Theaetetus
to be called procuresses. There are some other differences between the
two sorts of pregnancy. For women do not bring into the world at one
time real children and at another time idols which are with difficulty
distinguished from them. 'At first,' says Socrates in his character of
the man-midwife, 'my patients are barren and stolid, but after a while
they "round apace," if the gods are propitious to them; and this is due
not to me but to themselves; I and the god only assist in bringing their
ideas to the birth. Many of them have left me too soon, and the result
has been that they have produced abortions; or when I have delivered
them of children they have lost them by an ill bringing up, and have
ended by seeing themselves, as others see them, to be great fools.
Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, is one of these, and there have been
others. The truants often return to me and beg to be taken back; and
then, if my familiar allows me, which is not always the case, I receive
them, and they begin to grow again. There come to me also those who have
nothing in them, and have no need of my art; and I am their matchmaker
(see above), and marry them to Prodicus or some other inspired sage who
is likely to suit them. I tell you this long story because I suspect
that you are in labour. Come then to me, who am a midwife, and the son
of a midwife, and I will deliver you. And do not bite me, as the women
do, if I abstract your first-born; for I am acting out of good-will
towards you; the God who is within me is the friend of man, though he
will not allow me to dissemble the truth. Once more then, Theaetetus,
I repeat my old question--"What is knowledge?" Take courage, and by the
help of God you will discover an answer.' 'My answer is, that knowledge
is perception.' 'That is the theory of Protagoras, who has another way
of expressing the same thing when he says, "Man is the measure of all
things." He was a very wise man, and we should try to understand him.
In order to illustrate his meaning let me suppose that there is the same
wind blowing in our faces, and one of us may be hot and the other cold.
How is this? Protagoras will reply that the wind is hot to him who is
cold, cold to him who is hot. And "is" means "appears," and when you
say "appears to him," that means "he feels." Thus feeling, appearance,
perception, coincide with being. I suspect, however, that this was only
a "facon de parler," by which he imposed on the common herd like you and
me; he told "the truth" (in allusion to the title of his book, which
was called "The Truth") in secret to his disciples. For he was really
a votary of that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be
relative; nothing is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all
is in motion and mixture and transition and flux and generation, not
"being," as we ignorantly affirm, but "becoming." This has been the
doctrine, not of Protagoras only, but of all philosophers, with the
single exception of Parmenides; Empedocles, Heracleitus, and others, and
all the poets, with Epicharmus, the king of Comedy, and Homer, the king
of Tragedy, at their head, have said the same; the latter has these
words--
"Ocean, whence the gods sprang, and mother Tethys."
And many arguments are used to show, that motion is the source of life,
and rest of death: fire and warmth are produced by friction, and living
creatures owe their origin to a similar cause; the bodily frame is
preserved by exercise and destroyed by indolence; and if the sun ceased
to move, "chaos would come again." Now apply this doctrine of "All
is motion" to the senses, and first of all to the sense of sight. The
colour of white, or any other colour, is neither in the eyes nor out of
them, but ever in motion between the object and the eye, and varying in
the case of every percipient. All is relative, and, as the followers of
Protagoras remark, endless contradictions arise when we deny this; e.g.
here are six dice; they are more than four and less than twelve; "more
and also less," would you not say?' 'Yes.' 'But Protagoras will retort:
"Can anything be more or less without addition or subtraction?"'
'I should say "No" if I were not afraid of contradicting my former
answer.'
'And if you say "Yes," the tongue will escape conviction but not the
mind, as Euripides would say?' 'True.' 'The thoroughbred Sophists, who
know all that can be known, would have a sparring match over this, but
you and I, who have no professional pride, want only to discover whether
our ideas are clear and consistent. And we cannot be wrong in saying,
first, that nothing can be greater or less while remaining equal;
secondly, that there can be no becoming greater or less without addition
or subtraction; thirdly, that what is and was not, cannot be without
having become. But then how is this reconcilable with the case of the
dice, and with similar examples?--that is the question.' 'I am often
perplexed and amazed, Socrates, by these difficulties.' 'That is because
you are a philosopher, for philosophy begins in wonder, and Iris is
the child of Thaumas. Do you know the original principle on which the
doctrine of Protagoras is based?' 'No.' 'Then I will tell you; but we
must not let the uninitiated hear, and by the uninitiated I mean the
obstinate people who believe in nothing which they cannot hold in their
hands. The brethren whose mysteries I am about to unfold to you are far
more ingenious. They maintain that all is motion; and that motion
has two forms, action and passion, out of which endless phenomena are
created, also in two forms--sense and the object of sense--which come to
the birth together. There are two kinds of motions, a slow and a fast;
the motions of the agent and the patient are slower, because they move
and create in and about themselves, but the things which are born of
them have a swifter motion, and pass rapidly from place to place.
The eye and the appropriate object come together, and give birth to
whiteness and the sensation of whiteness; the eye is filled with seeing,
and becomes not sight but a seeing eye, and the object is filled with
whiteness, and becomes not whiteness but white; and no other compound of
either with another would have produced the same effect. All sensation
is to be resolved into a similar combination of an agent and patient.
Of either, taken separately, no idea can be formed; and the agent may
become a patient, and the patient an agent. Hence there arises a general
reflection that nothing is, but all things become; no name can detain or
fix them. Are not these speculations charming, Theaetetus, and very good
for a person in your interesting situation? I am offering you specimens
of other men's wisdom, because I have no wisdom of my own, and I want
to deliver you of something; and presently we will see whether you
have brought forth wind or not. Tell me, then, what do you think of the
notion that "All things are becoming"?'
'When I hear your arguments, I am marvellously ready to assent.'
'But I ought not to conceal from you that there is a serious objection
which may be urged against this doctrine of Protagoras. For there are
states, such as madness and dreaming, in which perception is false; and
half our life is spent in dreaming; and who can say that at this instant
we are not dreaming? Even the fancies of madmen are real at the time.
But if knowledge is perception, how can we distinguish between the true
and the false in such cases? Having stated the objection, I will now
state the answer. Protagoras would deny the continuity of phenomena;
he would say that what is different is entirely different, and whether
active or passive has a different power. There are infinite agents and
patients in the world, and these produce in every combination of them a
different perception. Take myself as an instance:--Socrates may be ill
or he may be well,--and remember that Socrates, with all his accidents,
is spoken of. The wine which I drink when I am well is pleasant to
me, but the same wine is unpleasant to me when I am ill. And there
is nothing else from which I can receive the same impression, nor can
another receive the same impression from the wine. Neither can I and the
object of sense become separately what we become together. For the one
in becoming is relative to the other, but they have no other relation;
and the combination of them is absolute at each moment. (In modern
language, the act of sensation is really indivisible, though capable of
a mental analysis into subject and object.) My sensation alone is true,
and true to me only. And therefore, as Protagoras says, "To myself I
am the judge of what is and what is not." Thus the flux of Homer and
Heracleitus, the great Protagorean saying that "Man is the measure of
all things," the doctrine of Theaetetus that "Knowledge is perception,"
have all the same meaning. And this is thy new-born child, which by my
art I have brought to light; and you must not be angry if instead of
rearing your infant we expose him.'
'Theaetetus will not be angry,' says Theodorus; 'he is very
good-natured. But I should like to know, Socrates, whether you mean to
say that all this is untrue?'
'First reminding you that I am not the bag which contains the arguments,
but that I extract them from Theaetetus, shall I tell you what amazes me
in your friend Protagoras?'
'What may that be?'
'I like his doctrine that what appears is; but I wonder that he did
not begin his great work on Truth with a declaration that a pig, or a
dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a measure
of all things; then, while we were reverencing him as a god, he might
have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he was no
wiser than a tadpole. For if sensations are always true, and one man's
discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own judge,
and everything that he judges is right and true, then what need of
Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why should we
be less knowing than he is, or have to go to him, if every man is the
measure of all things? My own art of midwifery, and all dialectic, is
an enormous folly, if Protagoras' "Truth" be indeed truth, and the
philosopher is not merely amusing himself by giving oracles out of his
book.'
Theodorus thinks that Socrates is unjust to his master, Protagoras; but
he is too old and stiff to try a fall with him, and therefore refers him
to Theaetetus, who is already driven out of his former opinion by the
arguments of Socrates.
Socrates then takes up the defence of Protagoras, who is supposed to
reply in his own person--'Good people, you sit and declaim about the
gods, of whose existence or non-existence I have nothing to say, or you
discourse about man being reduced to the level of the brutes; but what
proof have you of your statements? And yet surely you and Theodorus had
better reflect whether probability is a safe guide. Theodorus would be
a bad geometrician if he had nothing better to offer.'...Theaetetus is
affected by the appeal to geometry, and Socrates is induced by him to
put the question in a new form. He proceeds as follows:--'Should we say
that we know what we see and hear,--e.g. the sound of words or the sight
of letters in a foreign tongue?'
'We should say that the figures of the letters, and the pitch of the
voice in uttering them, were known to us, but not the meaning of them.'
'Excellent; I want you to grow, and therefore I will leave that answer
and ask another question: Is not seeing perceiving?' 'Very true.' 'And
he who sees knows?' 'Yes.' 'And he who remembers, remembers that which
he sees and knows?' 'Very true.' 'But if he closes his eyes, does he not
remember?' 'He does.' 'Then he may remember and not see; and if seeing