116 PLATO
darkness, something that comes into and passes out of being, it deals in seeming and grows
dim, changing its opinions up and down, and is like something that has no intellect.”
“It does seem like that.”
“Then say that what endows the things known with truth, and gives that which
knows them its power, is the look of the good. Since it’s the cause of knowledge and truth,
think of it as something known, but though both of these, knowing and truth, are so beau-
tiful, by regarding it as something else, still more beautiful than they are, you’ll regard it
rightly. And as far as knowledge and truth are concerned, just as it’s right over there to
consider light and sight sunlike, but isn’t right to consider them to be the sun, so too here
it’s right to consider both of these as like the good, but not right to regard either of them as
being the good; the condition of the good requires that it be held in still greater honor.”
“You’re talking about a beauty hard to conceive,” he said, “if it endows things
with knowledge and truth but is itself beyond these in beauty, because it’s sure not plea-
sure you mean.”
“Watch your mouth,” I said; “but look into the image of it still more closely.”
“In what way?”
“I imagine you’d claim that the sun not only endows the visible things with their
power of being seen, but also with their coming into being, their growth, and their nur-
ture, though it’s not itself coming-into-being.”
“How could it be?”
“Then claim as well that the things that are known not only get their being-known
furnished by the good, but they’re also endowed by that source with their very being
and their being what they are, even though the good is not being, but something over
and above being, beyond it in seniority and surpassing it in power.”
And Glaucon, in a very comical manner, said “By Apollo, that’s a stupendous
stretcher.”
“You’re to blame for it,” I said, “for forcing me to tell the way things seem to me
about it.”
“And don’t by any means stop,” he said, “not if there are any other things for you
to go over in the likeness to the sun, in case you’re leaving something out anywhere.”
“That’s for sure,” I said; “I’m leaving out scads of things.”
“Well don’t skip over any little bit,” he said.
“I suspect I’ll skip over a lot,” I said, “but be that as it may, as far as it’s possible
at present, I won’t willingly leave anything out.”
“See that you don’t,” he said.
“Well then, as we’re saying,” I said, “think of them as being a pair, one ruling as
king over the intelligible race and realm, and the other, for its part, over the visible—
note that I’m not saying ‘over the heavens,’ so I won’t seem to you to be playing verbal
tricks with the name. But do you grasp these two forms, visible, intelligible?”
“I’ve got them.”
“Then take them as being like a line divided into two unequal segments, one for
the visible class and the other for the intelligible, and cut each segment again in the
same ratio, and you’ll get the parts to one another in their relation of clarity and obscu-
rity; in the visible section, one segment [A] will be for images, and by images I mean
first of all shadows, then semblances formed in water and on all dense, smooth, bright
surfaces, and everything of that sort, if you get the idea.”
“I get it.”
“Then in the other part [B], put what this one is likened to, the animals around us,
and every plant, and the whole class of artificial things.”e509a
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