Timaeus — Plato

p. 176

Knowledge^ ignorance, opinion.

Republic V. Socrates, Glaucon.

Opinion differs from knowledge because the one errs and the other is unerring.

It also differs from ignorance, which is concerned with nothing.

Yes. And will you be so very good as to answer one more question? Would you say that knowledge is a faculty, or in what class would you place it? Certainly knowledge is a faculty, and the mightiest of all faculties. And is opinion also a faculty? Certainly, he said ; for opinion is that with which we are able to form an opinion. And yet you were acknowledging a little while ago that knowledge is not the same as opinion?

Why, yes, he said: how can any reasonable being ever 47 S identify that which is infallible with that which errs? An excellent answer, proving, I said, that we are quite conscious of a distinction between them. Yes. Then knowledge and opinion having distinct powers have also distinct spheres or subject-matters? That is certain. Being is the sphere or subject-matter of knowledge, and knowledge is to know the nature of being? Yes.

And opinion is to have an opinion? Yes. And do we know what we opine? or is the subject-matter of opinion the same as the subject-matter of knowledge? Nay, he replied, that has been already disproven ; if difference in faculty implies difference in the sphere or subject-matter, and if, as we were saying, opinion and knowledge are distinct faculties, then the sphere of knowledge and of opinion cannot be the same.

Then if being is the subject-matter of knowledge, something else must be the subject-matter of opinion? Yes, something else. Well then, is not-being the subject-matter of opinion? or, rather, how can there be an opinion at all about not-being? Reflect : when a man has an opinion, has he not an opinion about something? Can he have an opinion which is an opinion about nothing? Impossible.

The interval betiveen being and not -being. 1 77 He who has an opinion has an opinion about some one Republic v. thing? Socrates, • Yes , Glaucon. And not-being is not one thing but, properly speaking, nothing? True. Of not-being, ignorance was assumed to be the necessarycorrelative ; of being, knowledge? True, he said. Then opinion is not concerned either with being or with not-being? Not with either. And can therefore neither be ignorance nor knowledge? That seems to be true. But is opinion to be sought without and beyond either of its place is them, in a greater clearness than knowledge, or in a greater "°^ '° "^^ darkness than ignorance? without or In neither. ^"^^f , knowledge or Then I suppose that opinion appears to you to be darker ignorance, but than knowledge, but lighter than ignorance? between them. Both ; and in no small degree. And also to be within and between them? Yes. Then you would infer that opinion is intermediate? No question. But were we not saying before, that if anything appeared to be of a sort which is and is not at the same time, that sort of thing would appear also to lie in the interval between pure being and absolute not-being ; and that the corresponding faculty is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but will be found in the interval between them? True. And in that interval there has now been discovered something which we call opinion? There has. Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes equally of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed either, pure and simple ; this unknown term, when discovered, we may truly call the subject of opinion, and assign each to their proper faculty, — VOL. III. — 27

p. 178

The piLuning riddle.