112 PLATO
“What was it?”
“We were saying something to the effect that getting the most beautiful possible
look at these things would take another, longer way around, which would make them
become evident to someone who traveled that road, though it would be possible to pro-
vide illustrations approximating to the things that had already been said earlier, and you
folks declared that would be sufficient. And so the things said at that time, as far as pre-
cision goes, as it appeared to me, were deficient; as for whether they were satisfactory
to you people, that’s something you could say.”
“To me? In a measured way,” he said, “and it looked like they were to the others
as well.”
“My friend,” I said, “measuredness in such matters that stops short in any respect
whatever of what isturns out not to measure anything at all, because nothing incom-
plete is a measure of anything.
“But sometimes it seems to some people that they’re well enough off already and
don’t need to search any further.”
“A great many people feel that way a lot,” he said, “because of laziness.”
“That feeling, anyway,” I said, “is one there’s the least need for in a guardian of a
city and its laws.”
“Likely so,” he said.
“So, my comrade,” I said, “it’s necessary for such a person to go around by the
longer road, and he needs to work as a learner no less hard than at gymnastic train-
ing, or else, as we were just saying, he’ll never get to the end of the greatest and most
relevant study.”
“So these aren’t the greatest ones,” he said, “but there’s something still greater
than justice and the things we’ve gone over?”
“Not only is there something greater,” I said, “but even for those things them-
selves, it’s necessary not just to look at a sketch, the way we’ve been doing now, but not
to stop short of working them out to their utmost completion. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous
to make a concentrated effort in every way over other things of little worth, to have
them be as precise and pure as possible, while not considering the greatest things to be
worthy of the greatest precision?”
“Very much so,” he said, “and a creditable thought it is, but what you mean by the
greatest study, and what it’s about—do you imagine,” he said, “that anyone’s going to
let you off without asking you what it is?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Just you ask. For all that, you’ve heard it no few times, but
now you’re either not thinking of it or else, by latching onto me, you think you’ll cause
me trouble. But I imagine it’s more the latter, since you’ve often heard that the greatest
learnable thing is the look of the good, which just things and everything else need in
addition in order to become useful and beneficial. So now you know pretty well that I’m
going to say that, and in addition to it that we don’t know it well enough. But if we don’t
know it, and we do know everything else as much as possible without it, you can be sure
that nothing is any benefit to us, just as there would be none if we possessed something
without the good. Or do you imagine it’s any use to acquire any possession that’s not
good? Or to be intelligent about everything else without the good, and have no intelli-
gence where anything beautiful and good is concerned?”
“By Zeus, I don’t!” he said.
“And surely you know this too, that to most people, the good seems to be plea-
sure, and to the more sophisticated ones, intelligence.”
“How could I not?”bcde505a
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