pronounce it good. The wise man will bear pain up to a certain point; and when he reaches that limit, he will stop. What is the point? Where is the limit? Virtue is the point up to which the bearing of pain is good, the limit beyond which the bearing of pain becomes an evil. Virtue, then, is the supreme good, and makes everything that furthers it, whether pleasurable or painful, good. Virtue makes everything that hinders it, whether pleasurable or painful, bad. What, then, is virtue? In what does this priceless pearl consist? We have our two analogies. Virtue is to pleasure what the music is to the tuning of the instrument. Just as the perfection of the music proves the excellence of the tuning, so the perfection of virtue justifies the particular pleasures we enjoy. Virtue stands related to the endurance of pain, as health stands related to the taking of medicine. The perfection of health proves that, however distasteful the medicine may be, it is nevertheless good; and any imperfection of health that may result from either too much or too little medicine shows that in the quantity taken the medicine was bad for us. Precisely so pain is good for us up to the point where virtue requires it. Below or above that point, pain becomes an evil. Plato spared no pains to disentangle the question of virtue from its complications with rewards and penalties, pleasures and pains. As the virtue of a violin is not in its carving or polish, but in the music it produces; as the virtue of medicine is not in its sweetness or its absence of bitterness, so the virtue of man has primarily nothing to do with rewards and penalties, pleasures or pains. In our study of virtue, he says, we must strip it naked of all rewards, honours, and emoluments; indeed we must go farther and even dress it up in the outer habiliments of vice; we must make the virtuous man poor, persecuted, forsaken, unpopular, distrusted, reviled, and condemned. Then we may be able to see what there is in virtue which, in every conceivable circumstance, makes it superior to vice. He makes one of his characters in the Republic complain that: "No one has ever adequately described either in verse or prose the true essential nature of either righteousness or unrighteousness immanent in the soul, and invisible to any human or divine eye; or shown that of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, righteousness is the greatest good, and unrighteousness the greatest evil. Therefore I say, not only prove to us that righteousness is better than unrighteousness, but show what either of them do to the possessors of them, which makes the one to be good and the other evil, whether seen or unseen by gods and men." Accordingly he attributes to the unrighteous man skill to win a reputation for righteousness, even while acting most unrighteously. He clothes him with power and glory, and fame, and family, and influence; fills his life with delights;