answer as follows:
PROTARCHUS: How?
SOCRATES: They would answer, as we said before, that for any single
class to be left by itself pure and isolated is not good, nor altogether
possible; and that if we are to make comparisons of one class with
another and choose, there is no better companion than knowledge of
things in general, and likewise the perfect knowledge, if that may be,
of ourselves in every respect.
PROTARCHUS: And our answer will be:--In that ye have spoken well.
SOCRATES: Very true. And now let us go back and interrogate wisdom and
mind: Would you like to have any pleasures in the mixture? And they will
reply:--'What pleasures do you mean?'
PROTARCHUS: Likely enough.
SOCRATES: And we shall take up our parable and say: Do you wish to have
the greatest and most vehement pleasures for your companions in addition
to the true ones? 'Why, Socrates,' they will say, 'how can we? seeing
that they are the source of ten thousand hindrances to us; they trouble
the souls of men, which are our habitation, with their madness; they
prevent us from coming to the birth, and are commonly the ruin of
the children which are born to us, causing them to be forgotten and
unheeded; but the true and pure pleasures, of which you spoke, know to
be of our family, and also those pleasures which accompany health and
temperance, and which every Virtue, like a goddess, has in her train to
follow her about wherever she goes,--mingle these and not the others;
there would be great want of sense in any one who desires to see a fair
and perfect mixture, and to find in it what is the highest good in man
and in the universe, and to divine what is the true form of good--there
would be great want of sense in his allowing the pleasures, which are
always in the company of folly and vice, to mingle with mind in the
cup.'--Is not this a very rational and suitable reply, which mind has
made, both on her own behalf, as well as on the behalf of memory and
true opinion?
PROTARCHUS: Most certainly.
SOCRATES: And still there must be something more added, which is a
necessary ingredient in every mixture.
PROTARCHUS: What is that?
SOCRATES: Unless truth enter into the composition, nothing can truly be
created or subsist.
PROTARCHUS: Impossible.
SOCRATES: Quite impossible; and now you and Philebus must tell me
whether anything is still wanting in the mixture, for to my way of
thinking the argument is now completed, and may be compared
|