Page - 303 - in The Complete Plato

pass? MENO: Exactly. SOCRATES: And some of the effluences fit into the passages, and some of them are too small or too large? MENO: True. SOCRATES: And there is such a thing as sight? MENO: Yes. SOCRATES: And now, as Pindar says, ‘read my meaning:’—colour is an effluence of form, commensurate with sight, and palpable to sense. MENO: That, Socrates, appears to me to be an admirable answer. SOCRATES: Why, yes, because it happens to be one which you have been in the habit of hearing: and your wit will have discovered, I suspect, that you may explain in the same way the nature of sound and smell, and of many other similar phenomena. MENO: Quite true. SOCRATES: The answer, Meno, was in the orthodox solemn vein, and therefore was more acceptable to you than the other answer about figure. MENO: Yes. SOCRATES: And yet, O son of Alexidemus, I cannot help thinking that the other was the better; and I am sure that you would be of the same opinion, if you would only stay and be initiated, and were not compelled, as you said yesterday, to go away before the mysteries. MENO: But I will stay, Socrates, if you will give me many such answers. SOCRATES: Well then, for my own sake as well as for yours, I will do my very best; but I am afraid that I shall not be able to give you very many as good: and now, in your turn, you are to fulfil your promise, and tell me what virtue is in the universal; and do not make a singular into a plural, as the facetious say of those who break a thing, but deliver virtue to me whole and sound, and not broken into a number of pieces: I have given you the pattern. MENO: Well then, Socrates, virtue, as I take it, is when he, who desires the honourable, is able to provide it for himself; so the poet says, and I say too— ‘Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.’ SOCRATES: And does he who desires the honourable also desire the good? 303