S: Will you enumerate them?
SOCRATES: Money-making, medicine, and justice.
POLUS: Justice, Socrates, far excels the two others.
SOCRATES: And justice, if the best, gives the greatest pleasure or
advantage or both?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: But is the being healed a pleasant thing, and are those who
are being healed pleased?
POLUS: I think not.
SOCRATES: A useful thing, then?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Yes, because the patient is delivered from a great evil; and
this is the advantage of enduring the pain--that you get well?
POLUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And would he be the happier man in his bodily condition, who
is healed, or who never was out of health?
POLUS: Clearly he who was never out of health.
SOCRATES: Yes; for happiness surely does not consist in being delivered
from evils, but in never having had them.
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: And suppose the case of two persons who have some evil in
their bodies, and that one of them is healed and delivered from evil,
and another is not healed, but retains the evil--which of them is the
most miserable?
POLUS: Clearly he who is not healed.
SOCRATES: And was not punishment said by us to be a deliverance from the
greatest of evils, which is vice?
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: And justice punishes us, and makes us more just, and is the
medicine of our vice?
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: He, then, has the first place in the scale of happiness
who has never had vice in his soul; for this has been shown to be the
greatest of evils.
POLUS: Clearly.
SOCRATES: And he has the second place, who is delivered from vice?
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: That is to say, he who receives admonition and rebuke and
punishment?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Then he lives worst, who, having been unjust, has no
deliverance from injustice?
POLUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: That is, he lives worst who commits the greatest crimes,
and who, being the most unjust of men, succeeds in escaping rebuke or
correction or punishment; and this, as you say, has been accomplished
by Archelaus and other tyrants and rhetoricians and potentates? (Compare
Republic.)
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: May not their way of proceeding, my friend, be compared to the
conduct of a person who is afflicted with the worst of diseases and yet
contrives not to pay the penalty to the physician for his sins against
his constitution, and will not be cured, because, like a child, he is
afraid of the pain of being bur
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