nd only when
false, can pleasure, like opinion, be vicious. Against this conclusion
Protarchus reclaims.

Leaving his denial for the present, Socrates proceeds to show that
some pleasures are false from another point of view. In desire, as we
admitted, the body is divided from the soul, and hence pleasures and
pains are often simultaneous. And we further admitted that both of them
belonged to the infinite class. How, then, can we compare them? Are we
not liable, or rather certain, as in the case of sight, to be deceived
by distance and relation? In this case the pleasures and pains are not
false because based upon false opinion, but are themselves false. And
there is another illusion: pain has often been said by us to arise out
of the derangement--pleasure out of the restoration--of our nature. But
in passing from one to the other, do we not experience neutral states,
which although they appear pleasureable or painful are really neither?
For even if we admit, with the wise man whom Protarchus loves (and only
a wise man could have ever entertained such a notion), that all things
are in a perpetual flux, still these changes are often unconscious, and
devoid either of pleasure or pain. We assume, then, that there are three
states--pleasureable, painful, neutral; we may embellish a little by
calling them gold, silver, and that which is neither.

But there are certain natural philosophers who will not admit a third
state. Their instinctive dislike to pleasure leads them to affirm that
pleasure is only the absence of pain. They are noble fellows, and,
although we do not agree with them, we may use them as diviners who
will indicate to us the right track. They will say, that the nature of
anything is best known from the examination of extreme cases, e.g. the
nature of hardness from the examination of the hardest things; and that
the nature of pleasure will be best understood from an examination of
the most intense pleasures. Now these are the pleasures of the body, not
of the mind; the pleasures of disease and not of health, the pleasures
of the intemperate and not of the temperate. I am speaking, not of the
frequency or continuance, but only of the intensity of such pleasures,
and this is given them by contrast with the pain or sickness of body
which precedes them. Their morbid nature is illustrated by the lesser
instances of itching and scratching, respecting which I swear that I
cannot tell whether they are a pleasure or a