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Section 99

"This is precisely what the majority of people seem to do, groping in the dark, calling the prerequisite a 'cause,' giving it a name that does not belong to it. Because of this, one man surrounds the earth with a vortex, claiming this keeps it in place under the heavens; another sets the air as a support underneath it, like a broad kneading trough. But the power that places them exactly where it is best for them to be—this they neither seek, nor do they think it has any divine strength. They believe they will someday find a stronger and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together. They do not think the genuinely Good and Binding truly binds and holds anything together. I would most gladly have become anyone's pupil to learn about such a cause and how it works! But since I was deprived of it, unable to find it myself or learn it from another, would you like me to show you, Cebes, how I busied myself with the second-best voyage in search of the cause?" "I would like that immensely," he said. "It seemed to me after this," he said, "when I had grown weary of investigating realities, that I must be careful not to suffer what happens to people looking at the sun during an eclipse. Some of them destroy their eyes if they do not look at the sun's reflection in water or some similar medium. I thought of this, and feared that I might completely blind my soul by looking at things with my eyes and trying to grasp them with my senses. So it seemed to me I must take refuge in accounts (logoi) and examine the truth of realities in them. Perhaps my image is slightly flawed in one respect: I do not entirely admit that one who examines realities in accounts is looking at them in images any more than one who examines them in deeds. But this was the path I started on. Laying down in each case the account I judge to be strongest, whatever seems to harmonize with it I set down as true—both regarding cause and everything else—and whatever does not, I set down as untrue. I wish to make what I mean clearer, because I think you do not yet understand." "Not entirely, by Zeus," said Cebes.