Sophist

Str. The one is comparable to a disease in the body, the other to a deformity.

Theaet. I do not understand.

Str. Perhaps you have not considered that disease and discord are the same thing?

Theaet. I do not know what reply I ought to make to this, either.

Str. Is that because you think discord is anything else than the disagreement of the naturally related, brought about by some corruption?

Theaet. No; I think it is nothing else.

Str. But is deformity anything else than the presence of the quality of disproportion, which is always ugly?

Theaet. Nothing else at all.

Str. Well then; do we not see that in the souls of worthless men opinions are opposed to desires, anger to pleasures, reason to pain, and all such things to one another?

Theaet. Yes, they are, decidedly.

Str. Yet they must all be naturally related.

Theaet. Of course.

Str. Then we shall be right if we say that wickedness is a discord and disease of the soul.

Theaet. Yes, quite right.

Str. But if things which partake of motion and aim at some particular mark pass beside the mark and miss it on every occasion when they try to hit it, shall we say that this happens to them through right proportion to one another or, on the contrary, through disproportion? [*](The connection between disproportion and missing the mark is not obvious. The explanation that a missile (e.g. an arrow) which is not evenly balanced will not fly straight, fails to take account of the words πρὸς ἄλληλα. The idea seems rather to be that moving objects of various sizes, shapes, and rates of speed must interfere with each other.)

Theaet. Evidently through disproportion.

Str. But yet we know that every soul, if ignorant of anything, is ignorant against its will.

Theaet. Very much so.

Str. Now being ignorant is nothing else than the aberration of a soul that aims at truth, when the understanding passes beside the mark.

Theaet. Very true.

Str. Then we must regard a foolish soul as deformed and ill-proportioned.

Theaet. So it seems.

Str. Then there are, it appears, these two kinds of evils in the soul, one, which people call wickedness, which is very clearly a disease.

Theaet. Yes.

Str. And the other they call ignorance, but they are not willing to acknowledge that it is vice, when it arises only in the soul.

Theaet. It must certainly be admitted, though I disputed it when you said it just now, that there are two kinds of vice in the soul, and that cowardice, intemperance, and injustice must all alike be considered a disease in us, and the widespread and various condition of ignorance must be regarded as a deformity.

Str. In the case of the body there are two arts which have to do with these two evil conditions, are there not?

Theaet. What are they?