with imitators indeed, but not among those who have knowledge.

THEAETETUS: Very true.

STRANGER: Let us, then, examine our imitator of appearance, and see
whether he is sound, like a piece of iron, or whether there is still
some crack in him.

THEAETETUS: Let us examine him.

STRANGER: Indeed there is a very considerable crack; for if you look,
you find that one of the two classes of imitators is a simple creature,
who thinks that he knows that which he only fancies; the other sort has
knocked about among arguments, until he suspects and fears that he is
ignorant of that which to the many he pretends to know.

THEAETETUS: There are certainly the two kinds which you describe.

STRANGER: Shall we regard one as the simple imitator--the other as the
dissembling or ironical imitator?

THEAETETUS: Very good.

STRANGER: And shall we further speak of this latter class as having one
or two divisions?

THEAETETUS: Answer yourself.

STRANGER: Upon consideration, then, there appear to me to be two; there
is the dissembler, who harangues a multitude in public in a long speech,
and the dissembler, who in private and in short speeches compels the
person who is conversing with him to contradict himself.

THEAETETUS: What you say is most true.

STRANGER: And who is the maker of the longer speeches? Is he the
statesman or the popular orator?

THEAETETUS: The latter.

STRANGER: And what shall we call the other? Is he the philosopher or the
Sophist?

THEAETETUS: The philosopher he cannot be, for upon our view he is
ignorant; but since he is an imitator of the wise he will have a name
which is formed by an adaptation of the word sophos. What shall we name
him? I am pretty sure that I cannot be mistaken in terming him the true
and very Sophist.

STRANGER: Shall we bind up his name as we did before, making a chain
from one end of his genealogy to the other?

THEAETETUS: By all means.

STRANGER: He, then, who traces the pedigree of his art as follows--who,
belonging to the conscious or dissembling section of the art of causing
self-contradiction, is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from
the class of phantastic which is a branch of image-making into that
further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human,
and not divine--any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood
and lineage will say the very truth.

THEAETETUS: Undoubtedly.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of