Dialogues

of the idea of knowledge and specific kinds of knowledge⁠—a confusion which has been already noticed in the “Lysis,” “Laches,” “Meno,” and other dialogues. In the infancy of logic, a form of thought has to be invented before the content can be filled up. We cannot define knowledge until the nature of definition has been ascertained. Having succeeded in making his meaning plain, Socrates proceeds to analyze (1) the first definition which Theaetetus proposes: “Knowledge is sensible perception.” This is speedily identified with the Protagorean saying, “Man is the measure of all things”; and of this again the foundation is discovered in the perpetual flux of Heracleitus. The relativeness of sensation is then developed at length, and for a moment the definition appears to be accepted. But soon the Protagorean thesis is pronounced to be suicidal; for the adversaries of Protagoras are as good a measure as he is, and they deny his doctrine. He is then supposed to reply that the perception may be true at any given instant. But the reply is in the end shown to be inconsistent with the Heraclitean foundation, on which the doctrine has been affirmed to rest. For if the Heraclitean flux is extended to every sort of change in every instant of time, how can any thought or word be detained even for an instant? Sensible perception, like everything else, is tumbling to pieces. Nor can Protagoras himself maintain that one man is as good as another in his knowledge of the future; and “the expedient,” if not “the just and true,” belongs to the sphere of the future.

And so we must ask again, What is knowledge? The comparison of sensations with one another implies a principle which is above sensation, and which resides in the mind itself. We are thus led to look for knowledge in a higher sphere, and accordingly Theaetetus, when again interrogated, replies (2) that “knowledge is true opinion.” But how is false opinion possible? The Megarian or Eristic spirit within us revives the question, which has been already asked and indirectly answered in the “Meno”: “How can a man be ignorant of that which he knows?” No answer is given to this not unanswerable question. The comparison of the mind to a block of wax, or to a decoy of birds, is found wanting.

But are we not inverting the natural order in looking for opinion before we have found knowledge? And knowledge is not true opinion; for the Athenian dicasts have true opinion but not knowledge. What then is knowledge? We answer (3), “True opinion, with definition or explanation.” But all the different ways in which this statement may be understood are set aside, like the definitions of courage in the “Laches,” or of friendship in the “Lysis,” or of temperance in the “Charmides.” At length we arrive at the conclusion, in which nothing is concluded.

There are two special difficulties which beset the student of the “Theaetetus”: (1) he is uncertain how far he can trust Plato’s account of the theory of Protagoras; and he is also uncertain (2) how far, and in what parts of the dialogue, Plato is expressing his own opinion. The dramatic character of the work renders the answer to both these questions difficult.

1. In reply to the first, we have only probabilities to offer. Three main points have to be decided: (a) Would Protagoras have identified his own thesis, “Man is the measure of all things,” with the other, “All knowledge is sensible perception”? (b) Would he have based the relativity of knowledge on the Heraclitean flux? (c) Would he have asserted the absoluteness of sensation at each instant? Of the work of Protagoras on “Truth” we know nothing, with the exception of the two famous fragments, which are cited in this dialogue, “Man is the measure of all things,” and, “Whether there are gods or not, I cannot tell.” Nor have we any other trustworthy evidence of the tenets of Protagoras, or of the sense in which his words are used. For later writers, including Aristotle in his Metaphysics, have mixed up the “Protagoras” of Plato, as they have the Socrates of Plato, with the real person.

Returning then to the “Theaetetus,” as the only possible source from which an answer to these questions can be obtained, we may remark, that Plato had “The Truth” of Protagoras before him, and frequently refers to the book. He seems to say expressly, that in this work the doctrine of the Heraclitean flux was not to be found; “he told the real truth” (not in the book, which is so entitled, but) “privately to his disciples,”⁠—words which imply that the connection between the doctrines of Protagoras and Heracleitus was not generally recognized in Greece, but was really discovered or invented by Plato. On the other hand, the doctrine that “Man is the measure of all things,” is expressly identified by Socrates with the other statement, that “What appears to each man is to him”; and a reference is made to the books in which the statement occurs;⁠—this Theaetetus, who has “often read the books,” is supposed to acknowledge (152 A: so “Cratylus” 385 E). And Protagoras, in the speech attributed to him, never says that he has been misunderstood: at 166 C he rather seems to imply that the absoluteness of sensation at each instant was to be found in his words (compare 158 E). He is only indignant at the reductio ad absurdum devised by Socrates for his homo mensura, which Theodorus also considers to be “really too bad.”

The question may be raised, how far Plato in the “Theaetetus” could have misrepresented Protagoras without violating the laws of dramatic probability. Could he have pretended to cite from a well-known writing what was not to be found there? But such a shadowy enquiry is not worth pursuing further. We need only remember that in the criticism which follows of the thesis of Protagoras, we are criticizing the Protagoras of Plato, and