Phaedo. Now I will
tell you my own experience in the matter, if you wish; then if anything I say
seems to you to be of any use, you can employ it for the solution of your
difficulty.
Certainly,
said Cebes, I wish to hear your experiences.
Listen then, and I will tell you. When I was young,
Cebes, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call
investigation of nature. I thought it was a glorious thing to know the causes of
everything, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it
exists;
and I was always unsettling myself
with such questions as these: Do heat and cold, by a sort of fermentation, bring
about the organization of animals, as some people say? Is it the blood, or air,
or fire by which we think? Or is it none of these, and does the brain furnish
the sensations of hearing and sight and smell, and do memory and opinion arise
from these, and does knowledge come from memory and opinion in a state of rest?
And again I tried to find out
how these
things perish, and I investigated the phenomena of heaven and earth until
finally I made up my mind that I was by nature totally unfitted for this kind of
investigation. And I will give you a sufficient proof of this. I was so
completely blinded by these studies that I lost the knowledge that I, and others
also, thought I had before; I forgot what I had formerly believed I knew about
many things and even about the cause of man’s growth. For I had thought
previously that it was plain to everyone that man grows through eating and
drinking; for when, from the food he
eats, flesh is added to his flesh and bones to his bones, and in the same way
the appropriate thing is added to each of his other parts, then the small bulk
becomes greater and the small man large. That is what I used to think. Doesn’t
that seem to you reasonable?
Yes,
said Cebes.Now listen
to this, too. I thought I was sure enough, when I saw a tall man standing by a
short one, that he was, say, taller by a head than the other,
and that one horse was larger by a head than another horse;
and, to mention still clearer things than those, I thought ten were more than
eight because two had been added to the eight, and I thought a two-cubit rule
was longer than a one-cubit rule because it exceeded it by half its
length.
And now,
said
Cebes, what do you think about them?