Theaetetus

​SOCRATES: This, then, as it seems, we have at last with difficulty brought to birth, whatever it actually turns out to be. But after the birth, we must truly run around it in a circle with our argument, examining it, lest it escape our notice that what has been generated is not worth rearing, but is a wind-egg and a falsehood. Or do you think your offspring must be reared in any case and not exposed? And will you bear to see it being examined and refuted, and not be extremely angry if someone takes it away from you, as if from a first-time mother? THEODORUS: Theaetetus will bear it, Socrates; for he is by no means ill-tempered. But, by the gods, tell me in what way is this not so? SOCRATES: You are absolutely a lover of discourse and a good man, Theodorus, because you think I am a bag of arguments and can easily pull one out and say that this is not so. But you do not realize what is happening, that none of the arguments comes out of me, but always from the one who is conversing with me; I myself know nothing more except a tiny bit, just enough to take an argument from another wise man and accept it reasonably. And now I will try to get this from him, not say anything myself. THEODORUS: You speak better, Socrates; so do so. SOCRATES: Do you know then, Theodorus, what I wonder at in your companion Protagoras? THEODORUS: What is that? SOCRATES: The other things he has said quite to my liking, as that what seems to each person is also so. But I wondered at the beginning of his book, because he did not say at the beginning of his Truth that a pig is the measure of all things, or a dog-faced baboon, or some other even more absurd creature that possesses perception, so that he might have begun to speak to us in a grand and utterly contemptuous manner, showing that while we wonder at him as if he were a god for his wisdom, he happened to be, in respect of intelligence, no better than a tadpole, let alone any other human being. Or how else should we say, Theodorus? For if indeed what each person judges through perception is to be true for him, and neither is anyone else a better judge of another’s experience, nor is another more authorized to examine another’s opinion, whether it is right or false, but—as has been said many times—each person alone will judge his own things, and all these are right and true, why on earth, my friend, is Protagoras wise, so that he is even thought worthy to be a teacher of others, justly and with great fees, while we are more ignorant and had to go to school to him, when each of us is himself the measure of his own wisdom? How can we avoid saying that Protagoras says this to win the crowd? And I keep silent about my own case and that of my art of midwifery, as to how much ridicule we incur, and I think also the whole business of dialectic. For to examine and attempt to refute one another’s appearances and opinions, which are right for each, is it not a long and vast piece of nonsense, if the Truth of Protagoras is true, and did not speak playing with us from the sanctuary of his book?