ii USELESS KNOWLEDGE 21 



tionary, but essayed only gently to turn to the light the 

 eyes of the Cave-dwellers whom you mention ? 



You don t know how insensitive they are to the light. 



Yet I was only preaching to them the necessity of 

 self-realisation. 



I know that ; but your language would have sounded 

 unfamiliar. 



Then you should repeat it, until it sounds familiar. 



How splendidly you must have lectured, Plato ! I 

 hardly dare however to follow your advice. However 

 mildly I might put them, your proposals would have 

 shocked the British public. 



And yet you told me that the infinitely more re 

 volutionary and unsparing proposals of my Republic 

 command universal admiration, and are held to be salutary 

 in the education of youth. 



Ah, but then they are protected by the decent 

 obscurity of a learned language ! 



Surely your language is learned enough, and by the 

 time they have passed through your mind my ideas will 

 be obscure enough to make them decent and safe. 



You are victorious as ever, Plato, in argument. But 

 you do not persuade me, because there is another obstacle, 

 even greater than that which I have mentioned. 



Will you not tell me what it is ? 



I hardly know how to put it. But though it now 

 seems almost too absurd even to suggest such a thing, 

 you know everybody to whom I spoke disbelieved that I 

 had really conversed with you, and thought that I had 

 dreamt it all, or even invented the whole matter. 



That, as you say, is too absurd. 



Nevertheless, so long as people believed this, you see 

 it was vain for me to try to persuade them of the 

 excellence of your proposals. For I do not happen to 

 have been born the son of a king myself, and am of no 

 account for such purposes. 



Still they could not have supposed that you could 

 have invented all you said yourself. 



I am afraid they did. 



