Part 15

THEAETETUS: I certainly admit what I at first disputed--that there are two kinds of vice in the soul, and that we ought to consider cowardice, intemperance, and injustice to be alike forms of disease in the soul, and ignorance, of which there are all sorts of varieties, to be deformity.

STRANGER: And in the case of the body are there not two arts which have to do with the two bodily states?

THEAETETUS: What are they?

STRANGER: There is gymnastic, which has to do with deformity, and medicine, which has to do with disease.

THEAETETUS: True.

STRANGER: And where there is insolence and injustice and cowardice, is not chastisement the art which is most required?

THEAETETUS: That certainly appears to be the opinion of mankind.

STRANGER: Again, of the various kinds of ignorance, may not instruction be rightly said to be the remedy?

THEAETETUS: True.

STRANGER: And of the art of instruction, shall we say that there is one or many kinds? At any rate there are two principal ones. Think.

THEAETETUS: I will.

STRANGER: I believe that I can see how we shall soonest arrive at the answer to this question.

THEAETETUS: How?

STRANGER: If we can discover a line which divides ignorance into two halves. For a division of ignorance into two parts will certainly imply that the art of instruction is also twofold, answering to the two divisions of ignorance.

THEAETETUS: Well, and do you see what you are looking for?

STRANGER: I do seem to myself to see one very large and bad sort of ignorance which is quite separate, and may be weighed in the scale against all other sorts of ignorance put together.

THEAETETUS: What is it?

STRANGER: When a person supposes that he knows, and does not know; this appears to be the great source of all the errors of the intellect.

THEAETETUS: True.

STRANGER: And this, if I am not mistaken, is the kind of ignorance which specially earns the title of stupidity.

THEAETETUS: True.

STRANGER: What name, then, shall be given to the sort of instruction which gets rid of this?

THEAETETUS: The instruction which you mean, Stranger, is, I should imagine, not the teaching of handicraft arts, but what, thanks to us, has been termed education in this part the world.

STRANGER: Yes, Theaetetus, and by nearly all Hellenes. But we have still to consider whether education admits of any further division.

THEAETETUS: We have.

STRANGER: I think that there is a point at which such a division is possible.

THEAETETUS: Where?

STRANGER: Of education, one method appears to be rougher, and another smoother.