Part 29

SOCRATES: Very good; but still, if I am not mistaken, you do assert that we must always be experiencing one of them; that is what the wise tell us; for, say they, all things are ever flowing up and down.

PROTARCHUS: Yes, and their words are of no mean authority.

SOCRATES: Of course, for they are no mean authorities themselves; and I should like to avoid the brunt of their argument. Shall I tell you how I mean to escape from them? And you shall be the partner of my flight.

PROTARCHUS: How?

SOCRATES: To them we will say: 'Good; but are we, or living things in general, always conscious of what happens to us--for example, of our growth, or the like? Are we not, on the contrary, almost wholly unconscious of this and similar phenomena?' You must answer for them.

PROTARCHUS: The latter alternative is the true one.

SOCRATES: Then we were not right in saying, just now, that motions going up and down cause pleasures and pains?

PROTARCHUS: True.

SOCRATES: A better and more unexceptionable way of speaking will be--

PROTARCHUS: What?

SOCRATES: If we say that the great changes produce pleasures and pains, but that the moderate and lesser ones do neither.

PROTARCHUS: That, Socrates, is the more correct mode of speaking.

SOCRATES: But if this be true, the life to which I was just now referring again appears.

PROTARCHUS: What life?

SOCRATES: The life which we affirmed to be devoid either of pain or of joy.

PROTARCHUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: We may assume then that there are three lives, one pleasant, one painful, and the third which is neither; what say you?

PROTARCHUS: I should say as you do that there are three of them.

SOCRATES: But if so, the negation of pain will not be the same with pleasure.

PROTARCHUS: Certainly not.

SOCRATES: Then when you hear a person saying, that always to live without pain is the pleasantest of all things, what would you understand him to mean by that statement?

PROTARCHUS: I think that by pleasure he must mean the negative of pain.

SOCRATES: Let us take any three things; or suppose that we embellish a little and call the first gold, the second silver, and there shall be a third which is neither.

PROTARCHUS: Very good.

SOCRATES: Now, can that which is neither be either gold or silver?

PROTARCHUS: Impossible.

SOCRATES: No more can that neutral or middle life be rightly or reasonably spoken or thought of as pleasant or painful.

PROTARCHUS: Certainly not.