rience. And I do not believe that either a Cretan, or any other
man, will doubt that such a test is a fair test, and safer, cheaper, and
speedier than any other.

CLEINIAS: That is certainly true.

ATHENIAN: And this knowledge of the natures and habits of men's souls
will be of the greatest use in that art which has the management of
them; and that art, if I am not mistaken, is politics.

CLEINIAS: Exactly so.

BOOK II.

ATHENIAN: And now we have to consider whether the insight into human
nature is the only benefit derived from well-ordered potations, or
whether there are not other advantages great and much to be desired. The
argument seems to imply that there are. But how and in what way these
are to be attained, will have to be considered attentively, or we may be
entangled in error.

CLEINIAS: Proceed.

ATHENIAN: Let me once more recall our doctrine of right education;
which, if I am not mistaken, depends on the due regulation of convivial
intercourse.

CLEINIAS: You talk rather grandly.

ATHENIAN: Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of
children, and I say that they are the forms under which virtue and
vice are originally present to them. As to wisdom and true and fixed
opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in
years; and we may say that he who possesses them, and the blessings
which are contained in them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by education
that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts
of virtue in children;--when pleasure, and friendship, and pain, and
hatred, are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding
the nature of them, and who find them, after they have attained reason,
to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole,
is virtue; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain,
which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you
ought to love from the beginning of life to the end, may be separated
off; and, in my view, will be rightly called education.

CLEINIAS: I think, Stranger, that you are quite right in all that you
have said and are saying about education.

ATHENIAN: I am glad to hear that you agree with me; for, indeed, the
discipline of pleasure and pain which, when rightly ordered, is a
principle of education, has been often relaxed and corrupted in human
life. And the Gods, pitying the toils which our race is born to undergo,
hav