37.2 · Where is the color?

“Consider the eyes first in this way, my excellent friend: what you call the color white is not itself a separate thing outside your eyes, nor is it in the eyes. Do not assign it a place; for then it would occupy a position and remain there, and would not be coming into being.”

“But how, then?”¹⁹⁵³

37.3 · Color arising in the encounter

“Let us follow the argument just given, assuming that nothing is one thing by itself. In this way black, white, and any other color will appear to us to have arisen from the eyes’ encounter with the corresponding motion. What we call each color will be neither what strikes nor what is struck, but something that has arisen between them, peculiar to each perceiver.”¹⁹⁵⁴

37.4 · Different perceivers and changing appearances

“Or would you insist that each color appears to a dog or any other animal just as it appears to you?”

“By Zeus, I certainly would not.”

“Well, are you firmly convinced that anything appears the same to another person as to you? Or is it much more the case that it does not appear the same even to you, since you yourself are never in exactly the same condition?”

“The latter seems more likely to me than the former.”¹⁹⁵⁵

37.5 · Qualities and changing relations

“Then if that against which we measure ourselves, or which we touch, were large or white or hot, it would never have become something different by encountering something else while itself undergoing no change. And if, in turn, the thing measuring itself or doing the touching were any of these, it would not itself become different without undergoing anything merely because something else approached or was affected in some way.”¹⁹⁵⁶

38.1 · Dreams and mistaken perceptions

In the same work.

“Let us not leave out what remains of the account. There remain dreams, other illnesses, madness, and everything called mishearing, misseeing, or some other mistaken perception. You surely know that all these are generally thought to refute the argument we have just been going through: in such cases our perceptions would above all be false, and it is far from true that the things appearing to each person actually are so. Quite the reverse: none of what appears is so.”¹⁹⁵⁷

38.2 · The challenge to perception as knowledge

“What you say is entirely true, Socrates.”

“What argument, then, my boy, remains for someone who maintains that perception is knowledge, and that what appears to each person is so for the person to whom it appears?”¹⁹⁵⁸

39.1 · Expertise and the measure

In the same work.

“We shall then have made a measured case against your teacher: he must admit both that one person is wiser than another and that such a person is a measure, whereas there is no necessity whatever for me, lacking knowledge, to become a measure. . . . .”¹⁹⁵⁹

39.2 · Present experiences are harder to refute

“In many other ways too, Theodorus, the position could be caught out to this extent: not every belief is invariably true. But concerning each person’s present affection, from which perceptions and the corresponding beliefs arise, it is harder to establish that these are not true.”¹⁹⁶⁰

40 · A conclusion still withheld

In the same work.

“Then, Theodorus, we have finished with your companion, and we do not yet concede to him that every person is the measure of all things.”¹⁹⁶¹

41.1 · True beliefs about perceptible things

Plato, in the Timaeus.

“Discourse proceeding in the same way, concerning both Difference and Sameness, and borne without voice or sound in that which moves itself, produces firm and true opinions and convictions when it concerns what is perceptible and the circle of Difference, moving correctly, reports throughout its entire soul.”¹⁹⁶²

41.2 · Intellect and knowledge

“But when it concerns what is accessible to reasoning, and the circle of Sameness, turning smoothly, announces these things, intellect and knowledge necessarily result.”¹⁹⁶³

41.3 · The soul as their seat

“Whatever existing thing these two arise in, if anyone ever calls it anything other than soul, he ⟨will say⟩ anything but the truth.”¹⁹⁶⁴