who
maintains that false opinion is heterodoxy is talking nonsense; for
neither in this, any more than in the previous way, can false opinion
exist in us.

THEAETETUS: No.

SOCRATES: But if, Theaetetus, this is not admitted, we shall be driven
into many absurdities.

THEAETETUS: What are they?

SOCRATES: I will not tell you until I have endeavoured to consider the
matter from every point of view. For I should be ashamed of us if we
were driven in our perplexity to admit the absurd consequences of which
I speak. But if we find the solution, and get away from them, we may
regard them only as the difficulties of others, and the ridicule will
not attach to us. On the other hand, if we utterly fail, I suppose that
we must be humble, and allow the argument to trample us under foot,
as the sea-sick passenger is trampled upon by the sailor, and to do
anything to us. Listen, then, while I tell you how I hope to find a way
out of our difficulty.

THEAETETUS: Let me hear.

SOCRATES: I think that we were wrong in denying that a man could think
what he knew to be what he did not know; and that there is a way in
which such a deception is possible.

THEAETETUS: You mean to say, as I suspected at the time, that I may know
Socrates, and at a distance see some one who is unknown to me, and whom
I mistake for him--then the deception will occur?

SOCRATES: But has not that position been relinquished by us, because
involving the absurdity that we should know and not know the things
which we know?

THEAETETUS: True.

SOCRATES: Let us make the assertion in another form, which may or may
not have a favourable issue; but as we are in a great strait, every
argument should be turned over and tested. Tell me, then, whether I am
right in saying that you may learn a thing which at one time you did not
know?

THEAETETUS: Certainly you may.

SOCRATES: And another and another?

THEAETETUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind
of man a block of wax, which is of different sizes in different men;
harder, moister, and having more or less of purity in one than another,
and in some of an intermediate quality.

THEAETETUS: I see.

SOCRATES: Let us say that this tablet is a gift of Memory, the mother
of the Muses; and that when we wish to remember anything which we have
seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the
perceptions and thoughts, and in that material receive the i