[534c]
and who cannot, as it were in battle,
running the gauntlet1 of all tests,
and striving to examine everything by essential reality and not by opinion, hold
on his way through all this without tripping2 in his
reasoning—the man who lacks this power, you will say, does not really
know the good itself or any particular good; but if he apprehends any
adumbration3 of it, his contact with
it is by opinion, not by knowledge; and dreaming and dozing through his present
life, before he awakens here
1 It imports little whether the objections are in his own mind or made by others. Thought is a discussion of the soul with itself (Cf. Theaet. 189 E, Phileb. 38 E, Soph. 263 E), and when the interlocutor refuses to proceed Socrates sometimes continues the argument himself by supplying both question and answer, e.g.Gorg. 506 C ff. Cf. further Phaedrus 278 C, Parman. 136 D-E, Unity of Plato's Thought, p. 17.
2 Cf. Theaet. 160 D, Phileb. 45 A. The practical outcome=Laws 966 A-B, Phaedr. 278 C, Soph. 259 B-C. Cf. Mill, Diss. and Disc. iv. p. 283: “There is no knowledge and no assurance of right belief but with him who can both confute the opposite opinion and successfully defend his own against confutation.”
3 For εἰδώλου cf. on 532 B, p. 197, not e. This may be one of the sources of Epist. vii. 342 B.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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