purpose to the art of speaking.

PHAEDRUS: Explain.

SOCRATES: Rhetoric is like medicine.

PHAEDRUS: How so?

SOCRATES: Why, because medicine has to define the nature of the body
and rhetoric of the soul--if we would proceed, not empirically but
scientifically, in the one case to impart health and strength by giving
medicine and food, in the other to implant the conviction or virtue
which you desire, by the right application of words and training.

PHAEDRUS: There, Socrates, I suspect that you are right.

SOCRATES: And do you think that you can know the nature of the soul
intelligently without knowing the nature of the whole?

PHAEDRUS: Hippocrates the Asclepiad says that the nature even of the
body can only be understood as a whole. (Compare Charmides.)

SOCRATES: Yes, friend, and he was right:--still, we ought not to be
content with the name of Hippocrates, but to examine and see whether his
argument agrees with his conception of nature.

PHAEDRUS: I agree.

SOCRATES: Then consider what truth as well as Hippocrates says about
this or about any other nature. Ought we not to consider first whether
that which we wish to learn and to teach is a simple or multiform thing,
and if simple, then to enquire what power it has of acting or being
acted upon in relation to other things, and if multiform, then to number
the forms; and see first in the case of one of them, and then in the
case of all of them, what is that power of acting or being acted upon
which makes each and all of them to be what they are?

PHAEDRUS: You may very likely be right, Socrates.

SOCRATES: The method which proceeds without analysis is like the groping
of a blind man. Yet, surely, he who is an artist ought not to admit of
a comparison with the blind, or deaf. The rhetorician, who teaches his
pupil to speak scientifically, will particularly set forth the nature of
that being to which he addresses his speeches; and this, I conceive, to
be the soul.

PHAEDRUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: His whole effort is directed to the soul; for in that he seeks
to produce conviction.

PHAEDRUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: Then clearly, Thrasymachus or any one else who teaches
rhetoric in earnest will give an exact description of the nature of the
soul; which will enable us to see whether she be single and same, or,
like the body, multiform. That is what we should call showing the nature
of the soul.

PHAEDRUS: Exactly.

SOCRATES: He will explain, secondly, the