ialectic may be thought to correspond to the highest good, the
sciences and arts and true opinions are enumerated in the fourth class.
We seem to have an intimation of a further discussion, in which some
topics lightly passed over were to receive a fuller consideration. The
various uses of the word 'mixed,' for the mixed life, the mixed class
of elements, the mixture of pleasures, or of pleasure and pain, are a
further source of perplexity. Our ignorance of the opinions which
Plato is attacking is also an element of obscurity. Many things in a
controversy might seem relevant, if we knew to what they were intended
to refer. But no conjecture will enable us to supply what Plato has
not told us; or to explain, from our fragmentary knowledge of them,
the relation in which his doctrine stood to the Eleatic Being or
the Megarian good, or to the theories of Aristippus or Antisthenes
respecting pleasure. Nor are we able to say how far Plato in the
Philebus conceives the finite and infinite (which occur both in the
fragments of Philolaus and in the Pythagorean table of opposites) in the
same manner as contemporary Pythagoreans.

There is little in the characters which is worthy of remark. The
Socrates of the Philebus is devoid of any touch of Socratic irony,
though here, as in the Phaedrus, he twice attributes the flow of his
ideas to a sudden inspiration. The interlocutor Protarchus, the son of
Callias, who has been a hearer of Gorgias, is supposed to begin as a
disciple of the partisans of pleasure, but is drawn over to the opposite
side by the arguments of Socrates. The instincts of ingenuous youth are
easily induced to take the better part. Philebus, who has withdrawn from
the argument, is several times brought back again, that he may support
pleasure, of which he remains to the end the uncompromising advocate.
On the other hand, the youthful group of listeners by whom he is
surrounded, 'Philebus' boys' as they are termed, whose presence is
several times intimated, are described as all of them at last convinced
by the arguments of Socrates. They bear a very faded resemblance to the
interested audiences of the Charmides, Lysis, or Protagoras. Other
signs of relation to external life in the dialogue, or references
to contemporary things and persons, with the single exception of the
allusions to the anonymous enemies of pleasure, and the teachers of the
flux, there are none.

The omission of the doctrine of recollection, deriv