An object may be often seen at a distance not very clearly,
and the seer may want to determine what it is which he sees.

PROTARCHUS: Very likely.

SOCRATES: Soon he begins to interrogate himself.

PROTARCHUS: In what manner?

SOCRATES: He asks himself--'What is that which appears to be standing by
the rock under the tree?' This is the question which he may be supposed
to put to himself when he sees such an appearance.

PROTARCHUS: True.

SOCRATES: To which he may guess the right answer, saying as if in a
whisper to himself--'It is a man.'

PROTARCHUS: Very good.

SOCRATES: Or again, he may be misled, and then he will say--'No, it is a
figure made by the shepherds.'

PROTARCHUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And if he has a companion, he repeats his thought to him in
articulate sounds, and what was before an opinion, has now become a
proposition.

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: But if he be walking alone when these thoughts occur to him,
he may not unfrequently keep them in his mind for a considerable time.

PROTARCHUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: Well, now, I wonder whether you would agree in my explanation
of this phenomenon.

PROTARCHUS: What is your explanation?

SOCRATES: I think that the soul at such times is like a book.

PROTARCHUS: How so?

SOCRATES: Memory and perception meet, and they and their attendant
feelings seem to almost to write down words in the soul, and when the
inscribing feeling writes truly, then true opinion and true propositions
which are the expressions of opinion come into our souls--but when the
scribe within us writes falsely, the result is false.

PROTARCHUS: I quite assent and agree to your statement.

SOCRATES: I must bespeak your favour also for another artist, who is
busy at the same time in the chambers of the soul.

PROTARCHUS: Who is he?

SOCRATES: The painter, who, after the scribe has done his work, draws
images in the soul of the things which he has described.

PROTARCHUS: But when and how does he do this?

SOCRATES: When a man, besides receiving from sight or some other sense
certain opinions or statements, sees in his mind the images of the
subjects of them;--is not this a very common mental phenomenon?

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And the images answering to true opinions and words are true,
and to false opinions and words false; are they not?

PROTARCHUS: They are.

SOCRATES: If we are right so far, there arises a further question.

PROTARCHUS: Wh