Page - 830 - in The Complete Plato

carpentering, and in other crafts, and all such arts as furnish impediments to thieving and acts of violence, and are concerned with making the lids of boxes and the fixing of doors, being divisions of the art of joining; and we also cut off the manufacture of arms, which is a section of the great and manifold art of making defences; and we originally began by parting off the whole of the magic art which is concerned with antidotes, and have left, as would appear, the very art of which we were in search, the art of protection against winter cold, which fabricates woollen defences, and has the name of weaving. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true. STRANGER: Yes, my boy, but that is not all; for the first process to which the material is subjected is the opposite of weaving. YOUNG SOCRATES: How so? STRANGER: Weaving is a sort of uniting? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes. STRANGER: But the first process is a separation of the clotted and matted fibres? YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean? STRANGER: I mean the work of the carder’s art; for we cannot say that carding is weaving, or that the carder is a weaver. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not. STRANGER: Again, if a person were to say that the art of making the warp and the woof was the art of weaving, he would say what was paradoxical and false. YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure. STRANGER: Shall we say that the whole art of the fuller or of the mender has nothing to do with the care and treatment of clothes, or are we to regard all these as arts of weaving? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not. STRANGER: And yet surely all these arts will maintain that they are concerned with the treatment and production of clothes; they will dispute the exclusive prerogative of weaving, and though assigning a larger sphere to that, will still reserve a considerable field for themselves. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true. STRANGER: Besides these, there are the arts which make tools and 830