INTRODUCTION. 13

3. In the language of ancient philosophy, the relative character of pleasure is described as "becoming" or "generation." This is relative to "being" or "essence." From one point of view, this may be regarded as the Heracleitean flux Referring to Heraclitus, who taught that all things are in a constant state of change. in contrast with Eleatic being Referring to the Eleatic school, which held that true reality is unchanging.; from another, it is the transient enjoyment of eating and drinking compared to the supposed permanence of intellectual pleasures. To us, however, this distinction is meaningless and belongs to a bygone stage of philosophy. Plato himself seems to have suspected that the continuity or life of things is just as much attributable to a principle of rest as to a principle of motion (compare Charmides 159, 160; Cratylus 437). A later view of pleasure is found in Aristotle, who agrees with Plato on many points—for example, his view of pleasure as a restoration to nature, and his distinction between bodily and mental, or necessary and non-necessary, pleasures—but he also moves beyond him. Aristotle affirms that pleasure is not in the body at all; therefore, even bodily pleasures should not be spoken of as "generations," but as being accompanied by generation (Nicomachean Ethics x. 3, 6).

4. Plato attempts to identify vicious pleasures with some form of error and insists that the term "false" may be applied to them. In this, he appears to be carrying out, in a confused manner, the Socratic doctrine that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance. He will allow for no distinction between the pleasures themselves and the erroneous opinions—whether arising from the illusion of distance or not—on which they are founded. To this, we naturally reply with Protarchus that the pleasure is what it is, even if the calculation is false or the after-effects are painful. It is difficult to avoid calling Plato a novice in dialectics when he overlooks such a distinction. Yet, on the other hand, we are hardly fair judges of confusing thoughts in those who view things differently from ourselves.

5. There appears also to be an inaccuracy in the notion, occurring here and in the Gorgias, regarding the simultaneousness of purely bodily pleasures and pains. We may perhaps admit—though even this is doubtful—that the feeling of pleasurable hope or recollection can be simultaneous with acute bodily suffering. But there is no such coexistence of the pain of thirst with the pleasures of drinking; they are not really simultaneous, for the one expels the other. Nor does Plato seem to have considered that bodily pleasures, except in certain extreme cases, are unattended by pain. Few philosophers would deny that a degree of pleasure attends eating and drinking; and yet