e disputer
may trip up his opponent as often as he likes, and make fun; but the
dialectician will be in earnest, and only correct his adversary when
necessary, telling him the errors into which he has fallen through his
own fault, or that of the company which he has previously kept. If
you do so, your adversary will lay the blame of his own confusion and
perplexity on himself, and not on you. He will follow and love you, and
will hate himself, and escape from himself into philosophy, in order
that he may become different from what he was. But the other mode of
arguing, which is practised by the many, will have just the opposite
effect upon him; and as he grows older, instead of turning philosopher,
he will come to hate philosophy. I would recommend you, therefore, as
I said before, not to encourage yourself in this polemical and
controversial temper, but to find out, in a friendly and congenial
spirit, what we really mean when we say that all things are in motion,
and that to every individual and state what appears, is. In this manner
you will consider whether knowledge and sensation are the same or
different, but you will not argue, as you were just now doing, from the
customary use of names and words, which the vulgar pervert in all sorts
of ways, causing infinite perplexity to one another. Such, Theodorus, is
the very slight help which I am able to offer to your old friend; had he
been living, he would have helped himself in a far more gloriose style.

THEODORUS: You are jesting, Socrates; indeed, your defence of him has
been most valorous.

SOCRATES: Thank you, friend; and I hope that you observed Protagoras
bidding us be serious, as the text, 'Man is the measure of all things,'
was a solemn one; and he reproached us with making a boy the medium of
discourse, and said that the boy's timidity was made to tell against his
argument; he also declared that we made a joke of him.

THEODORUS: How could I fail to observe all that, Socrates?

SOCRATES: Well, and shall we do as he says?

THEODORUS: By all means.

SOCRATES: But if his wishes are to be regarded, you and I must take up
the argument, and in all seriousness, and ask and answer one another,
for you see that the rest of us are nothing but boys. In no other way
can we escape the imputation, that in our fresh analysis of his thesis
we are making fun with boys.

THEODORUS: Well, but is not Theaetetus better able to follow a
philosophical enquiry than a great ma