ed Socrates to raise a
laugh against himself. 'But I cannot be fairly charged,' he will say,
'with an answer which I should not have given; for I never maintained
that the memory of a feeling is the same as a feeling, or denied that a
man might know and not know the same thing at the same time. Or, if you
will have extreme precision, I say that man in different relations is
many or rather infinite in number. And I challenge you, either to show
that his perceptions are not individual, or that if they are, what
appears to him is not what is. As to your pigs and baboons, you are
yourself a pig, and you make my writings a sport of other swine. But
I still affirm that man is the measure of all things, although I admit
that one man may be a thousand times better than another, in proportion
as he has better impressions. Neither do I deny the existence of wisdom
or of the wise man. But I maintain that wisdom is a practical remedial
power of turning evil into good, the bitterness of disease into the
sweetness of health, and does not consist in any greater truth or
superior knowledge. For the impressions of the sick are as true as the
impressions of the healthy; and the sick are as wise as the healthy. Nor
can any man be cured of a false opinion, for there is no such thing;
but he may be cured of the evil habit which generates in him an evil
opinion. This is effected in the body by the drugs of the physician, and
in the soul by the words of the Sophist; and the new state or opinion
is not truer, but only better than the old. And philosophers are not
tadpoles, but physicians and husbandmen, who till the soil and infuse
health into animals and plants, and make the good take the place of the
evil, both in individuals and states. Wise and good rhetoricians make
the good to appear just in states (for that is just which appears just
to a state), and in return, they deserve to be well paid. And you,
Socrates, whether you please or not, must continue to be a measure.
This is my defence, and I must request you to meet me fairly. We are
professing to reason, and not merely to dispute; and there is a great
difference between reasoning and disputation. For the disputer is always
seeking to trip up his opponent; and this is a mode of argument which
disgusts men with philosophy as they grow older. But the reasoner is
trying to understand him and to point out his errors to him, whether
arising from his own or from his companion's fault; he does n