SOCRATES: Then you see and do not see the same thing at the same time.
THEAETETUS: Yes, in a certain sense.
SOCRATES: None of that, he will reply; I do not ask or bid you answer
in what sense you know, but only whether you know that which you do not
know. You have been proved to see that which you do not see; and you
have already admitted that seeing is knowing, and that not-seeing is
not-knowing: I leave you to draw the inference.
THEAETETUS: Yes; the inference is the contradictory of my assertion.
SOCRATES: Yes, my marvel, and there might have been yet worse things in
store for you, if an opponent had gone on to ask whether you can have a
sharp and also a dull knowledge, and whether you can know near, but not
at a distance, or know the same thing with more or less intensity,
and so on without end. Such questions might have been put to you by a
light-armed mercenary, who argued for pay. He would have lain in wait
for you, and when you took up the position, that sense is knowledge,
he would have made an assault upon hearing, smelling, and the other
senses;--he would have shown you no mercy; and while you were lost in
envy and admiration of his wisdom, he would have got you into his
net, out of which you would not have escaped until you had come to an
understanding about the sum to be paid for your release. Well, you ask,
and how will Protagoras reinforce his position? Shall I answer for him?
THEAETETUS: By all means.
SOCRATES: He will repeat all those things which we have been urging on
his behalf, and then he will close with us in disdain, and say:--The
worthy Socrates asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember
and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was
frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made
fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask
questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found
tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am
refuted, but if he answers something else, then he is refuted and not
I. For do you really suppose that any one would admit the memory which a
man has of an impression which has passed away to be the same with that
which he experienced at the time? Assuredly not. Or would he hesitate to
acknowledge that the same man may know and not know the same thing? Or,
if he is afraid of making this admission, would he ever grant that one
who has become unlike is the same as before he became unlike? Or would
he admit that a man is one at all, and not rather many and infinite as
the changes which take place in him? I speak by the card in order to
avoid entanglements of words. But, O my good sir, he will say, come to
the argument in a more generous spirit; and either show, if you can,
that our sensations are not relative and individual, or, if you admit
them to be so, prove that this does not involve the consequence that the
appearance becomes, or, if you will have the word, is, to the individual
only. As to your talk about pigs and baboons, you are yourself behaving
like a pig, and you teach your hearers to make sport of my writings in
the same ignorant manner; but this is not to your credit. For I declare
that the truth is as I have written, and that each of us is a measure
of existence and of non-existence. Yet one man may be a thousand times
better than another in proportion as different things are and appear
to him. And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man have no
existence; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils which
appear and are to a man, into goods which are and appear to him. And
I would beg you not to press my words in the letter, but to take the
meaning of them as I will explain them. Remember what has been already
said,--that to the sick man his food appears to be and is bitter, and to
the man in health the opposite of bitter. Now I cannot conceive that one
of these men can be or ought to be made wiser than the other: nor can
you assert that the sick man because he has one impression is foolish,
and the healthy man because he has another is wise; but the one state
requires to be changed into the other, the worse into the better. As
in education, a change of state has to be effected, and the sophist
accomplishes by words the change which the physician works by the aid
of drugs. Not that any one ever made another think truly, who previously
thought falsely. For no one can think what is not, or, think anything
different from that which he feels; and this is always true. But as the
inferior habit of mind has thoughts of kindred nature, so I conceive
that a good mind causes men to have good thoughts; and these which the
inexperienced call true, I maintain to be only better, and not truer
than others. And, O my dear Socrates, I do not call wise men tadpoles:
far from it; I say that they are the physicians of the human body, and
the husbandmen of plants--for the husbandmen also take away the evil and
disordered sensations of plants, and infuse into them good and healthy
sensations--aye and true ones; and the wise and good rhetoricians
make the good instead of the evil to seem just to states; for whatever
appears to a state to be just and fair, so long as it is regarded as
such, is just and fair to it; but the teacher of wisdom causes the good
to take the place of the evil, both in appearance and in reality. And in
like manner the Sophist who is able to train his pupils in this spirit
is a wise man, and deserves to be well paid by them. And so one man is
wiser than another; and no one thinks falsely, and you, whether you will
or not, must endure to be a measure. On these foundations the argument
stands firm, which you, Socrates, may, if you please, overthrow by an
opposite argument, or if you like you may put questions to me--a method
to which no intelligent person will object, quite the reverse. But I
must beg you to put fair questions: for there is great inconsistency
in saying that you have a zeal for virtue, and then always behaving
unfairly in argument. The unfairness of which I complain is that you do
not distinguish between mere disputation and dialectic: the disputer
may trip up his opponent as often as he likes, and make fun; but the
dialectician will be in earnest, and only correct his adversary when
necessary, telling him the errors into which he has fallen through his
own fault, or that of the company which he has previously kept. If
you do so, your adversary will lay the blame of his own confusion and
perplexity on himself, and not on you. He will follow and love you, and
will hate himself, and escape from himself into philosophy, in order
that he may become different from what he was. But the other mode of
arguing, which is practised by the many, will have just the opposite
effect upon him; and as he grows older, instead of turning philosopher,
he will come to hate philosophy. I would recommend you, therefore, as
I said before, not to encourage yourself in this polemical and
controversial temper, but to find out, in a friendly and congenial
spirit, what we really mean when we say that all things are in motion,
and that to every individual and state what appears, is. In this manner
you will consider whether knowledge and sensation are the same or
different, but you will not argue, as you were just now doing, from the
customary use of names and words, which the vulgar pervert in all sorts
of ways, causing infinite perplexity to one another. Such, Theodorus, is
the very slight help which I am able to offer to your old friend; had he
been living, he would have helped himself in a far more gloriose style.
THEODORUS: You are jesting, Socrates; indeed, your defence of him has
been most valorous.
SOCRATES: Thank you, friend; and I hope that you observed Protagoras
bidding us be serious, as the text, 'Man is the measure of all things,'
was a solemn one; and he reproached us with making a boy the medium of
discourse, and said that the boy's timidity was made to tell against his
argument; he also declared that we made a joke of him.
THEODORUS: How could I fail to observe all that, Socrates?
SOCRATES: Well, and shall we do as he says?
THEODORUS: By all means.
SOCRATES: But if his wishes are to be regarded, you and I must take up
the argument, and in all seriousness, and ask and answer one another,
for you see that the rest of us are nothing but boys. In no other way
can we escape the imputation, that in our fresh analysis of his thesis
we are making fun with boys.
THEODORUS: Well, but is not Theaetetus better able to follow a
philosophical enquiry than a great many men who have long beards?
SOCRATES: Yes, Theodorus, but not better than you; and therefore please
not to imagine that I am to defend by every means in my power your
departed friend; and that you are to defend nothing and nobody. At any
rate, my good man, do not sheer off until we know whether you are a
true measure of diagrams, or whether all men are equally measures and
sufficient for themselves in astronomy and geometry, and the other
branches of knowledge in which you are supposed to excel them.
THEODORUS: He who is sitting by you, Socrates, will not easily avoid
being drawn into an argument; and when I said just now that you would
excuse me, and not, like the Lacedaemonians, compel me to strip and
fight, I was talking nonsense--I should rather compare you to Scirrhon,
who threw travellers from the rocks; for the Lacedaemonian rule is
'strip or depart,' but you seem to go about your work more after the
fashion of Antaeus: you will not allow any one who approaches you to
depart until you have stripped him, and he has been compelled to try a
fall with you in argument.
SOCRATES: There, Theodorus, you have hit off precisely the nature of my
complaint; but I am even more pugnacious than the giants of old, for I
have met with no end of heroes; many a Heracles, many a Theseus, mighty
in words, has broken my head; nevertheless I am always at this rough
exercise, which inspires me like a passion. Please, then, to try a fall
with me, whereby you will do yourself good as well as me.
THEODORUS: I consent; lead me whither you will, for I know that you are
like destiny; no man can escape from any argument which you may weave
for him. But I am not disposed to go further than you suggest.
SOCRATES: Once will be enough; and now take particular care that we
do not again unwittingly expose ourselves to the reproach of talking
childishly.
THEODORUS: I will do my best to avoid that error.
SOCRATES: In the first place, let us return to our old objection, and
see whether we were right in blaming and taking offence at Protagoras
on the ground that he assumed all to be equal and sufficient in wisdom;
although he admitted that there was a better and worse, and that in
respect of this, some who as he said were the wise excelled others.
THEODORUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: Had Protagoras been living and answered for himself, instead
of our answering for him, there would have been no need of our reviewing
or reinforcing the argument. But as he is not here, and some one may
accuse us of speaking without authority on his behalf, had we not better
come to a clearer agreement about his meaning, for a great deal may be
at stake?
THEODORUS: True.
SOCRATES: Then let us obtain, not through any third person, but from his
own statement and in the fewest words possible, the basis of agreement.
THEODORUS: In what way?