"But if you give up the view that 'liberation is the manifestation of happiness,' and then accept such a view as that which holds it to be only the cessation of pain, does not your conduct resemble that of the dyspeptic patient who refused sweet milk and preferred sour rice-gruel?" Your satire, however, falls powerless, as fitter for some speech in a play [rather than for a grave philosophical argument]. The truth is that all happiness must be included under the category of pain, since, like honey mixed with poison, it is always accompanied by pain, either as admitting of increase,[231] or as being an object of perception, or as being exposed to many hostile influences, or as involving an irksome necessity of seeking all kinds of instruments for its production. Nor may you retort on us that we have fulfilled the proverb of "seeking one thing and dropping another in the search," since we have abolished happiness as being ever tainted by some incidental pain, and, at the same time, our own favourite alternative is one which no one can consider desirable. For the truth is that any attempt to establish happiness as the _summum bonum_, since it is inevitably accompanied by various causes of pain, is only like the man who would try to grasp a red-hot ball of iron under the delusion that it was gold. In the case of objects of enjoyment got together by rightful means, we may find many firefly-like pleasures; but then how many are the rainy days to drown them? And in the case of those got together by wrong means, the mind cannot even conceive the future issue which will be brought about. Let our intelligent readers consider all this, and not attempt to disguise their own conscious experience. Therefore it is that we hold it as indisputable that for him, pre-eminent among his fellows, who, through the favour of the Supreme Being, has, by the regular method of listening to the revealed Śruti, &c., attained unto the knowledge of the real nature of the soul, for him the absolute abolition of pain is the true Liberation.