ions to you, Socrates;
and I remark that if a person grants you anything in play, you, like a
child, want to keep hold and will not give it back. But do you really
suppose that I or any other human being denies that some pleasures are
good and others bad?

SOCRATES: Alas, Callicles, how unfair you are! you certainly treat me as
if I were a child, sometimes saying one thing, and then another, as if
you were meaning to deceive me. And yet I thought at first that you were
my friend, and would not have deceived me if you could have helped. But
I see that I was mistaken; and now I suppose that I must make the best
of a bad business, as they said of old, and take what I can get out of
you.--Well, then, as I understand you to say, I may assume that some
pleasures are good and others evil?

CALLICLES: Yes.

SOCRATES: The beneficial are good, and the hurtful are evil?

CALLICLES: To be sure.

SOCRATES: And the beneficial are those which do some good, and the
hurtful are those which do some evil?

CALLICLES: Yes.

SOCRATES: Take, for example, the bodily pleasures of eating and
drinking, which we were just now mentioning--you mean to say that those
which promote health, or any other bodily excellence, are good, and
their opposites evil?

CALLICLES: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And in the same way there are good pains and there are evil
pains?

CALLICLES: To be sure.

SOCRATES: And ought we not to choose and use the good pleasures and
pains?

CALLICLES: Certainly.

SOCRATES: But not the evil?

CALLICLES: Clearly.

SOCRATES: Because, if you remember, Polus and I have agreed that all
our actions are to be done for the sake of the good;--and will you agree
with us in saying, that the good is the end of all our actions, and that
all our actions are to be done for the sake of the good, and not the
good for the sake of them?--will you add a third vote to our two?

CALLICLES: I will.

SOCRATES: Then pleasure, like everything else, is to be sought for the
sake of that which is good, and not that which is good for the sake of
pleasure?

CALLICLES: To be sure.

SOCRATES: But can every man choose what pleasures are good and what are
evil, or must he have art or knowledge of them in detail?

CALLICLES: He must have art.

SOCRATES: Let me now remind you of what I was saying to Gorgias and
Polus; I was saying, as you will not have forgotten, that there were
some processes which aim only at pleasure, and know nothing of a