speak of it by the spirit of
truth."

A. "Why?"

S. "Because, by what we agreed before, it will not be there to
speak of, my wondrous friend. For it appeared to us, if I recollect
right, that facts can only exist as they are, and not as they are
not, and that therefore the spirit of truth had nothing to do with
any facts but those which are."

"But," I interrupted, "O dear Socrates, I fear much that if the
spirit of truth be such as this, it must be beyond the reach of
man."

S. "Why then?"

P. "Because the immortal gods only can see things as they really
are, having alone made all things, and ruling them all according to
the laws of each. They therefore, I much fear, will be alone able
to behold them, how they are really in their inner nature and
properties, and not merely from the outside, and by guess, as we do.
How then can we obtain such a spirit ourselves?"

S. "Dear boy, you seem to wish that I should, as usual, put you off
with a myth, when you begin to ask me about those who know far more
about me than I do about them. Nevertheless, shall I tell you a
myth?"

P. "If you have nothing better."

S. "They say, then, that Prometheus, when he grew to man's estate,
found mankind, though they were like him in form, utterly brutish
and ignorant, so that, as AEschylus says:

Seeing they saw in vain,
Hearing they heard not; but were like the shapes
Of dreams, and long time did confuse all things
At random:

being, as I suppose, led, like the animals, only by their private
judgments of things as they seemed to each man, and enslaved to that
subjective truth, which we found to be utterly careless and ignorant
of facts as they are. But Prometheus, taking pity on them,
determined in his mind to free them from that slavery and to teach
them to rise above the beasts, by seeing things as they are. He
therefore made them acquainted with the secrets of nature, and
taught them to build houses, to work in wood and metals, to observe
the courses of the stars, and all other such arts and sciences,
which if any man attempts to follow according to his private
opinion, and not according to the rules of that art, which are
independent of him and of his opinions, being discovered from the
unchangeable laws of things as they are, he will fail. But yet, as
the myth relates, they became only a more cunning sort of animals;
not being wholly freed from their original slavery to a certain
subjective opini