Least of all, he said. I fancy, at any rate, said I, that the just and the honorable, if their relation and reference to the good is not known, The personal or ab urbe condita construction. Cf. Theaet. 169 E. will not have secured a guardian the guardians must be able to give a reason, which they can do only by reference to the sanction. For the idea that the statesman must know better than other men. Cf. Laws 968 A, 964 C, 858 C-E, 817 C, Xen Mem. iii. 6. 8. of much worth in the man thus ignorant, and my surmise is that no one will understand them adequately before he knows this. You surmise well, he said. Then our constitution will have its perfect and definitive organization For the effect of the future perfect cf. 457 B λελέξεται 465 A προστετάξεται , Eurip. Heracleidae 980 πεπράξεται . only when such a guardian, who knows these things, oversees it. 
 Necessarily, he said. But you yourself, Socrates, do you think that knowledge is the good or pleasure or something else and different? What a man it is, said I; you made it very plain For the personal construction 348 E, Isoc. To Nic. I. καταφανής is a variation in this idiom for δῆλος . Cf. also Theaet. 189 C, Symp. 221 B, Charm. 162 C, etc. long ago that you would not be satisfied with what others think about it. Why, it does not seem right to me either, Socrates, he said, to be ready to state the opinions of others but not one’s own when one has occupied himself with the matter so long. Cf. 367 D-E. But then, said I, do you think it right to speak as having knowledge about things one does not know? By no means, he said, as having knowledge, but one ought to be willing to tell as his opinion what he opines. Nay, said I, have you not observed that opinions divorced from knowledge This is not a contradiction of Meno 97 B, Theaet. 201 B-C and Phileb. 62 A-B, but simply a different context and emphasis. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 47, nn. 338 and 339. are ugly things? The best of them are blind. Cf. on 484 C, Phaedr. 270 E. Or do you think that those who hold some true opinion without intelligence differ appreciably from blind men who go the right way? They do not differ at all, he said. Is it, then, ugly things that you prefer to contemplate, things blind and crooked, when you might hear from others what is luminous Probably an allusion to the revelation of the mysteries. Cf. Phaedr. 250 C, Phileb. 16 C, Rep. 518 C, 478 C, 479 D, 518 A. It is fantastic to see in it a reference to what Cicero calls the lumina orationis of Isocratean style. The rhetoric and synonyms of this passage are not to be pressed. and fair? Nay, in heaven’s name, Socrates, said Glaucon, do not draw back, as it were, at the very goal. Cf. Phileb. 64 C ἐπὶ μὲν τοῖς τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἤδη προθύροις , we are now in the vestibule of the good. For it will content us if you explain the good even as you set forth the nature of justice, sobriety, and the other virtues. It will right well καὶ μάλα , jolly well, humorous emphasis on the point that it is much easier to define the conventional virtues than to explain the sanction. Cf. Symp. 189 A, Euthydem. 298 D-E, Herod. viii. 66. It is frequent in the Republic. Ritter gives forty-seven cases. I have fifty-four! But the point that matters is the humorous tone. Cf. e.g. 610 E. content me, my dear fellow, I said, but I fear that my powers may fail and that in my eagerness I may cut a sorry figure and become a laughing-stock. Excess of Zeal, προθυμία , seemed laughable to the Greeks. Cf. my interpretation of Iliad i. in fine , Class. Phil. xxii. ( 1927 ) pp. 222-223. Nay, my beloved, let us dismiss for the time being the nature of the good in itself; Cf. More, Principia Ethica, p. 17 Good, then, is indefinable; and yet, so far as I know, there is only one ethical writer, Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognized and stated this fact. for to attain to my present surmise of that seems a pitch above the impulse that wings my flight today. This is not superstitious mysticism but a deliberate refusal to confine in a formula what requires either a volume or a symbol. See Introd. p. xxvii, and my Idea of Good in Plato’s Republic, p. 212. τὰ νῦν repeats τὸ νῦν εἶναι (Cf. Tim. 48 C), as the evasive phrase εἰσαῦθις below sometimes lays the topic on the table, never to be taken up again. Cf. 347 E and 430 C. But of what seems to be the offspring of the good and most nearly made in its likeness Cf. Laws 897 D-E, Phaedr. 246 A. I am willing to speak if you too wish it, and otherwise to let the matter drop. Well, speak on, he said, for you will duly pay me the tale of the parent another time. I could wish, I said, that I were able to make and you to receive the payment and not merely as now the interest. But at any rate receive this interest This playful interlude relieves the monotony of the argument and is a transition to the symbolism. τόκος means both interest and offspring. Cf. 555 E, Polit. 267 A, Aristoph. Clouds 34, Thesm. 845, Pindar, Ol. x. 12. the equivocation, which in other languages became a metaphor, has played a great part in the history of opinion about usury. Cf. the article Usury in Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Relig. and Ethics. and the offspring of the good. Have a care, however, lest I deceive you unintentionally with a false reckoning of the interest. We will do our best, he said, to be on our guard. Only speak on. Yes, I said, after first coming to an understanding with you and reminding you of what has been said here before and often on other occasions. Cf. 475 E f. Plato as often begins by a restatement of the theory of ideas, i.e. practically of the distinction between the concept and the objects of sense. Cf. Rep. 596 A ff., Phaedo 108 b ff. What? said he. We predicate to be The modern reader will never understand Plato from translations that talk about Being. Cf. What Plato Said, p. 605. of many beautiful things and many good things, saying of them severally that they are, and so define them in our speech. We do. And again, we speak of a self-beautiful and of a good that is only and merely good, and so, in the case of all the things that we then posited as many, we turn about and posit each as a single idea or aspect, assuming it to be a unity and call it that which each really is. ὃ ἔστιν is technical for the reality of the ideas. Cf. Phaedo 75 B, D, 78 D, Parmen. 129 B, Symp. 211 C, Rep. 490 B, 532 A, 597 A. It is so. And the one class of things we say can be seen but not thought, while the ideas can be thought but not seen. By all means. With which of the parts of ourselves, with which of our faculties, then, do we see visible things? With sight, he said. And do we not, I said, hear audibles with hearing, and perceive all sensibles with the other senses? Surely. Have you ever observed, said I, how much the greatest expenditure the creator Creator, δημιουργός , God, the gods, and nature, are all virtual synonyms in such passages. of the senses has lavished on the faculty of seeing and being seen? Cf. Phaedr. 259 D, Tim. 45 B. Why, no, I have not, he said. Well, look at it thus. Do hearing and voice stand in need of another medium This is literature, not science. Plato knew that sound required a medium, Tim. 67 B. But the statement here is true enough to illustrate the thought. so that the one may hear and the other be heard, in the absence of which third element the one will not hear and the other not be heard? They need nothing, he said. Neither, I fancy, said I, do many others, not to say that none require anything of the sort. Or do you know of any? Not I, he said. But do you not observe that vision and the visible do have this further need? How? Though vision may be in the eyes and its possessor may try to use it, and though color be present, yet without the presence of a third thing Lit. kind of thing, γένος . Cf. 507 C-D. specifically and naturally adapted to this purpose, you are aware that vision will see nothing and the colors will remain invisible. Cf. Troland, The Mystery of Mind, p. 82: In order that there should be vision, it is not sufficient that a physical object should exist before the eyes. there must also be a source of so-called light. What Plato would not have tried to explain this loose colloquial genitive, and we need not. is this thing of which you speak? he said. The thing, I said, that you call light. You say truly, he replied. The bond, then, that yokes together 
 visibility and the faculty of sight is more precious by no slight form The loose Herodotean-Thucydidean-Isocratean use of ἰδέα . Cf. Laws 689 D καὶ τὸ σμικρότατον εἶδος . Form over-translates ἰδέᾳ here, which is little more than a synonym for γένος above. Cf. Wilamowitz, Platon, ii. p. 250. than that which unites the other pairs, if light is not without honor. It surely is far from being so, he said. 
 Which one can you name of the divinities in heaven Plato was willing to call the stars gods as the barbarians did ( Cratyl. 397 D, Aristoph. Peace 406 ff., Herod. iv. 188). Cf. Laws 821 B, 899 B, 950 D, Apol. 26 D, Epinomis 985 B, 988 B. as the author and cause of this, whose light makes our vision see best and visible things to be seen? Why, the one that you too and other people mean, he said; for your question evidently refers to the sun. Cf. my Idea of good in Plato’s Republic pp. 223-225, Reinhardt, Kosmos und Sympathie, pp. 374-384. Mediaeval writers have much to say of Platos mysterious Tagathon. Aristotle, who rejects the idea of good, uses τἀγαθόν in much the same way. It is naive to take the language of Platonic unction too literally. Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 394 ff. Is not this, then, the relation of vision to that divinity? What? Neither vision itself nor its vehicle, which we call the eye, is identical with the sun. Why, no. But it is, I think, the most sunlike Cf. 509 A, Plotinus, Enn. i. 6. 9 οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἶδεν ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος and vi. 7. 19, Cic. Tusc. i. 25. 73 in fine quod si in hoc mundo fieri sine deo non potest, ne in sphaera quidem eosdem motus Archimedes sine divino ingenio potuisset imitare, Manilius ii. 115: quis caelum posset nisi caeli munere nosse, et reperire deum nisi qui pars ipse deorum? Goethe's Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Die Sonne könnt es nic erblicken, and Goethe to Eckermann, Feb. 26, 1824: Hätte ich nicht die Welt durch Anticipation bereits in mir getragen, ich wäre mit sehenden Augen blind geblieben. of all the instruments of sense. By far the most. And does it not receive the power which it possesses as an influx, as it were, dispensed from the sun? Certainly. Is it not also true that the sun is not vision, yet as being the cause thereof is beheld by vision itself? That is so, he said. This, then, you must understand that I meant by the offspring of the good i.e. creation was the work of benevolent design. This is one of the few passages in the Republic where the idea of good is considered in relation to the universe, a thesis reserved for poetical or mythical development in the Timaeus. It is idle to construct a systematic metaphysical theology for Plato by identification of τἀγαθόν here either with god or with the ideas as a whole. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p 512. which the good begot to stand in a proportion Cf. Gorg. 465 B-C, 510 A-B, 511 E, 530 D, 534 A, 576 C, Phaedo 111 A-B, Tim. 29 C, 32 A-B. For ἀνάλογον in this sense cf. 511 E, 534 A, Phaedo 110 D. with itself: as the good is in the intelligible region to reason and the objects of reason, so is this in the visible world to vision and the objects of vision. How is that? he said; explain further. You are aware, I said, that when the eyes are no longer turned upon objects upon whose colors the light of day falls but that of the dim luminaries of night, their edge is blunted and they appear almost blind, as if pure vision did not dwell in them. Yes, indeed, he said. But when, I take it, they are directed upon objects illumined by the sun, they see clearly, and vision appears to reside in these same eyes. Certainly. Apply this comparison to the soul also in this way. When it is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent Plato’s rhetoric is not to be pressed. Truth, being the good, are virtual synonyms. Still, for Plato’s ethical and political philosophy the light that makes things intelligible is the idea of good, i.e. the sanction, and not, as some commentators insist, the truth. it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason; but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason. Yes, it does, This reality, then, that gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea No absolute distinction can be drawn between εἶδος and ἰδέα in Plato. But ἰδέα may be used o carry the notion of apprehended aspect which I think is more pertinent here than the metaphysical entity of the idea, though of course Plato would affirm that. Cf. 379 A, Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 35, What Plato Said, p. 585, Class. Phil. xx. ( 1925 ) p. 347. of good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge, and of truth in so far as known. The meaning is clear. we really understand and know anything only when we apprehend its purpose, the aspect of the good that it reveals. Cf. Introd. pp. xxxv-xxxvi. the position and case of γιγνωσκομένης are difficult. But no change proposed is any improvement. Yet fair as they both are, knowledge and truth, in supposing it to be something fairer still Plato likes to cap a superlative by a further degree of completeness, a climax beyond the climax. Cf. 405 B αἴσχιστον . . . αἴσχιον , 578 B, Symp. 180 A-B and Bury ad loc. The same characteristic can be observed in his method, e.g. in the Symposium where Agathon’s speech, which seems the climax, is surpassed by that of Socrates: similarly in the Gorgias and the tenth book of the Republic, Cf. Friedländer, Platon, i. p. 174, Introd. p. lxi. This and the next half page belong, I think, to rhetoric rather than to systematic metaphysics. Plato the idealist uses transcendental language of his ideal, and is never willing to admit that expression has done justice to it. But Plato the rationalist distinctly draws the line between his religious language thrown out at an object and his definite logical and practical conclusions. Cf. e.g. Meno 81 D-E. than these you will think rightly of it.