pure
tone, then I mean to say that they are not relatively but absolutely
beautiful, and have natural pleasures associated with them.

PROTARCHUS: Yes, there are such pleasures.

SOCRATES: The pleasures of smell are of a less ethereal sort, but they
have no necessary admixture of pain; and all pleasures, however and
wherever experienced, which are unattended by pains, I assign to an
analogous class. Here then are two kinds of pleasures.

PROTARCHUS: I understand.

SOCRATES: To these may be added the pleasures of knowledge, if no hunger
of knowledge and no pain caused by such hunger precede them.

PROTARCHUS: And this is the case.

SOCRATES: Well, but if a man who is full of knowledge loses his
knowledge, are there not pains of forgetting?

PROTARCHUS: Not necessarily, but there may be times of reflection, when
he feels grief at the loss of his knowledge.

SOCRATES: Yes, my friend, but at present we are enumerating only the
natural perceptions, and have nothing to do with reflection.

PROTARCHUS: In that case you are right in saying that the loss of
knowledge is not attended with pain.

SOCRATES: These pleasures of knowledge, then, are unmixed with pain; and
they are not the pleasures of the many but of a very few.

PROTARCHUS: Quite true.

SOCRATES: And now, having fairly separated the pure pleasures and
those which may be rightly termed impure, let us further add to our
description of them, that the pleasures which are in excess have no
measure, but that those which are not in excess have measure; the great,
the excessive, whether more or less frequent, we shall be right in
referring to the class of the infinite, and of the more and less, which
pours through body and soul alike; and the others we shall refer to the
class which has measure.

PROTARCHUS: Quite right, Socrates.

SOCRATES: Still there is something more to be considered about
pleasures.

PROTARCHUS: What is it?

SOCRATES: When you speak of purity and clearness, or of excess,
abundance, greatness and sufficiency, in what relation do these terms
stand to truth?

PROTARCHUS: Why do you ask, Socrates?

SOCRATES: Because, Protarchus, I should wish to test pleasure and
knowledge in every possible way, in order that if there be a pure and
impure element in either of them, I may present the pure element for
judgment, and then they will be more easily judged of by you and by me
and by all of us.

PROTARCHUS: Most true.

SOCRATES: Let us