tween the pleasures and the erroneous opinions on which
they are founded, whether arising out of the illusion of distance or
not. But to this we naturally reply with Protarchus, that the
pleasure is what it is, although the calculation may be false, or the
after-effects painful. It is difficult to acquit Plato, to use his own
language, of being a 'tyro in dialectics,' when he overlooks such
a distinction. Yet, on the other hand, we are hardly fair judges
of confusions of thought in those who view things differently from
ourselves.

5. There appears also to be an incorrectness in the notion which occurs
both here and in the Gorgias, of the simultaneousness of merely bodily
pleasures and pains. We may, perhaps, admit, though even this is not
free from doubt, that the feeling of pleasureable hope or recollection
is, or rather may be, simultaneous with acute bodily suffering. But
there is no such coexistence of the pain of thirst with the pleasures
of drinking; they are not really simultaneous, for the one expels the
other. Nor does Plato seem to have considered that the bodily pleasures,
except in certain extreme cases, are unattended with pain. Few
philosophers will deny that a degree of pleasure attends eating
and drinking; and yet surely we might as well speak of the pains of
digestion which follow, as of the pains of hunger and thirst which
precede them. Plato's conception is derived partly from the extreme case
of a man suffering pain from hunger or thirst, partly from the image
of a full and empty vessel. But the truth is rather, that while the
gratification of our bodily desires constantly affords some degree
of pleasure, the antecedent pains are scarcely perceived by us, being
almost done away with by use and regularity.

6. The desire to classify pleasures as accompanied or not accompanied by
antecedent pains, has led Plato to place under one head the pleasures of
smell and sight, as well as those derived from sounds of music and from
knowledge. He would have done better to make a separate class of the
pleasures of smell, having no association of mind, or perhaps to have
divided them into natural and artificial. The pleasures of sight and
sound might then have been regarded as being the expression of ideas.
But this higher and truer point of view never appears to have occurred
to Plato. Nor has he any distinction between the fine arts and the
mechanical; and, neither here nor anywhere, an adequate conception of