[476c]
“They would, indeed.” “He, then, who
believes in beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is
able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of
it—do you think that his life is a dream or a waking1? Just consider. Is not the dream
state, whether the man is asleep or awake, just this: the mistaking of
resemblance for identity?” “I should certainly call that
dreaming,” he said. “Well, then, take the opposite case:
the man whose thought recognizes a beauty in itself,
1 The dream state is a very different thing for Plato from what it is for some modern sentimental Platonists. Cf. 520 C-D, Phaedrus 277 D, Timaeus 52 B, and 71 E, if rightly interpreted.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.