not always conscious of what we are doing or of what happens to us,' a
chance expression to which if philosophers had attended they would have
escaped many errors in psychology. We may contrast the contempt which
is poured upon the verbal difficulty of the one and many, and the
seriousness with the unity of opposites is regarded from the higher
point of view of abstract ideas: or compare the simple manner in which
the question of cause and effect and their mutual dependence is regarded
by Plato (to which modern science has returned in Mill and Bacon), and
the cumbrous fourfold division of causes in the Physics and Metaphysics
of Aristotle, for which it has puzzled the world to find a use in so
many centuries. When we consider the backwardness of knowledge in
the age of Plato, the boldness with which he looks forward into the
distance, the many questions of modern philosophy which are anticipated
in his writings, may we not truly describe him in his own words as a
'spectator of all time and of all existence'?
PHILEBUS
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Protarchus, Philebus.
SOCRATES: Observe, Protarchus, the nature of the position which you are
now going to take from Philebus, and what the other position is which I
maintain, and which, if you do not approve of it, is to be controverted
by you. Shall you and I sum up the two sides?
PROTARCHUS: By all means.
SOCRATES: Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight,
and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living
being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence
and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are
better and more desirable than pleasure for all who are able to partake
of them, and that to all such who are or ever will be they are the most
advantageous of all things. Have I not given, Philebus, a fair statement
of the two sides of the argument?
PHILEBUS: Nothing could be fairer, Socrates.
SOCRATES: And do you, Protarchus, accept the position which is assigned
to you?
PROTARCHUS: I cannot do otherwise, since our excellent Philebus has left
the field.
SOCRATES: Surely the truth about these matters ought, by all means, to
be ascertained.
PROTARCHUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Shall we further agree--
PROTARCHUS: To what?
SOCRATES: That you and I must now try to indicate some state and
disposition of the soul, which has the property of making all men happy.
PROTARCHUS: Yes, by all means.
SOCRATES: And you say that pleasure, and I say that wisdom, is such a
state?
PROTARCHUS: True.
SOCRATES: And what if there be a third state, which is better than
either? Then both of us are vanquished--are we not? But if this life,
which really has the power of making men happy, turn out to be more
akin to pleasure than to wisdom, the life of pleasure may still have the
advantage over the life of wisdom.
PROTARCHUS: True.