I hesitate to tell you, Hermotimus, that even this is not enough. No, I think we deceived ourselves when we thought we had found safety: we have found no safety at all. We are like fishermen who often when they have let down their nets feel something heavy, and so haul in expecting a huge catch of fish; then when they are tired with their pulling they see a stone or a jar packed with sand. I am afraid we have hauled up something like that.

I don’t know what these nets of yours mean: you have certainly caught me in them.

Then try to get out. If anybody knows how to swim, you do—thanks to god’s help. Now, even if we go round all the sects making our tests, and eventually complete our enquiry, I don’t think it will even yet be certain whether any one of them has what we are looking for, or whether all alike are ignorant of it.

What do you mean? Not one of them?

It is debatable. Do you think it impossible that all are wrong, and that the truth may be something different, something which none of them has yet found?

How could that be possible?

In this way. Suppose our true number to be twenty. Now let someone take twenty beans in his hand, and then close it and ask any ten people how many beans he has in his hand. Suppose one man guesses seven, another five, another thirty, some other ten or fifteen, in short every one differently; nevertheless it is possible for someone by some chance to guess the truth, isn’t it?

Yes.

Yet it is not at all impossible for everyone to guess different numbers and for all these numbers to be wrong and untrue, and for not one of them to say that the man has twenty beans. Do you agree?

It is not impossible.

In the same way, then, all those who study philosophy are trying to find out what happiness is, and each one says it is something different—pleasure, beauty, and all the other things they say about it. Very likely one of these things is happiness, but it is not unlikely that it is something quite different from every one of them. We seem to have gone in the wrong direction, hastening to the end before we have found the beginning. We should first, I think, have ascertained that the truth has been discovered, and that one or other of the philosophers really has knowledge of it. Then the next step would be to find out whom to believe.

This is what you are saying, then, Lycinus, that even if we go through all philosophy, we shall not even then really be able to discover the truth.