The answer which is given by Plato is paradoxical enough, and seems rather
intended to stimulate than to satisfy enquiry. Virtue is knowledge, and
therefore virtue can be taught. But virtue is not taught, and therefore in
this higher and ideal sense there is no virtue and no knowledge. The
teaching of the Sophists is confessedly inadequate, and Meno, who is their
pupil, is ignorant of the very nature of general terms. He can only
produce out of their armoury the sophism, 'that you can neither enquire
into what you know nor into what you do not know;' to which Socrates
replies by his theory of reminiscence.

To the doctrine that virtue is knowledge, Plato has been constantly tending
in the previous Dialogues. But the new truth is no sooner found than it
vanishes away. 'If there is knowledge, there must be teachers; and where
are the teachers?' There is no knowledge in the higher sense of
systematic, connected, reasoned knowledge, such as may one day be attained,
and such as Plato himself seems to see in some far off vision of a single
science. And there are no teachers in the higher sense of the word; that
is to say, no real teachers who will arouse the spirit of enquiry in their
pupils, and not merely instruct them in rhetoric or impart to them ready-
made information for a fee of 'one' or of 'fifty drachms.' Plato is
desirous of deepening the notion of education, and therefore he asserts the
paradox that there are no educators. This paradox, though different in
form, is not really different from the remark which is often made in modern
times by those who would depreciate either the methods of education
commonly employed, or the standard attained--that 'there is no true
education among us.'

There remains still a possibility which must not be overlooked. Even if
there be no true knowledge, as is proved by 'the wretched state of
education,' there may be right opinion, which is a sort of guessing or