ll I find them?

There are many of them: take as an example the pleasures, of smell,
which are very great and have no antecedent pains; they come in a
moment, and when they depart leave no pain behind them.

Most true, he said.

Let us not, then, be induced to believe that pure pleasure is the
cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.

No.

Still, the more numerous and violent pleasures which reach the soul
through the body are generally of this sort--they are reliefs of pain.

That is true.

And the anticipations of future pleasures and pains are of a like
nature?

Yes.

Shall I give you an illustration of them?

Let me hear.

You would allow, I said, that there is in nature an upper and lower and
middle region?

I should.

And if a person were to go from the lower to the middle region, would
he not imagine that he is going up; and he who is standing in the
middle and sees whence he has come, would imagine that he is already in
the upper region, if he has never seen the true upper world?

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