which body and mind are opposed (and they
are innumerable), pleasure and pain coalesce in one.

PROTARCHUS: I believe that to be quite true.

SOCRATES: There still remains one other sort of admixture of pleasures
and pains.

PROTARCHUS: What is that?

SOCRATES: The union which, as we were saying, the mind often experiences
of purely mental feelings.

PROTARCHUS: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: Why, do we not speak of anger, fear, desire, sorrow, love,
emulation, envy, and the like, as pains which belong to the soul only?

PROTARCHUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And shall we not find them also full of the most wonderful
pleasures? need I remind you of the anger

'Which stirs even a wise man to violence, And is sweeter than honey and
the honeycomb?'

And you remember how pleasures mingle with pains in lamentation and
bereavement?

PROTARCHUS: Yes, there is a natural connexion between them.

SOCRATES: And you remember also how at the sight of tragedies the
spectators smile through their tears?

PROTARCHUS: Certainly I do.

SOCRATES: And are you aware that even at a comedy the soul experiences a
mixed feeling of pain and pleasure?

PROTARCHUS: I do not quite understand you.

SOCRATES: I admit, Protarchus, that there is some difficulty in
recognizing this mixture of feelings at a comedy.

PROTARCHUS: There is, I think.

SOCRATES: And the greater the obscurity of the case the more desirable
is the examination of it, because the difficulty in detecting other
cases of mixed pleasures and pains will be less.

PROTARCHUS: Proceed.

SOCRATES: I have just mentioned envy; would you not call that a pain of
the soul?

PROTARCHUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And yet the envious man finds something in the misfortunes of
his neighbours at which he is pleased?

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And ignorance, and what is termed clownishness, are surely an
evil?

PROTARCHUS: To be sure.

SOCRATES: From these considerations learn to know the nature of the
ridiculous.

PROTARCHUS: Explain.

SOCRATES: The ridiculous is in short the specific name which is used to
describe the vicious form of a certain habit; and of vice in general it
is that kind which is most at variance with the inscription at Delphi.

PROTARCHUS: You mean, Socrates, 'Know thyself.'

SOCRATES: I do; and the opposite would be, 'Know not thyself.'

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And now, O Protarchus, try to divide this into three.

PROTARCHUS: Indeed I