given an account but isn't that a thing that everyone is able to do more or less readily I mean indicate what he thinks about a thing if he is not deaf or dumb to begin with and that being so anyone at all who makes a correct judgment would turn out to have it together with an account correct judgment without knowledge will no longer be found anywhere true well then we mustn't be too ready to condemn the author of the definition of knowledge now before us for talking nonsense perhaps he didn't mean this perhaps he meant being able when questioned about what a thing is to give an answer by reference to its elements as for example Socrates as for example what Hesiod is doing when he say 100 other Timbers of a wagon now I couldn't say what they are and I don't suppose you could either if you and I were asked what a wagon is we should be satisfied if we could answer wheels axle body rails yoke yes surely but he might think us ridiculous just as he would if we were asked what your name is and replied by giving the syllables in that case he would think us ridiculous because although we might be correct in our judgment and our expression of it we should be fancying ourselves as scholars thinking we knew and we're expressing a scholars account or Fayette ace as his name whereas in fact no one gives an account of a thing with knowledge till in addition to his true judgment he goes right through the thing element by element as I think we said before we did yes in the same way in the example of a wagon he would say that we have indeed correct judgment but it is the man who can explore its being by going through those hundred items who has made the addition which adds an account to his true judgment it is this man who has passed form a judgment to expert knowledge on the being of a wagon and he has done so in virtue of having gone over the whole by means of the elements and doesn't that seem sound to you Socrates well tell me if it seems sound to you my friend tell me if you are prepared to accept the view that an account is a matter of going through a thing element by element while going through it by syllables or larger divisions fall short of being an account then we shall be able to discuss it I'm certainly prepared to accept that and do you at the same time think that a man has knowledge of anything when he believes the same thing now to be part of one thing and now part of something else or when he judges that now one thing and now something different belongs to one in the same object no indeed I don't then have you forgotten that first when you were learning to read and write that is just what you and the other boys used to do you mean we used to think that sometimes one letter and sometimes another belong to the same syllable and used to put the same letter sometimes into its proper syllable and sometimes into another yes that is what I mean well I certainly haven't forgotten and I don't think people at that stage can be said to have knowledge yet well suppose now that someone who is at this sort of stage is writing the name daya taters he thinks he ought to write sir and does so then suppose another time he is trying to write Theodorus and this time he thinks he should write take and proceed to do so are we going to say that he knows the first syllable of your names no we've admitted that anyone who is at that stage has not yet knowledge and is there anything to prevent the same person being in that situation as regards the second and third and fourth syllables no nothing now at the time when he does this he will be writing pea taters not only with correct jug but with command of the way through its letters that must be so whenever he writes them out one after another in their order yes clearly and still without knowledge though with correct judgment isn't that how do you yes yet possessing an account of it along with his correct judgment he was writing it you see with command of the way through its letters and we agreed that that is an account true so here my friend we have correct judgment together with an account which we are not yet in times want to call knowledge yes I'm afraid that so so it was only the poor man's dream of gold that we had when we thought we had got the truest account of knowledge or is it early days to be harsh perhaps this is not the way in which one is to define account we said that the man who defines knowledge as correct judgment together win an account would choose one of three meanings for a perhaps the last is the one to define it by yes you're right to remind me there is one possibility still left the first was a kind of vocal image of thought the one we have just discussed was the way to the hole through the elements now what's your third suggestion what the majority of people would say namely being able to tell some mark by which the object you are asked about differs from all other things and you give me an example of such an account of something well take the Sun if you like you would be satisfied I imagine with the answer that it is the brightest of the bodies that move around the earth in the heavens oh yes quiet now I want you to get hold of the principle that this illustrates it is what we were just saying that if you get hold of the difference that distinguishes a thing from everything else then so some people say you will have got an account of it on the other hand so long as it is some common feature that you grow us your account will be about all those things which have this in common I see I think it's very good to call this kind of thing an account then if a man with correct judgment about any one of the things that are grasps in addition it's different from the rest he has become a knower of the thing he was a judge of before that's our present position anyway well at this point they attained us as regards what we are saying and through all the world like a man looking at a shadow painting when I'm up close to it I can't take it in in the least though when I stood well back from it it appeared to me to have some meaning how's that I'll see if I can explain suppose I have formed a correct judgment about you if I can grasp your account in addition I know you but if not I am merely judging yes and an account was to be a matter of expounding your different nests that is so then when I was merely judging my thought failed to grasp any point of difference but you and the rest of mankind apparently what I had in mind it seems was some common characteristic something that belongs no more to you than to anybody else yes that must be so then tell me in heaven's name how if that was so did it come about that you were the object of my judgement and nobody else suppose my thought is that this is their Titus one who is a human being and has a nose and eyes and a mouth and so on through the whole list of limbs will this thought cause me to be thinking of theaetetus rather than of Theodorus or of the proverbial remotest million no how could it but suppose I think not merely of the one with the nose and eyes but of the one with a snub nose and prominent eyes shall I even then be judging you any more than myself or anyone who is like that not at all it will not I take it the saya tators who is judged in my mind until this stub nosiness of yours has left imprinted and established in me a record that is different in some way from the other snub-nosed it misses I have seen and so with the other details of your maker and this will remind me if I meet you tomorrow and make me judge correctly about you that's perfectly true then correct judgment also must be concerned with the different nurse of what it is about so it seems anyway then what more might this add in an account to correct judgment be if on the one hand it means that we must make another judgment about the way in which a thing differs from the rest of things we are being required to do something very absurd how's that because we already have a correct judgment about the way a sink differs from other things and we are then directed to add a correct judgment about the way it differs from other things at that rate the way a roller goes round or a pestle or anything proverbial would be nothing compared with such directions they might be more justly called a matter of the blind leading the blind to tell us to end what we already have in order to come to know what we are judging about there is a generous resemblance to the behavior of a man by knighted whereas if on the other hand what else were you going to suggest when you started this inquiry just now well if adding an account means that we are required to get to know the different nurse not merely judge this most splendid of our accounts of knowledge turns out to be a very amusing affair forgetting to know of course is acquiring knowledge isn't it yes so it seems the answer to the question what is knowledge will be correct judgment accompanied by knowledge of the different nests for this is what we are ours to understand by the addition of an account apparently so and it is surely too silly to tell us when we are trying to discover what knowledge is that is his correct judgment accompanied by knowledge whether of different nests or of anything else and so theaetetus knowledge is neither perception nor truth judgment nor an account added to true judgment it seems not well now dear lad are we still pregnant still in labor with any thoughts about knowledge or have we been delivered of them all as far as I'm concerned Socrates you've made me safe far more than ever was in me heaven knows well then how art of midwifery tells us that all of these offsprings are wind eggs and not worth bringing up undoubtedly and Sophia Titus if ever in the future you should attempt to conceive or should succeed in conceiving other theories they will be better ones as the result of this inquiry and if you remain barren your companions will find you gentle er and less tiresome you will be modest and not think you know what you don't know this is all my art can achieve nothing more I do not know any of the things that other men know the great and inspired men of today and yesterday but this art of midwifery my mother and I had allotted to us by God she to deliver women I to deliver men that are young and generous soft spirit all that have any beauty and now I must go to the king's porch to meet the indictment that Meletis has brought against me but let us meet here again in the morning Theodorus

Channel: Lewis Kirk

Views: 5,243

Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

Keywords: Plato, Philosophy, Dialogues, Theaetetus

Id: -z1QrP22QQs

Length: 220min 14sec (13214 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019