Phaedo
Plato (428–347 BC)
Plato's Phaedo in the Greek text edited by John Burnet, with Harold North Fowler's English translation.
Section 57
Section 58
Section 59
Section 60
Section 61
Section 62
Section 63
Section 64
Section 65
Section 66
Section 67
Section 68
Section 69
Section 70
Section 71
Section 72
Section 73
Section 74
Section 75
Section 76
Section 77
Section 78
Section 79
Section 80
Section 81
Section 82
Section 83
Section 84
Section 85
Section 86
Section 87
Section 88
Section 89
Section 90
Section 91
Section 92
Section 93
Section 94
Section 95
Section 96
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?