ssion of this in some form of sense. All of them are akin
to speech, and therefore, like speech, admit of true and false. And
we have discovered false opinion, which is an encouraging sign of our
probable success in the rest of the enquiry.

Then now let us return to our old division of likeness-making and
phantastic. When we were going to place the Sophist in one of them,
a doubt arose whether there could be such a thing as an appearance,
because there was no such thing as falsehood. At length falsehood
has been discovered by us to exist, and we have acknowledged that the
Sophist is to be found in the class of imitators. All art was divided
originally by us into two branches--productive and acquisitive. And
now we may divide both on a different principle into the creations or
imitations which are of human, and those which are of divine, origin.
For we must admit that the world and ourselves and the animals did not
come into existence by chance, or the spontaneous working of nature, but
by divine reason and knowledge. And there are not only divine creations
but divine imitations, such as apparitions and shadows and reflections,
which are equally the work of a divine mind. And there are human
creations and human imitations too,--there is the actual house and the
drawing of it. Nor must we forget that image-making may be an imitation
of realities or an imitation of appearances, which last has been
called by us phantastic. And this phantastic may be again divided into
imitation by the help of instruments and impersonations. And the
latter may be either dissembling or unconscious, either with or without
knowledge. A man cannot imitate you, Theaetetus, without knowing you,
but he can imitate the form of justice or virtue if he have a sentiment
or opinion about them. Not being well provided with names, the former
I will venture to call the imitation of science, and the latter the
imitation of opinion.

The latter is our present concern, for the Sophist has no claims to
science or knowledge. Now the imitator, who has only opinion, may be
either the simple imitator, who thinks that he knows, or the dissembler,
who is conscious that he does not know, but disguises his ignorance. And
the last may be either a maker of long speeches, or of shorter speeches
which compel the person conversing to contradict himself. The maker of
longer speeches is the popular orator; the maker of the shorter is
the Sophist, whose art may be traced as