And are those who acquire those who have or have not a thing?

Those who have not.

And have you not admitted that those who do not know are of the number
of those who have not?

He nodded assent.

Then those who learn are of the class of those who acquire, and not of
those who have?

He agreed.

Then, Cleinias, he said, those who do not know learn, and not those who
know.

Euthydemus was proceeding to give the youth a third fall; but I knew
that he was in deep water, and therefore, as I wanted to give him a
respite lest he should be disheartened, I said to him consolingly: You
must not be surprised, Cleinias, at the singularity of their mode of
speech: this I say because you may not understand what the two strangers
are doing with you; they are only initiating you after the manner of
the Corybantes in the mysteries; and this answers to the enthronement,
which, if you have ever been initiated, is, as you will know,
accompanied by dancing and sport; and now they are just prancing and
dancing about you, and will next proceed to initiate you; imagine then
that you have gone through the first part of the sophistical ritual,
which, as Prodicus says, begins with initiation into the correct use
of terms. The two foreign gentlemen, perceiving that you did not know,
wanted to explain to you that the word 'to learn' has two meanings, and
is used, first, in the sense of acquiring knowledge of some matter of
which you previously have no knowledge, and also, when you have the
knowledge, in the sense of reviewing this matter, whether something done
or spoken by the light of this newly-acquired knowledge; the latter
is generally called 'knowing' rather than 'learning,' but the word
'learning' is also used; and you did not see, as they explained to you,
that the term is employed of two opposite sorts of men, of those who
know, and of those who do not know. There was a similar trick in the
second question, when they asked you whether men learn what they know
or what they do not know. These parts of learning are not serious, and
therefore I say that the gentlemen are not serious, but are only playing
with you. For if a man had all that sort of knowledge that ever was, he
would not be at all the wiser; he would only be able to play with men,
tripping them up and oversetting them with distinctions of words. He
would be like a person who pulls away a stool from some one when he is
about to sit down, and then laughs and makes merry