140a
140e
Soc.
Well, if you will attend to me, two together 1 will be searching, and so mayhap we shall find what we seek.Alc.
Nay, but I am attending, Socrates, to the best of my power.Soc.
Then we have admitted that while every ophthalmia is a disease, every disease, on the other hand, is not ophthalmia?Alc.
We have.Soc.
And our admission seems to me quite right. For everyone in a fever is sick, but yet not everyone who is sick has a fever or the gout 140b or ophthalmia, I take it; though everything of the sort is a disease, but differs—to quote those whom we call doctors— in its manifestation. 2 For they are not all alike, nor of like effect, but each works according to its own faculty, and yet all are diseases. In the same way, we conceive of some men as artisans, do we not?Alc.
Certainly.Soc.
That is, cobblers and carpenters and statuaries and a host of others, whom we need not mention in particular; but any way, they have 140c their several departments of craft, and all of them are craftsmen; yet they are not all carpenters or cobblers or statuaries, though these taken together are craftsmen.Alc.
No, indeed.Soc.
In the same way, then, have men divided unwisdom also among them, and those who have the largest share of it we call mad, and those who have a little less, dolts and idiots; though people who prefer to use the mildest language term them sometimes romantic, 3 sometimes simpleminded, 4 or again 140d innocent, inexperienced, or obtuse; and many another name will you find if you look for more. But all these things are unwisdom, though they differ, as we observed that one art or one disease differs from another. Or how does it strike you?Alc.
That is my view.Soc.
Then let us turn at this point and retrace our steps. For we said, you know, at the beginning that we must consider who the unwise can be, and who the wise: for we had admitted that there are such persons, had we not?Alc.
Yes, we have admitted it.Soc.
Then you conceive those to be wise who know what one ought to do and say?Alc.
I do.Soc.
And which are the unwise? Those who know neither of these things?Alc.
The same.Soc.
And those who know neither of these things will say and do unawares what one ought not?Alc.
Apparently.Alcibiades 2. Plato. Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1927.
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