Classical literature; Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800
Theodorus objects that Callias is the true guardian, but he hopes that
Socrates will come to the rescue. Socrates prefaces his defence by
resuming the attack. He asks whether a man can know and not know at the
same time? 'Impossible.' Quite possible, if you maintain that seeing is
knowing. The confident adversary, suiting the action to the word, shuts
one of your eyes; and now, says he, you see and do not see, but do
you know and not know? And a fresh opponent darts from his ambush, and
transfers to knowledge the terms which are commonly applied to sight.
He asks whether you can know near and not at a distance; whether you can
have a sharp and also a dull knowledge. While you are wondering at his
incomparable wisdom, he gets you into his power, and you will not escape
until you have come to an understanding with him about the money which
is to be paid for your release.
But Protagoras has not yet made his defence; and already he may be heard
contemptuously replying that he is not responsible for the admissions
which were made by a boy, who could not foresee the coming move, and
therefore had answered in a manner which enabled Socrates to raise a
laugh against himself. 'But I cannot be fairly charged,' he will say,
'with an answer which I should not have given; for I never maintained
that the memory of a feeling is the same as a feeling, or denied that a
man might know and not know the same thing at the same time. Or, if you
will have extreme precision, I say that man in different relations is
many or rather infinite in number. And I challenge you, either to show
that his perceptions are not individual, or that if they are, what
appears to him is not what is. As to your pigs and baboons, you are
yourself a pig, and you make my writings a sport of other swine. But
I still affirm that man is the measure of all things, although I admit
that one man may be a thousand times better than another, in proportion
as he has better impressions. Neither do I deny the existence of wisdom
or of the wise man. But I maintain that wisdom is a practical remedial
power of turning evil into good, the bitterness of disease into the
sweetness of health, and does not consist in any greater truth or
superior knowledge. For the impressions of the sick are as true as the
impressions of the healthy; and the sick are as wise as the healthy. Nor
can any man be cured of a false opinion, for there is no such thing;
but he may be cured of the evil habit which generates in him an evil
opinion. This is effected in the body by the drugs of the physician, and
in the soul by the words of the Sophist; and the new state or opinion
is not truer, but only better than the old. And philosophers are not
tadpoles, but physicians and husbandmen, who till the soil and infuse
health into animals and plants, and make the good take the place of the
evil, both in individuals and states. Wise and good rhetoricians make
the good to appear just in states (for that is just which appears just
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