we know so little, and without which though a man gain the world he has
no profit of it! Some people imagine that the good is wisdom; but this
involves a circle,—the good, they say, is wisdom, wisdom has to do with
the good. According to others the good is pleasure; but then comes the
absurdity that good is bad, for there are bad pleasures as well as
good. Again, the good must have reality; a man may desire the
appearance of virtue, but he will not desire the appearance of good.
Ought our guardians then to be ignorant of this supreme principle, of
which every man has a presentiment, and without which no man has any
real knowledge of anything? ‘But, Socrates, what is this supreme
principle, knowledge or pleasure, or what? You may think me
troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always repeating
the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.’ Can I say what
I do not know? ‘You may offer an opinion.’ And will the blindness and
crookedness of opinion content you when you might have the light and
certainty of science? ‘I will only ask you to give such an explanation
of the good as you have given already of temperance and justice.’ I
wish that I could, but in my present mood I cannot reach to the height
of the knowledge of the good. To the parent or principal I cannot
introduce you, but to the child begotten in his image, which I may
compare with the interest on the principal, I will. (Audit the account,
and do not let me give you a false statement of the debt.) You remember
our old distinction of the many beautiful and the one beautiful, the
particular and the universal, the objects of sight and the objects of
thought? Did you ever consider that the objects of sight imply a
faculty of sight which is the most complex and costly of our senses,
requiring not only objects of sense, but also a medium, which is light;
without which the sight will not distinguish between colours and all
will be a blank? For light is the noble bond between the perceiving
faculty and the thing perceived, and the god who gives us light is the
sun, who is the eye of the day, but is not to be confounded with the
eye of man. This eye of the day or sun is what I call the child of the
good, standing in the same relation to the visible world as the good to
the intellectual. When the sun shines the eye sees, and in the
intellectual world where truth is, there is sight and light. Now that
which is the sun of intelligent natures, is the idea of good, the cause
of knowledge and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and
standing in the same relation to them in which the sun stands to light.
O inconceivable height of beauty, which is above knowledge and above
truth! (‘You cannot surely mean pleasure,’ he said. Peace, I replied.)
And this idea of good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and
the author not of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than
either in dignity and power. ‘That is a reach of thought more than