Page - 640 - in The Complete Plato

time? SOCRATES: You are quite right, and perhaps there will be no harm in retracing our steps and beginning again. Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly. THEAETETUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Well, and what is the difficulty? Do we not speak of false opinion, and say that one man holds a false and another a true opinion, as though there were some natural distinction between them? THEAETETUS: We certainly say so. SOCRATES: All things and everything are either known or not known. I leave out of view the intermediate conceptions of learning and forgetting, because they have nothing to do with our present question. THEAETETUS: There can be no doubt, Socrates, if you exclude these, that there is no other alternative but knowing or not knowing a thing. SOCRATES: That point being now determined, must we not say that he who has an opinion, must have an opinion about something which he knows or does not know? THEAETETUS: He must. SOCRATES: He who knows, cannot but know; and he who does not know, cannot know? THEAETETUS: Of course. SOCRATES: What shall we say then? When a man has a false opinion does he think that which he knows to be some other thing which he knows, and knowing both, is he at the same time ignorant of both? THEAETETUS: That, Socrates, is impossible. SOCRATES: But perhaps he thinks of something which he does not know as some other thing which he does not know; for example, he knows neither Theaetetus nor Socrates, and yet he fancies that Theaetetus is Socrates, or Socrates Theaetetus? THEAETETUS: How can he? SOCRATES: But surely he cannot suppose what he knows to be what he does not know, or what he does not know to be what he knows? THEAETETUS: That would be monstrous. SOCRATES: Where, then, is false opinion? For if all things are either 640