I dare say that you must have observed this.
Yes, I said.
And is not this discreditable? The reason is that a man, having to
deal with other men, has no knowledge of them; for if he had knowledge
he would have known the true state of the case, that few are the
good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the interval
between them.
How do you mean? I said.
I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and very
small, that nothing is more uncommon than a very large or a very small
man; and this applies generally to all extremes, whether of great
and small, or swift and slow, or fair and foul, or black and white:
and whether the instances you select be men or dogs or anything
else, few are the extremes, but many are in the mean between them. Did
you never observe this?
Yes, I said, I have.
And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition of
evil, the first in evil would be found to be very few?
Yes, that is very likely, I said.
Yes, that is very likely, he replied; not that in this respect
arguments are like men-there I was led on by you to say more than I
had intended; but the point of comparison was that when a simple man
who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which
he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and
then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great
disputers, as you know, come to think, at last that they have grown to
be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter
unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or, indeed, of all
things, which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down
in never-ceasing ebb and flow.
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