So find a competent teacher to give you instruction in demonstration and the art of distinguishing matters in dispute, and you will certainly find an end to your difficulties. At once the best will be clear to you, truth and falsehood will be proved under the scrutiny of this art of demonstration, and you will make a sound choice, and having made your judgment you will practise philosophy, and you will have won your thrice-desired happiness and live with her, possessing all good things in one package.

Well done, Lycinus! What you say is far better and full of great hopes. We must look for a man, it seems, who will make us able to judge and to distinguish and able in the highest degree to prove a case. What follows will be easy now and no trouble, and it will not need much time. Now I am indeed grateful to you for finding this excellent short-cut for us.

Because, my good friend, even if we find someone who professes knowledge of the art of demonstration and the ability to teach it to another, we shall not, I fancy, believe him at once, but look for someone else who can determine if the first man is speaking the truth. And even if we find this one, we are still not clear whether our arbiter knows how to distinguish the man whose judgment is correct or not, and for him too I fancy we shall need another arbiter. For how could we ourselves know how to choose the one able to judge best? Do you see how this goes on to infinity and cannot stop and be arrested? For you will see that all the proofs you can find are disputable and have no certainty. Most of them try to compel our belief on a basis of assumptions equally open to dispute, while the rest tack the most obscure and quite unrelated speculations on to self-evident truths and then say that the latter prove the former, as if a man thought to prove the existence of gods because we see their altars. So, Hermotimus, we seem to have run round in a circle and come back to our starting-point and the self-same difficulty.

Look at what you have done to me, Lycinus. You have shown my treasure to be nothing more than ashes, and all these years and heavy toil are lost in all likelihood.

Well, Hermotimus, you will not be nearly so hurt if you remember that you are not the only one left outside the hoped-for blessings. No, all those who study philosophy are, as it were, wrangling over the shadow of an ass. Who could go through all that process I described? Even you yourself say that it is impossible. And now you seem to me to be acting like a man who wept and blamed fortune because he could not go up to heaven or dive deep into the sea off Sicily and come up at Cyprus, or fly like a bird from Greece to India in one day. His disappointment was due, I fancy, to expectations following a dream on some such subject or an invention of his imagination without prior enquiry whether his wishes could be fulfilled and were humanly possible. You too, my friend, have had many wonderful dreams, and the argument has poked you in the ribs and made you jump up out of your sleep. Then while your eyes are scarcely open you are angry with it, and you cannot easily shake off sleep for delight in what you have seen. Those who fabricate an unreal blessedness for themselves have just the same experience, surrounded by wealth, digging up treasure, kings, heaven-blest for some other reason—all this the goddess Wishing easily manages, great in her gifts and never saying “no,” whether you want to fly, to be as big as a Colossus, to discover whole mountains of gold; and if a slave interrupts their reverie with a question on day-to-day necessities—with what he is to buy bread, what he is to say to the landlord who has been waiting ever so long with a demand for the rent—they are so angry with him for taking all those good things away with his troublesome questions that they come near to biting off his nose.

But, my dear friend, do not feel like that towards me, if I, a friend, did not let you spend all your life in a dream, albeit a sweet one, digging up treasure, flying, inventing extravagant visions, and hoping for what was beyond reach, or if again I tell you to get up and carry out your daily tasks and adopt a course that will keep your mind in future on the trivalities of the common life. For what you have recently been working at and planning is no different from Hippocentaurs and Chimaeras and Gorgons and all the other images that belong to dreams and to poets and painters with their artistic licence—fancies that have never existed and can never exist. Nevertheless the vast majority of mankind believe them and they are enchanted when they see or hear things of this sort, because they are strange and monstrous.

You too have heard from some storyteller of a woman of surpassing beauty, beyond the Graces themselves or Heavenly Aphrodite; and, although you had not first asked whether he was telling the truth and whether this woman existed anywhere in the world, you fell in love with her at once, as they say Medea fell in love with Jason from a dream. But what above all brought you to this love—and has brought all who are in love with the same vision as you—was, I should guess, this: when he had told you about the woman and his first sketch had won your belief, he proceeded to fill in the details. You looked at nothing else, and so, when once you had let him get the first grip, he dragged you all by the nose and led you to the beloved by what he said was a straight path. The rest, I fancy, was easy: not one of you turned back to the entrance and enquired whether it was the true one and whether he had made a mistake and should not have entered; no, you followed in the steps of those who had made the journey before you, like sheep following their leader, although you should have considered at the entrance right at the beginning whether you ought to enter in there.

You will see better what I mean if you consider this analogy: suppose one of these daring poets were to say that there was once a man with three heads and six hands, and suppose that you facilely accepted this without asking if it were possible, just believing, he would at once follow it up by filling in the details appropriately—six eyes, six ears, three voices coming from three mouths, each taking food, and thirty fingers, unlike us with our ten on two hands; and, if he had to go to war, three hands held three shields—light, oblong, or round—, and three brandished axe, spear, and sword. Who would disbelieve these details now—details which are consistent with the first outline? It was there that you ought to have seen whether it was credible or acceptable thus. Once you admit the premises the rest comes flooding in; you will never stay its course, and disbelief is difficult now, for what follows is consistent in the way it follows the agreed premises. This has happened to you all. Because of your love and enthusiasm you made no enquiry into the conditions at each entrance. You go forward led by the consistency of what came after, not considering that things may be consistent and false. Suppose for instance you were to believe someone who said that twice five is seven and did not count for yourself, he will clearly go on to say that four times five is certainly fourteen, and so on, as long as he likes. This is what that marvellous geometry does—in the beginning it presents certain monstrous postulates and demands that we consent to them though they cannot exist—for instance points without parts, lines without breadth, and so on—and on these rotten foundations it erects its structure and claims to demonstrate truths, in spite of the fact that it starts from a false beginning.