himself. 'But I cannot be fairly charged,' he will say, 'with an answer
which I should not have given; for I never maintained that the memory of a
feeling is the same as a feeling, or denied that a man might know and not
know the same thing at the same time. Or, if you will have extreme
precision, I say that man in different relations is many or rather infinite
in number. And I challenge you, either to show that his perceptions are
not individual, or that if they are, what appears to him is not what is.
As to your pigs and baboons, you are yourself a pig, and you make my
writings a sport of other swine. But I still affirm that man is the
measure of all things, although I admit that one man may be a thousand
times better than another, in proportion as he has better impressions.
Neither do I deny the existence of wisdom or of the wise man. But I
maintain that wisdom is a practical remedial power of turning evil into
good, the bitterness of disease into the sweetness of health, and does not
consist in any greater truth or superior knowledge. For the impressions of
the sick are as true as the impressions of the healthy; and the sick are as
wise as the healthy. Nor can any man be cured of a false opinion, for
there is no such thing; but he may be cured of the evil habit which
generates in him an evil opinion. This is effected in the body by the
drugs of the physician, and in the soul by the words of the Sophist; and
the new state or opinion is not truer, but only better than the old. And
philosophers are not tadpoles, but physicians and husbandmen, who till the
soil and infuse health into animals and plants, and make the good take the
place of the evil, both in individuals and states. Wise and good
rhetoricians make the good to appear just in states (for that is just which
appears just to a state), and in return, they deserve to be well paid. And
you, Socrates, whether you please or not, must continue to be a measure.
This is my defence, and I must request you to meet me fairly. We are
professing to reason, and not merely to dispute; and there is a great
difference between reasoning and disputation. For the disputer is always