PROTARCHUS: Certainly not.

SOCRATES: Then when you hear a person saying, that always to live
without pain is the pleasantest of all things, what would you understand
him to mean by that statement?

PROTARCHUS: I think that by pleasure he must mean the negative of pain.

SOCRATES: Let us take any three things; or suppose that we embellish a
little and call the first gold, the second silver, and there shall be a
third which is neither.

PROTARCHUS: Very good.

SOCRATES: Now, can that which is neither be either gold or silver?

PROTARCHUS: Impossible.

SOCRATES: No more can that neutral or middle life be rightly or
reasonably spoken or thought of as pleasant or painful.

PROTARCHUS: Certainly not.

SOCRATES: And yet, my friend, there are, as we know, persons who say and
think so.

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And do they think that they have pleasure when they are free
from pain?

PROTARCHUS: They say so.

SOCRATES: And they must think or they would not say that they have
pleasure.

PROTARCHUS: I suppose not.

SOCRATES: And yet if pleasure and the negation of pain are of distinct
natures, they are wrong.

PROTARCHUS: But they are undoubtedly of distinct natures.

SOCRATES: Then shall we take the view that they are three, as we were
just now saying, or that they are two only--the one being a state of
pain, which is an evil, and the other a cessation of pain, which is of
itself a good, and is called pleasant?

PROTARCHUS: But why, Socrates, do we ask the question at all? I do not
see the reason.

SOCRATES: You, Protarchus, have clearly never heard of certain enemies
of our friend Philebus.

PROTARCHUS: And who may they be?

SOCRATES: Certain persons who are reputed to be masters in natural
philosophy, who deny the very existence of pleasure.

PROTARCHUS: Indeed!

SOCRATES: They say that what the school of Philebus calls pleasures are
all of them only avoidances of pain.

PROTARCHUS: And would you, Socrates, have us agree with them?

SOCRATES: Why, no, I would rather use them as a sort of diviners, who
divine the truth, not by rules of art, but by an instinctive repugnance
and extreme detestation which a noble nature has of the power of
pleasure, in which they think that there is nothing sound, and her
seductive influence is declared by them to be witchcraft, and not
pleasure. This is the use which you may make of them. And when you have
considered the various grounds of their dislike,