No More Learning

He knows that four can never be
five, though ten thousand Platos or Pythagorases said it was.

_Ly_. Not to the point. You compare accepted with disputed facts,
whereas they are completely different. Tell me, did you ever meet a man
who said twice two was seven or eleven?

_Her_. Not I; any one who did not make four of it must be mad.

_Ly_. But on the other hand--try to tell the truth, I adjure you--,
did you ever meet a Stoic and an Epicurean who did _not_ differ
about principles or ends?

_Her_. No.

_Ly_. You are an honest man; now ask yourself whether you are trapping a
friend with false logic. We are trying to find out with whom philosophic
truth lies; and you beg the question and make a present of that same truth
to the Stoics; for you say (what is quite unproved) that they are the
people who make twice two four; the Epicureans or Platonists would say
that _they_ bring out that result, whereas you get five or seven. Does it
not amount to that, when your school reckon goodness the only end, and the
Epicureans pleasure? or again when you say everything is material, and
Plato recognizes an immaterial element also in all that exists? As I said,
you lay hold of the thing in dispute, as though it were the admitted
property of the Stoics, and put it into their hands, though the others
claim it and maintain that it is theirs; why, it is the very point at
issue. If it is once established that Stoics have the monopoly of making
four out of twice two, it is time for the rest to hold their tongues; but
as long as they refuse to yield that point, we must hear all alike, or be
prepared for people's calling us partial judges.

_Her_. It seems to me, Lycinus, you do not understand what I mean.

_Ly_. Very well, put it plainer, if it is something different from that.

_Her_. You will see in a minute. Let us suppose two people have gone
into the temple of Asclepius or Dionysus, and subsequently one of the
sacred cups is missing. Both of them will have to be searched, to see
which has it about him.

_Ly_. Clearly.

_Her_. Of course one of them has it.

_Ly_. Necessarily, if it is missing.

_Her_. Then, if you find it on the first, you will not strip the other; it
is clear he has not got it.

_Ly_. Quite.

_Her_. And if we fail to find it on the first, the other certainly has it;
it is unnecessary to search him that way either.

_Ly_. Yes, he has it.

_Her_. So with us; if we find the cup in the possession of the Stoics, we
shall not care to go on and search the others; we have what we were
looking for; why trouble further?

_Ly_. There is no why, if you really find it, and can be certain it
is the missing article, the sacred object being unmistakable. But there
are some differences in this case, friend, the temple-visitors are not
two, so that if one has not got the booty the other has, but many; and
the identity of the missing object is also uncertain; it may be cup, or
bowl, or garland; every priest gives a different description of it; they
do not agree even about the material; bronze, say these, silver, say
those--anything from gold to tin. So there is nothing for it but to strip
the visitors, if you want to find it; even if you discover a gold cup on
the first man, you must go on to the others.

_Her_. What for?

_Ly_. Because it is not certain that the thing was a cup. And even if that
is generally admitted, they do not all agree that it was gold; and if it
is well known that a gold cup is missing, and you find a gold cup on your
first man, even so you are not quit of searching the others; it is not
clear that this is _the_ sacred cup; do you suppose there is only one gold
cup in the world?

_Her_. No, indeed.

_Ly_. So you will have to go the round, and then collect all your finds
together and decide which of them is most likely to be divine property.

For the source of all the difficulty is this: every one who is stripped
has something or other on him, one a bowl, one a cup, one a garland,
which again may be bronze, gold, or silver; but whether the one he has is
the sacred one, is not yet clear. It is absolutely impossible to know
which man to accuse of sacrilege; even if all the objects were similar,
it would be uncertain who had robbed the God; for such things may be
private property too. Our perplexity, of course, is simply due to the
fact that the missing cup--assume it to be a cup--has no inscription; if
either the God's or the donor's name had been on it, we should not have
had all this trouble; when we found the inscribed one, we should have
stopped stripping and inconveniencing other visitors. I suppose,
Hermotimus, you have often been at athletic meetings?

_Her_. You suppose right; and in many places too.

_Ly_. Did you ever have a seat close by the judges?

_Her_. Dear me, yes; last Olympia, I was on the left of the stewards;
Euandridas of Elis had got me a place in the Elean enclosure; I
particularly wanted to have a near view of how things are done there.

_Ly_. So you know how they arrange ties for the wrestling or the
pancratium?

_Her_. Yes.

_Ly_. Then you will describe it better than I, as you have seen it
so close.

_Her_. In old days, when Heracles presided, bay leaves--

_Ly_. No old days, thank you; tell me what you saw with your own
eyes.

_Her_. A consecrated silver urn is produced, and into it are thrown
little lots about the size of a bean, with letters on them. Two are
marked alpha [Footnote: The Greek alphabet runs: alpha, beta, gamma,
delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi,
omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega. ], two beta,
two more gamma, and so on, if the competitors run to more than that--two
lots always to each letter. A competitor comes up, makes a prayer to
Zeus, dips his hand into the urn, and pulls out one lot; then another
does the same; there is a policeman to each drawer, who holds his hand so
that he cannot see what letter he has drawn. When all have drawn, the
chief police officer, I think it is, or one of the stewards themselves--I
cannot quite remember this detail--, goes round and examines the lots
while they stand in a circle, and puts together the two alphas for the
wrestling or pancratium, and so for the two betas, and the rest. That is
the procedure when the number of competitors is even, as eight, four, or
twelve. If it is five, seven, nine, or other odd number, an odd letter is
marked on one lot, which is put in with the others, not having a
duplicate. Whoever draws this is a bye, and waits till the rest have
finished their ties; no duplicate turns up for him, you see; and it is a
considerable advantage to an athlete, to know that he will come fresh
against tired competitors.

_Ly_. Stop there; that is just what I wanted. There are nine of them, we
will say, and they have all drawn, and the lots are in their hands. You go
round--for I promote you from spectator to steward--examining the letters;
and I suppose you will not know who is the bye till you have been to them
all and paired them.

_Her_. How do you mean?

_Ly_. It is impossible for you to hit straight upon the letter which
indicates the bye; at least, you may hit upon the letter, but you will
not know about the bye; it was not announced beforehand that kappa or mu
or iota had the appointment in its gift; when you find alpha, you look
for the holder of the other alpha, whom finding, you pair the two. Again
finding beta, you inquire into the whereabouts of the second beta which
matches it; and so all through, till there is no one left but the holder
of the single unpaired letter.

_Her_. But suppose you come upon it first or second, what will you do
then?

_Ly_. Never mind me; I want to know what _you_ will do, Mr. Steward. Will
you say at once, Here is the bye? or will you have to go round to all, and
see whether there is a duplicate to be found, it being impossible to know
the bye till you have seen all the lots?

_Her_. Why, Lycinus, I shall know quite easily; nine being the number, if
I find the epsilon first or second, I know the holder of it for the bye.

_Ly_. But how?

_Her_. How? Why, two of them must have alpha, two beta, and of the
next two pairs one has certainly drawn gammas and the other deltas, so
that four letters have been used up over eight competitors. Obviously,
then, the next letter, which is epsilon, is the only one that can be odd,
and the drawer of it is the bye.

_Ly_. Shall I extol your intelligence, or would you rather I explained to
you my own poor idea, which differs?

_Her_. The latter, of course, though I cannot conceive how you can
reasonably differ.

_Ly_. You have gone on the assumption that the letters are taken in
alphabetical order, until at a particular one the number of competitors
runs short; and I grant you it may be done so at Olympia. But suppose we
were to pick out five letters at random, say chi, sigma, zeta, kappa,
theta, and duplicate the other four on the lots for eight competitors,
but put a single zeta on the ninth, which we meant to indicate the
bye--what then would you do if you came on the zeta first? How can you
tell that its holder is the bye till you have been all round and found no
counterpart to it? for you could not tell by the alphabetical order, as
at Olympia.

_Her_. A difficult question.

_Ly_. Look at the same thing another way. Suppose we put no letters
at all on the lots, but, instead of them, signs and marks such as the
Egyptians use for letters, men with dogs' or lions' heads. Or no, those
are rather too strange; let us avoid hybrids, and put down simple forms,
as well as our draughtsmanship will allow--men on two lots, horses on
two, a pair of cocks, a pair of dogs, and let a lion be the mark of the
ninth. Now, if you hit upon the lion at the first try, how can you tell
that this is the bye-maker, until you have gone all round and seen
whether any one else has a lion to match?

_Her_. Your question is too much for me.

_Ly_. No wonder; there is no plausible answer. Consequently if we
mean to find either the man who has the sacred cup, or the bye, or our
best guide to the famous city of Corinth, we must absolutely go to and
examine them all, trying them carefully, stripping and comparing them;
the truth will be hard enough to find, even so. If I am to take any one's
advice upon the right philosophy to choose, I insist upon his knowing
what they all say; every one else I disqualify; I will not trust him
while there is one philosophy he is unacquainted with; that one may
possibly be the best of all. If some one were to produce a handsome man,
and state that he was the handsomest of mankind, we should not accept
that, unless we knew he had seen all men; very likely his man is
handsome, but whether the handsomest, he has no means of knowing without
seeing all. Now we are looking not simply for beauty, but for the
greatest beauty, and if we miss that, we shall account ourselves no
further than we were; we shall not be content with chancing upon some
sort of beauty; we are in search of a definite thing, the supreme beauty,
which must necessarily be _one_.

_Her_. True.

_Ly_. Well then, can you name me a man who has tried every road in
philosophy? one who, knowing the doctrine of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle,
Chrysippus, Epicurus, and the rest, has ended by selecting one out of all
these roads, because he has proved it genuine, and had found it by
experience to be the only one that led straight to Happiness? If we
can meet with such a man, we are at the end of our troubles.

_Her_. Alas, that is no easy matter.

_Ly_. What shall we do, then? I do not think we ought to despair, in the
momentary absence of such a guide. Perhaps the best and safest plan
of all is to set to work oneself, go through every system, and carefully
examine the various doctrines.

_Her_. That is what seems to be indicated. I am afraid, though, there is
an obstacle in what you said just now: it is not easy, when you have
committed yourself with a spread of canvas to the wind, to get home
again. How can a man try all the roads, when, as you said, he will be
unable to escape from the first of them?

_Ly_. My notion is to copy Theseus, get dame Ariadne to give us a skein,
and go into one labyrinth after another, with the certainty of getting out
by winding it up.

_Her_. Who is to be our Ariadne? Where shall we find the skein?

_Ly_. Never despair; I fancy I have found something to hold on to and
escape.

_Her_. And what is that?

_Ly_. It is not original; I borrow it from one of the wise men: 'Be sober
and doubt all things,' says he. If we do not believe everything we are
told, but behave like jurymen who suspend judgement till they have heard
the other side, we may have no difficulty in getting out of the
labyrinths.

_Her_. A good plan; let us try it.

_Ly_. Very well, which shall we start with? However, that will make no
difference; we may begin with whomsoever we fancy, Pythagoras, say; how
long shall we allow for learning the whole of Pythagoreanism? and do
not omit the five years of silence; including those, I suppose thirty
altogether will do; or, if you do not like that, still we cannot put it
lower than twenty.

_Her_. Put it at that.

_Ly_. Plato will come next with as many more, and then Aristotle cannot do
with less.

_Her_. No.

_Ly_. As to Chrysippus, I need not ask you; you have told me already that
forty is barely enough.

_Her_. That is so.

_Ly_. And we have still Epicurus and the others. I am not taking high
figures, either, as you will see if you reflect upon the number of
octogenarian Stoics, Epicureans, and Platonists who confess that they
have not yet completely mastered their own systems. Or, if they did not
confess it, at any rate Chrysippus, Aristotle, and Plato would for them;
still more Socrates, who is as good as they; he used to proclaim to all
comers that, so far from knowing all, he knew nothing whatever, except
the one fact of his own ignorance. Well, let us add up. Twenty years we
gave Pythagoras, the same to Plato, and so to the others. What will the
total come to, if we assume only ten schools?

_Her_. Over two hundred years.

_Ly_. Shall we deduct a quarter of that, and say a hundred and fifty
will do? or can we halve it?

_Her_. You must decide about that; but I see that, at the best, it
will be but few who will get through the course, though they begin
philosophy and life together.

_Ly_. In that case, what are we to do? Must we withdraw our previous
admission, that no one can choose the best out of many without trying
all? We thought selection without experiment a method of inquiry
savouring more of divination than of judgement, did we not?

_Her_. Yes.

_Ly_. Without such longevity, then, it is absolutely impossible for
us to complete the series--experiment, selection, philosophy, Happiness.
Yet anything short of that is a mere game of blindman's-buff; whatever we
knock against and get hold of we shall be taking for the thing we want,
because the truth is hidden from us. Even if a mere piece of luck brings
us straight to it, we shall have no grounded conviction of our success;
there are so many similar objects, all claiming to be the real thing.

_Her_.
Ah, Lycinus, your arguments seem to me more or less logical,
but--but--to be frank with you--I hate to hear you going through them and
wasting your acuteness. I suspect it was in an evil hour that I came out
to-day and met you; my hopes were almost in my grasp; and now here are
you plunging me into a slough of despond with your demonstrations; truth
is undiscoverable, if the search needs so many years.

_Ly_. My dear friend, it would be much fairer to blame your parents,
Menecrates and whatever your mother's name may have been--or indeed to go
still further back to human nature. Why did not they make you a Tithonus
for years and durability? instead of which, they limited you like other
men to a century at the outside. As for me, I have only been helping you
to deduce results.

_Her_. No, no; it is just your way; you want to crow over me; you
detest philosophy--I cannot tell why--and poke fun at philosophers.

_Ly_. Hermotimus, I cannot show what truth is, so well as wise people like
you and your professor; but one thing I do know about it, and that is that
it is not pleasant to the ear; falsehood is far more esteemed; it is
prettier, and therefore pleasanter; while Truth, conscious of its purity,
blurts out downright remarks, and offends people. Here is a case of it:
even you are offended with me for having discovered (with your assistance)
how this matter really stands, and shown that our common object is hard of
attainment. Suppose you had been in love with a statue and hoped to win
it, under the impression that it was human, and I had realized that it was
only bronze or marble, and given you a friendly warning that your passion
was hopeless--you might just as well have thought I was your enemy then,
because I would not leave you a prey to extravagant and impracticable
delusions.

_Her_. Well, well; are we to give up philosophy, then, and idle our
lives away like the common herd?

_Ly_. What have I said to justify that? My point is not that we are
to give up philosophy, but this: whereas we are to pursue philosophy, and
whereas there are many roads, each professing to lead to philosophy and
Virtue, and whereas it is uncertain which of these is the true road,
therefore the selection shall be made with care. Now we resolved that it
was impossible out of many offers to choose the best, unless a man should
try all in turn; and then the process of trial was found to be long. What
do _you_ propose? --It is the old question again. To follow and join
philosophic forces with whomsoever you first fall in with, and let him
thank Fortune for his proselyte?

_Her_. What is the good of answering your questions? You say no one
can judge for himself, unless he can devote the life of a phoenix to
going round experimenting; and on the other hand you refuse to trust
either previous experience or the multitude of favourable testimony.

_Ly_. Where is your multitude, with knowledge and experience _of all_?
Never mind the multitude; one man who answers the description will do for
me. But if you mean the people who do not know, their mere numbers will
never persuade me, as long as they pronounce upon all from knowledge of,
at the most, one.

_Her_. Are you the only man who has found the truth, and are all the
people who go in for philosophy fools?

_Ly_. You wrong me, Hermotimus, when you imply that I put myself
above other people, or rank myself at all with those who know; you forget
what I said; I never claimed to know the truth better than others, only
confessed that I was as ignorant of it as every one else.

_Her_. Well, but, Lycinus, it may be all very well to insist on going the
round, testing the various statements, and eschewing any other method of
choice; but it is ridiculous to spend so many years on each experiment, as
though there were no such thing as judging from samples. That device seems
to me quite simple, and economical of time. There is a story that some
sculptor, Phidias, I think, seeing a single claw, calculated from it the
size of the lion, if it were modelled proportionally. So, if some one were
to let you see a man's hand, keeping the rest of his body concealed, you
would know at once that what was behind was a man, without seeing his
whole body. Well, it is easy to find out in a few hours the essential
points of the various doctrines, and, for selecting the best, these will
suffice, without any of your scrupulous exacting investigation.

_Ly_. Upon my word, how confident you are in your faculty of divining the
whole from the parts! and yet I remember being told just the
opposite--that knowledge of the whole includes that of the parts, but not
vice versa. Well, but tell me; when Phidias saw the claw, would he ever
have known it for a lion's, if he had never seen a lion? Could you have
said the hand was a man's, if you had never known or seen a man? Why are
you dumb? Let me make the only possible answer for you--that you could
_not_; I am afraid Phidias has modelled his lion all for nothing;
for it proves to be neither here nor there. What resemblance is there?
What enabled you and Phidias to recognize the parts was just your
knowledge of the wholes--the lion and the man. But in philosophy--the
Stoic, for instance--how will the part reveal the other parts to you, or
how can you conclude that they are beautiful? You do not know the whole
to which the parts belong.

Then you say it is easy to hear in a few hours the essentials of all
philosophy--meaning, I suppose, their principles and ends, their accounts
of God and the soul, their views on the material and the immaterial,
their respective identification of pleasure or goodness with the
desirable and the Happy; well, it is easy--it is quite a trifle--to
deliver an opinion after such a hearing; but really to _know_ where
the truth lies will be work, I suspect, not for a few hours, but for a
good many days. If not, what can have induced them to enlarge on these
rudiments to the tune of a hundred or a thousand volumes apiece? I
imagine they only wanted to establish the truth of those few points which
you thought so easy and intelligible. If you refuse to spend your time on
a conscientious selection, after personal examination of each and all, in
sum and in detail, it seems to me you will still want your soothsayer to
choose the best for you. It would be a fine short cut, with no
meanderings or wastings of time, if you sent for him, listened to the
summaries, and killed a victim at the end of each; by indicating in its
liver which is the philosophy for you, the God would save you a pack of
troubles.

Or, if you like, I can suggest a still simpler way; you need not shed all
this blood in sacrifice to any God, nor employ an expensive priest; put
into an urn a set of tablets, each marked with a philosopher's name, and
tell a boy (he must be quite young, and his parents both be living) to go
to the urn and pick out whichever tablet his hand first touches; and live
a philosopher ever after, of the school which then comes out triumphant.

_Her_. This is buffoonery, Lycinus; I should not have expected it of you.
Now tell me, did you ever buy wine? in person, I mean.

_Ly_. Many a time.

_Her_. Well, did you go to every wine vault in town, one after another,
tasting and comparing?

_Ly_. Certainly not.

_Her_. No; as soon as you find good sound stuff, you have only to get it
sent home.

_Ly_. To be sure.

_Her_. And from that little taste you could have answered for the quality
of the whole?

_Ly_. Yes.

_Her_. Now suppose you had gone to all the wine-merchants and said: I want
to buy a pint of wine; I must ask you, gentlemen, to let me drink the
whole of the cask which each of you has on tap; after that exhaustive
sampling, I shall know which of you keeps the best wine, and is the man
for my money. If you had talked like that, they might have laughed at
you, and, if you persisted in worrying them, have tried how you liked
water.

_Ly_. Yes; it would be no more than my deserts.

_Her_. Apply this to philosophy. What need to drink the whole cask,
when you can judge the quality of the whole from one little taste?

_Ly_. What an adept at evasion you are, Hermotimus! How you slip
through one's fingers! However, it is all the better this time; you
fancied yourself out, but you have flopped into the net again.

_Her_. What do you mean?

_Ly_. You take a thing whose nature is self-evident and universally
admitted, like wine, and argue from it to perfectly unlike things, whose
nature is obscure and generally debated. In fact I cannot tell what
analogy you find between philosophy and wine; there is just one, indeed:
philosophers and wine-merchants both sell their wares, mostly resorting
to adulteration, fraud, and false measures, in the process. But let us
look into your real meaning. You say all the wine in a cask is of the
same quality--which is perfectly reasonable; further, that any one who
draws and tastes quite a small quantity will know at once the quality of
the whole--of which the same may be said; I should never have thought of
objecting. But mark what comes now: do philosophy and its professors
(your own, for instance) give you every day the same remarks on the same
subjects, or do they vary them? They vary them a great deal, friend; you
would never have stuck to your master through your twenty years'
wandering--quite a philosophic Odyssey--if he had always said the same
thing; one hearing would have been enough.

_Her_. So it would.

_Ly_. How could you have known the whole of his doctrines from the
first taste, then? They were not homogeneous, like the wine; novelty
to-day, and novelty to-morrow on the top of it. Consequently, dear friend,
short of drinking the whole cask, you might soak to no purpose;
Providence seems to me to have hidden the philosophic Good right at the
bottom, underneath the lees. So you will have to drain it dry, or you
will never get to that nectar for which I know you have so long thirsted.
According to your idea, it has such virtue that, could you once taste it
and swallow the very least drop, you would straightway have perfect
wisdom; so they say the Delphian prophetess is inspired by one draught of
the sacred spring with answers for those who consult the oracle. But it
seems not to be so; you have drunk more than half the cask; yet you told
me you were only beginning yet.

Now see whether this is not a better analogy. You shall keep your
merchant, and your cask; but the contents of the latter are not to be
wine, but assorted seeds. On the top is wheat, next beans, then barley,
below that lentils, then peas--and other kinds yet. You go to buy seeds,
and he takes some wheat out of that layer, and puts it in your hand as a
sample; now, could you tell by looking at that whether the peas were
Sound, the lentils tender, and the beans full?

_Her_. Impossible.

_Ly_. No more can you tell the quality of a philosophy from the first
statements of its professor; it is not uniform, like the wine to which you
compared it, claiming that it must resemble the sample glass; it is
heterogeneous, and it had better not be cursorily tested. If you buy bad
wine, the loss is limited to a few pence; but to rot with the common herd
(in your own words) is not so light a loss. Moreover, your man who wants
to drink up the cask as a preliminary to buying a pint will injure the
merchant, with his dubious sampling; but philosophy knows no such danger;
you may drink your fill, but this cask grows no emptier, and its owner
suffers no loss. It is cut and come again here; we have the converse of
the Danaids' cask; that would not hold what was put into it; it ran
straight through; but here, the more you take away, the more remains.

And I have another similar remark to make about these specimen drops of
philosophy. Do not fancy I am libelling it, if I say it is like hemlock,
aconite, or other deadly poison. Those too, though they have death in
them, will not kill if a man scrapes off the tiniest particle with the
edge of his nail and tastes it; if they are not taken in the right
quantity, the right manner, and the right vehicle, the taker will not
die; you were wrong in claiming that the least possible quantity is
enough to base a generalization on.

_Her_. Oh, have it your own way, Lycinus. Well then, we have got to live a
hundred years, and go through all this trouble? There is no other road to
philosophy?

_Ly_. No, none; and we need not complain; as you very truly said, _ars
longa, vita brevis_. But I do not know what has come over you; you now
make a grievance of it, if you cannot before set of sun develop into a
Chrysippus, a Plato, a Pythagoras.

_Her_. You trap me, and drive me into a corner, Lycinus; yet I never
provoked you; it is all envy, I know, because I have made some progress
in my studies, whereas you have neglected yourself, when you were old
enough to know better.

_Ly_. Seest, then, thy true course? never mind me, but leave me as a
lunatic to my follies, and you go on your way and accomplish what you
have intended all this time.

_Her_. But you are so masterful, you will not let me make a choice, till I
have proved all.

_Ly_. Why, I confess, you will never get me to budge from that. But when
you call me masterful, it seems to me you blame the blameless, as the poet
says; for I am myself being dragged along by reason, until you bring up
some other reason to release me from durance. And here is reason about to
talk more masterfully still, you will see; but I suppose you will
exonerate it, and blame me.

_Her_. What can it be? I am surprised to hear it still has anything in
reserve.

_Ly_. It says that seeing and going through all philosophies will not
suffice, if you want to choose the best of them; the most important
qualification is still missing.

_Her_. Indeed? Which?

_Ly_. Why (bear with me), a critical investigating faculty, mental acumen,
intellectual precision and independence equal to the occasion; without
this, the completest inspection will be useless. Reason insists that the
owner of it must further be allowed ample time; he will collect the rival
candidates together, and make his choice with long, lingering, repeated
deliberation; he will give no heed to the candidate's age, appearance, or
repute for wisdom, but perform his functions like the Areopagites, who
judge in the darkness of night, so that they must regard not the pleaders,
but the pleadings. Then and not till then will you be able to make a sound
choice and live a philosopher.

_Her_. Live? an after life, then. No mortal span will meet your demands;
let me see: go the whole round, examine each with care, on that
examination form a judgement, on that judgement make a choice, on that
choice be a philosopher; so and no otherwise you say the truth may be
found.

_Ly_. I hardly dare tell you--even that is not exhaustive; I am afraid,
after all, the solid basis we thought we had found was imaginary. You know
how fishermen often let down their nets, feel a weight, and pull them up
expecting a great haul; when they have got them up with much toil, behold,
a stone, or an old pot full of sand. I fear our catch is one of those.

_Her_. I don't know what this particular net may be; your nets are all
round me, anyhow.

_Ly_. Well, try and get through; providentially, you are as good a
swimmer as can be. Now, this is it: granted that we go all round
experimenting, and get it done at last, too, I do not believe we shall
have solved the elementary question, whether _any_ of them has the
much-desired; perhaps they are all wrong together.

_Her_. Oh, come now! not one of _them_ right either?

_Ly_. I cannot tell. Do you think it impossible they may all be deluded,
and the truth be something which none of them has yet found?

_Her_. How can it possibly be?

_Ly_. This way: take a correct number, twenty; suppose, I mean, a man has
twenty beans in his closed hand, and asks ten different persons to guess
the number; they guess seven, five, thirty, ten, fifteen--various numbers,
in short. It is possible, I suppose, that one may be right?

_Her_. Yes.

_Ly_. It is not impossible, however, that they may all guess different
incorrect numbers, and not one of them suggest twenty beans. What say you?

_Her_. It is not impossible.

_Ly_. In the same way, all philosophers are investigating the nature of
Happiness; they get different answers one Pleasure, another Goodness,
and so through the list. It is probable that Happiness _is_ one of these;
but it is also not improbable that it is something else altogether. We
seem to have reversed the proper procedure, and hurried on to the end
before we had found the beginning I suppose we ought first to have
ascertained that the truth has actually been discovered, and that some
philosopher or other has it, and only then to have gone on to the next
question, _which_ of them is to be believed.

_Her_. So that, even if we go all through all philosophy, we shall have no
certainty of finding the truth even then; that is what you say.

_Ly_. Please, please do not ask _me_; once more, apply to reason itself.
Its answer will perhaps be that there can be no certainty yet--as long as
we cannot be sure that it is one or other of the things they say it is.

_Her_. Then, according to you, we shall never finish our quest nor
be philosophers, but have to give it up and live the life of laymen. What
you say amounts to that: philosophy is impossible and inaccessible to a
mere mortal; for you expect the aspirant first to choose the best
philosophy; and you considered that the only guarantee of such choice's
being correct was to go through all philosophy before choosing the
truest. Then in reckoning the number of years required by each you
spurned all limits, extended the thing to several generations, and made
out the quest of truth too long for the individual life; and now you
crown all by proving success doubtful even apart from all that; you say
it is uncertain whether the philosophers have ever found truth at all.

_Ly_. Could you state on oath that they have?

_Her_. Not on oath, no.

_Ly_. And yet there is much that I have intentionally spared you, though
it merits careful examination too.

_Her_. For instance?

_Ly_.