TES: He is labouring, not after eternal being, but about things
which are becoming, or which will or have become.

PROTARCHUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: And can we say that any of these things which neither are nor
have been nor will be unchangeable, when judged by the strict rule of
truth ever become certain?

PROTARCHUS: Impossible.

SOCRATES: How can anything fixed be concerned with that which has no
fixedness?

PROTARCHUS: How indeed?

SOCRATES: Then mind and science when employed about such changing things
do not attain the highest truth?

PROTARCHUS: I should imagine not.

SOCRATES: And now let us bid farewell, a long farewell, to you or me or
Philebus or Gorgias, and urge on behalf of the argument a single point.

PROTARCHUS: What point?

SOCRATES: Let us say that the stable and pure and true and unalloyed has
to do with the things which are eternal and unchangeable and unmixed,
or if not, at any rate what is most akin to them has; and that all other
things are to be placed in a second or inferior class.

PROTARCHUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: And of the names expressing cognition, ought not the fairest
to be given to the fairest things?

PROTARCHUS: That is natural.

SOCRATES: And are not mind and wisdom the names which are to be honoured
most?

PROTARCHUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And these names may be said to have their truest and most
exact application when the mind is engaged in the contemplation of true
being?

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And these were the names which I adduced of the rivals of
pleasure?

PROTARCHUS: Very true, Socrates.

SOCRATES: In the next place, as to the mixture, here are the
ingredients, pleasure and wisdom, and we may be compared to artists who
have their materials ready to their hands.

PROTARCHUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And now we must begin to mix them?

PROTARCHUS: By all means.

SOCRATES: But had we not better have a preliminary word and refresh our
memories?

PROTARCHUS: Of what?

SOCRATES: Of that which I have already mentioned. Well says the proverb,
that we ought to repeat twice and even thrice that which is good.

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: Well then, by Zeus, let us proceed, and I will make what I
believe to be a fair summary of the argument.

PROTARCHUS: Let me hear.

SOCRATES: Philebus says that pleasure is the true end of all living
beings, at which all ought to aim, and moreover that it is the chief
good of all, and that the two names