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small, but they are not insignificant; and it is obvious that nothing very glaring could be expected. For if Plato had become aware of any considerable divergence between the text of the Speech and his subsequent version of it, he would have modified one or the other.
(a) The assertion that the restriction now proposed is a concession to common-sense on the part of Protagoreanism is merely a repetition of the remark in 169 D. It does not become more plausible thereby. And it has already been explained how profound a misconception of the chief distinction made in the Speech is implied in this assertion.
(b) Nothing is said in the Speech about a division of territories whereby the sphere of perception would be left to the dictum, while that of good and evil, and of health and disease would be assigned to the control of authority. The contention of the Speech was that of judgments equally true one might be better than another. And this was laid down universally. Neither subjectivity nor valuation was confined to sense-perceptions, thus implicitly giving the lie to Plato’s attempt to fuse the humanism of Protagoras with the sensationalism of his day, an attempt the arbitrary nature of which is as good as confessed in ‘Socrates’s’ remark in 152 C, that he is divulging a ‘secret doctrine’ to an astonished world. No restriction, therefore, of the personal implication in all knowing to the sphere of mere perception can for a moment be entertained by any logical Protagoreanism, and this implication must carry the universality of valuations with it. If e.g., I am short-sighted and you are not, your visual perceptions will be ‘better’ than mine. But this will not make them ‘true’ to me. The fact that you can read print at a distance impossible to me, does not enable me to do so, though the manifest superiority of your practical adjustments will induce me to admit and to envy the superiority of your perceptions. I shall continue to see a blur, where you see clearly, as before. It would seem, therefore, that in attempting to apply the distinction of the Speech, Plato has restricted it in a way which the Speech does not warrant and the facts refute. Surely a curious fact on the hypothesis that he was himself the author of the distinction!
