ture can only tend to
disproportion?

Undoubtedly.

And do you consider truth to be akin to proportion or to disproportion?

To proportion.

Then, besides other qualities, we must try to find a naturally
well-proportioned and gracious mind, which will move spontaneously
towards the true being of everything.

Certainly.

Well, and do not all these qualities, which we have been enumerating, go
together, and are they not, in a manner, necessary to a soul, which is
to have a full and perfect participation of being?

They are absolutely necessary, he replied.

And must not that be a blameless study which he only can pursue who has
the gift of a good memory, and is quick to learn,--noble, gracious, the
friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance, who are his kindred?

The god of jealousy himself, he said, could find no fault with such a
study.

And to men like him, I said, when perfected by years and education, and
to these only you will entrust the State.

Here Adeimantus interposed and said: To these statements, Socrates, no
one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling
passes over the minds of your hearers: They fancy that they are led
astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of
skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and
at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty
overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned upside down.
And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up by their
more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they too find
themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in this new
game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time they are in
the right. The observation is suggested to me by what is now occurring.
For any one of us might say, that although in words he is not able
to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact that the
votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only in youth
as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years, most
of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues, and that those
who may be considered the best of them are made useless to the world by
the very study which you extol.

Well, and do you think that those who say so are wrong?

I cannot tell, he replied; but I should like to know what is your
opinion.

Hear my answer; I am of opinion that the