out their condensed notes, as they call them; they put their ears
close alongside of the strings like persons catching a sound from their
neighbour's wall--one set of them declaring that they distinguish an
intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be
the unit of measurement; the others insisting that the two sounds have
passed into the same--either party setting their ears before their
understanding.

You mean, I said, those gentlemen who tease and torture the strings and
rack them on the pegs of the instrument: I might carry on the metaphor
and speak after their manner of the blows which the plectrum gives,
and make accusations against the strings, both of backwardness and
forwardness to sound; but this would be tedious, and therefore I will
only say that these are not the men, and that I am referring to the
Pythagoreans, of whom I was just now proposing to enquire about harmony.
For they too are in error, like the astronomers; they investigate the
numbers of the harmonies which are heard, but they never attain to
problems--that is to say, they never reach the natural harmonies of
number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and others not.

That, he said, is a thing of more than mortal knowledge.

A thing, I replied, which I would rather call useful; that is, if sought
after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in any other
spirit, useless.

Very true, he said.

Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and
connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual
affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them
have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.

I suspect so; but you are speaking, Socrates, of a vast work.

What do you mean? I said; the prelude or what? Do you not know that all
this is but the prelude to the actual strain which we have to learn? For
you surely would not regard the skilled mathematician as a dialectician?

Assuredly not, he said; I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was
capable of reasoning.

But do you imagine that men who are unable to give and take a reason
will have the knowledge which we require of them?

Neither can this be supposed.

And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of
dialectic. This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but which
the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for sight,
a