but, I think, mistaken opinion. And having fallen into
a kind of whirlpool themselves, they are carried round, and want to
drag us in after them. There is a matter, master Cratylus, about which I
often dream, and should like to ask your opinion: Tell me, whether
there is or is not any absolute beauty or good, or any other absolute
existence?

CRATYLUS: Certainly, Socrates, I think so.

SOCRATES: Then let us seek the true beauty: not asking whether a face
is fair, or anything of that sort, for all such things appear to be in a
flux; but let us ask whether the true beauty is not always beautiful.

CRATYLUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And can we rightly speak of a beauty which is always passing
away, and is first this and then that; must not the same thing be born
and retire and vanish while the word is in our mouths?

CRATYLUS: Undoubtedly.

SOCRATES: Then how can that be a real thing which is never in the same
state? for obviously things which are the same cannot change while they
remain the same; and if they are always the same and in the same state,
and never depart from their original form, they can never change or be
moved.

CRATYLUS: Certainly they cannot.

SOCRATES: Nor yet can they be known by any one; for at the moment that
the observer approaches, then they become other and of another nature,
so that you cannot get any further in knowing their nature or state, for
you cannot know that which has no state.

CRATYLUS: True.

SOCRATES: Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that there is knowledge
at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing
abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless
continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of
knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no
knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always
be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to
know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is
known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing
also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or
flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal
nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his
followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no
man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in
the power of names: neither w