the list of four.
PROTARCHUS: That which followed the infinite and the finite; and in
which you ranked health, and, if I am not mistaken, harmony.
SOCRATES: Capital; and now will you please to give me your best
attention?
PROTARCHUS: Proceed; I am attending.
SOCRATES: I say that when the harmony in animals is dissolved, there is
also a dissolution of nature and a generation of pain.
PROTARCHUS: That is very probable.
SOCRATES: And the restoration of harmony and return to nature is the
source of pleasure, if I may be allowed to speak in the fewest and
shortest words about matters of the greatest moment.
PROTARCHUS: I believe that you are right, Socrates; but will you try to
be a little plainer?
SOCRATES: Do not obvious and every-day phenomena furnish the simplest
illustration?
PROTARCHUS: What phenomena do you mean?
SOCRATES: Hunger, for example, is a dissolution and a pain.
PROTARCHUS: True.
SOCRATES: Whereas eating is a replenishment and a pleasure?
PROTARCHUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Thirst again is a destruction and a pain, but the effect
of moisture replenishing the dry place is a pleasure: once more, the
unnatural separation and dissolution caused by heat is painful, and the
natural restoration and refrigeration is pleasant.
PROTARCHUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: And the unnatural freezing of the moisture in an animal is
pain, and the natural process of resolution and return of the elements
to their original state is pleasure. And would not the general
proposition seem to you to hold, that the destroying of the natural
union of the finite and infinite, which, as I was observing before, make
up the class of living beings, is pain, and that the process of return
of all things to their own nature is pleasure?
PROTARCHUS: Granted; what you say has a general truth.
SOCRATES: Here then is one kind of pleasures and pains originating
severally in the two processes which we have described?
PROTARCHUS: Good.
SOCRATES: Let us next assume that in the soul herself there is an
antecedent hope of pleasure which is sweet and refreshing, and an
expectation of pain, fearful and anxious.
PROTARCHUS: Yes; this is another class of pleasures and pains, which is
of the soul only, apart from the body, and is produced by expectation.
SOCRATES: Right; for in the analysis of these, pure, as I suppose
them to be, the pleasures being unalloyed with pain and the pains with
pleasure, methinks that we shall se
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