Antidosis (201-205)

These are the requirements they set up, and yet they have never heard me make such promises, nor have they ever seen like results in the other arts and disciplines. On the contrary, all knowledge yields itself up to us only after great effort on our part, and we are by no means all equally capable of working out in practice what we learn. Nay, from all our schools only two or three students turn out to be real champions,[*] the rest retiring from their studies into private life.[*]

And yet how can we fail to deny intelligence to those who have the effrontery to demand powers which are not found in the recognized arts of this which they declare is not an art and who expect greater advantages to come from an art in which they do not believe than from arts which they regard as thoroughly perfected?

Men of intelligence ought not to form contrary judgements about similar things[*] nor refuse to recognize a discipline which accomplishes the same results as most of the arts. For who among you does not know that most of those who have sat under the sophists have not been duped nor affected as these men claim,

but that some of them have been turned out competent champions and others able teachers; while those who have preferred to live in private have become more gracious in their social intercourse[*] than before, and keener judges and more prudent counsellors than the great majority? How then is it possible to scorn a discipline which is able to make of those who have taken advantage of it men of that kind?

Furthermore, this also will be agreed to by all men, namely, that in all the arts and crafts we regard those as the most skilled who turn out pupils who all work as far as possible in the same manner. Now it will be seen that this is the case with philosophy.