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Soc. Let us first consider whether in the manual arts one part is more allied to knowledge, and the other less, and the one should be regarded as purest, the other as less pure.
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Pro. Yes, we ought to consider that.
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Soc. And should the ruling elements of each of them be separated and distinguished from the rest?
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Pro. What are they, and how can they be separated?
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Soc. For example, if arithmetic and the sciences of measurement and weighing were taken away from all arts, what was left of any of them would be, so to speak, pretty worthless.
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Pro. Yes, pretty worthless.
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Soc. All that would be left for us would be to conjecture and to drill the perceptions by practice and experience, with the additional use of the powers of guessing, which are commonly called arts and acquire their efficacy by practice and toil.
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Pro. That is undeniable.
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Soc. Take music first; it is full of this; it attains harmony by guesswork based on practice, not by measurement; and flute music throughout tries to find the pitch of each note as it is produced by guess, so that the amount of uncertainty mixed up in it is great, and the amount of certainty small.
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Pro. Very true.
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Soc. And we shall find that medicine and agriculture and piloting and generalship are all in the same case.
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Pro. Certainly.
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Soc. But the art of building, I believe, employs the greatest number of measures and instruments which give it great accuracy and make it more scientific than most arts.
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Pro. In what way?
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Soc. In shipbuilding and house-building, and many other branches of wood-working. For the artisan uses a rule, I imagine, a lathe, compasses, a chalk-line, and an ingenious instrument called a vice.
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Pro. Certainly, Socrates; you are right.
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Soc. Let us, then, divide the arts, as they are called, into two kinds, those which resemble music, and have less accuracy in their works, and those which, like building, are more exact.
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Pro. Agreed.
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Soc. And of these the most exact are the arts which I just now mentioned first.
