. And we must not forget that Plato's
conception of pleasure is the Heracleitean flux transferred to the
sphere of human conduct. There is some degree of unfairness in opposing
the principle of good, which is objective, to the principle of pleasure,
which is subjective. For the assertion of the permanence of good is only
based on the assumption of its objective character. Had Plato fixed
his mind, not on the ideal nature of good, but on the subjective
consciousness of happiness, that would have been found to be as
transient and precarious as pleasure.

b. The arts or sciences, when pursued without any view to truth, or the
improvement of human life, are called flatteries. They are all alike
dependent upon the opinion of mankind, from which they are derived.
To Plato the whole world appears to be sunk in error, based on
self-interest. To this is opposed the one wise man hardly professing to
have found truth, yet strong in the conviction that a virtuous life
is the only good, whether regarded with reference to this world or to
another. Statesmen, Sophists, rhetoricians, poets, are alike brought up
for judgment. They are the parodies of wise men, and their arts are the
parodies of true arts and sciences. All that they call science is merely
the result of that study of the tempers of the Great Beast, which he
describes in the Republic.

c. Various other points of contact naturally suggest themselves between
the Gorgias and other dialogues, especially the Republic, the Philebus,
and the Protagoras. There are closer resemblances both of spirit
and language in the Republic than in any other dialogue, the verbal
similarity tending to show that they were written at the same period of
Plato's life. For the Republic supplies that education and training of
which the Gorgias suggests the necessity. The theory of the many weak
combining against the few strong in the formation of society (which is
indeed a partial truth), is similar in both of them, and is expressed in
nearly the same language. The sufferings and fate of the just man, the
powerlessness of evil, and the reversal of the situation in another
life, are also points of similarity. The poets, like the rhetoricians,
are condemned because they aim at pleasure only, as in the Republic they
are expelled the State, because they are imitators, and minister to
the weaker side of human nature. That poetry is akin to rhetoric may be
compared with the analogous notion, which occurs i