PHILEBUS. 14

surely we might as well speak of the pains of digestion that follow as of the pains of hunger and thirst that precede them. Plato's conception is derived partly from the extreme case of a man suffering from hunger or thirst, and partly from the image of a full or empty vessel. But the truth is that while the gratification of our bodily desires constantly affords some degree of pleasure, the prior pains are scarcely perceived by us, as they are almost eliminated by habit and regularity.

6. The desire to classify pleasures as either accompanied or unaccompanied by prior pains led Plato to group the pleasures of smell and sight with those derived from simple musical sounds and mathematical figures. He would have done better to connect the pleasures of smell, through the medium of taste, with the bodily appetites they seem to serve. The pleasures of sight and sound could then have been regarded as the expression of ideas. However, this higher and truer perspective never seems to have occurred to Plato. He makes no distinction between the fine arts and the mechanical, and neither here nor anywhere else does he have an adequate conception of the beautiful in external things.

7. Plato partially agrees with certain "surly or fastidious" philosophers, as he terms them, who defined pleasure as the absence of pain. They are also described as eminent in physics. Unfortunately, no school of Greek philosophy known to us combined these two characteristics. Antisthenes, who was an enemy of pleasure, was not a physical philosopher; the atomists, who were physical philosophers, were not enemies of pleasure. Yet such a combination of opinions is far from impossible. Plato's omission to mention them distinctly has created the same uncertainty regarding them that also occurs regarding the "friends of the ideas" and the materialists in the Sophist.

On the whole, this discussion is one of the least satisfactory in Plato's dialogues. While the ethical nature of pleasure is scarcely considered and the merely physical phenomenon is imperfectly analyzed, too much weight is given to ideas of measure and number as the sole principle of good. The comparison of pleasure and knowledge is really a comparison of two elements that have no common measure and cannot be excluded from each other. Feeling is not opposed to knowledge; in all consciousness, there is an element of both. The most abstract kinds of knowledge are inseparable from some pleasure