To be sure, he said; how can he think otherwise?

But if he were taken back again he would imagine, and truly imagine,
that he was descending?

No doubt.

All that would arise out of his ignorance of the true upper and middle
and lower regions?

Yes.

Then can you wonder that persons who are inexperienced in the truth, as
they have wrong ideas about many other things, should also have wrong
ideas about pleasure and pain and the intermediate state; so that when
they are only being drawn towards the painful they feel pain and think
the pain which they experience to be real, and in like manner, when
drawn away from pain to the neutral or intermediate state, they firmly
believe that they have reached the goal of satiety and pleasure; they,
not knowing pleasure, err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain,
which is like contrasting black with grey instead of white--can you
wonder, I say, at this?

No, indeed; I should be much more disposed to wonder at the opposite.

Look at the matter thus:--Hunger, thirst, and the like, are inanitions
of the bodily state?

Yes.

And ignorance and folly are inanitions of the soul?

True.

And food and wisdom are the corresponding satisfactions of either?

Certainly.

And is the satisfaction derived from that which has less or from that
which has more existence the truer?

Clearly, from that which has more.

What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence in your
judgment--those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of
sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion
and knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue? Put
the question in this way:--Which has a more pure being--that which is
concerned with the invariable, the immortal, and the true, and is of
such a nature, and is found in such natures; or that which is concerned
with and found in the variable and mortal, and is itself variable and
mortal?

Far purer, he replied, is the being of that which is concerned with the
invariable.

And does the essence of the invariable partake of knowledge in the same
degree as of essence?

Yes, of knowledge in the same degree.

And of truth in the same degree?

Yes.

And, conversely, that which has less of truth will also have less of
essence?

Necessarily.

Then, in general, those kinds of things which are in the service of the
body have less of truth and essence than those which are in the service
of t