and try.

SOCRATES: The trail soon comes to an end, for a whole profession is
against us.

THEAETETUS: How is that, and what profession do you mean?

SOCRATES: The profession of the great wise ones who are called orators
and lawyers; for these persuade men by their art and make them think
whatever they like, but they do not teach them. Do you imagine that
there are any teachers in the world so clever as to be able to convince
others of the truth about acts of robbery or violence, of which
they were not eye-witnesses, while a little water is flowing in the
clepsydra?

THEAETETUS: Certainly not, they can only persuade them.

SOCRATES: And would you not say that persuading them is making them have
an opinion?

THEAETETUS: To be sure.

SOCRATES: When, therefore, judges are justly persuaded about matters
which you can know only by seeing them, and not in any other way, and
when thus judging of them from report they attain a true opinion about
them, they judge without knowledge, and yet are rightly persuaded, if
they have judged well.

THEAETETUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And yet, O my friend, if true opinion in law courts and
knowledge are the same, the perfect judge could not have judged rightly
without knowledge; and therefore I must infer that they are not the
same.

THEAETETUS: That is a distinction, Socrates, which I have heard made
by some one else, but I had forgotten it. He said that true opinion,
combined with reason, was knowledge, but that the opinion which had
no reason was out of the sphere of knowledge; and that things of which
there is no rational account are not knowable--such was the singular
expression which he used--and that things which have a reason or
explanation are knowable.

SOCRATES: Excellent; but then, how did he distinguish between things
which are and are not 'knowable'? I wish that you would repeat to me
what he said, and then I shall know whether you and I have heard the
same tale.

THEAETETUS: I do not know whether I can recall it; but if another person
would tell me, I think that I could follow him.

SOCRATES: Let me give you, then, a dream in return for a
dream:--Methought that I too had a dream, and I heard in my dream that
the primeval letters or elements out of which you and I and all other
things are compounded, have no reason or explanation; you can only name
them, but no predicate can be either affirmed or denied of them, for in
the one case existence, in the other non