discourse in the shortest form. And thus not only speech, but thought and
opinion and imagination are proved to be both true and false. For thought
is only the process of silent speech, and opinion is only the silent assent
or denial which follows this, and imagination is only the expression of
this in some form of sense. All of them are akin to speech, and therefore,
like speech, admit of true and false. And we have discovered false
opinion, which is an encouraging sign of our probable success in the rest
of the enquiry.

Then now let us return to our old division of likeness-making and
phantastic. When we were going to place the Sophist in one of them, a
doubt arose whether there could be such a thing as an appearance, because
there was no such thing as falsehood. At length falsehood has been
discovered by us to exist, and we have acknowledged that the Sophist is to
be found in the class of imitators. All art was divided originally by us
into two branches--productive and acquisitive. And now we may divide both
on a different principle into the creations or imitations which are of
human, and those which are of divine, origin. For we must admit that the
world and ourselves and the animals did not come into existence by chance,
or the spontaneous working of nature, but by divine reason and knowledge.
And there are not only divine creations but divine imitations, such as
apparitions and shadows and reflections, which are equally the work of a
divine mind. And there are human creations and human imitations too,--
there is the actual house and the drawing of it. Nor must we forget that
image-making may be an imitation of realities or an imitation of
appearances, which last has been called by us phantastic. And this
phantastic may be again divided into imitation by the help of instruments
and impersonations. And the latter may be either dissembling or
unconscious, either with or without knowledge. A man cannot imitate you,
Theaetetus, without knowing you, but he can imitate the form of justice or