Page - 919 - in The Complete Plato
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PROTARCHUS: Most true.
SOCRATES: Let us investigate all the pure kinds; first selecting for
consideration a single instance.
PROTARCHUS: What instance shall we select?
SOCRATES: Suppose that we first of all take whiteness.
PROTARCHUS: Very good.
SOCRATES: How can there be purity in whiteness, and what purity? Is that
purest which is greatest or most in quantity, or that which is most
unadulterated and freest from any admixture of other colours?
PROTARCHUS: Clearly that which is most unadulterated.
SOCRATES: True, Protarchus; and so the purest white, and not the greatest
or largest in quantity, is to be deemed truest and most beautiful?
PROTARCHUS: Right.
SOCRATES: And we shall be quite right in saying that a little pure white is
whiter and fairer and truer than a great deal that is mixed.
PROTARCHUS: Perfectly right.
SOCRATES: There is no need of adducing many similar examples in
illustration of the argument about pleasure; one such is sufficient to prove to
us that a small pleasure or a small amount of pleasure, if pure or unalloyed
with pain, is always pleasanter and truer and fairer than a great pleasure or a
great amount of pleasure of another kind.
PROTARCHUS: Assuredly; and the instance you have given is quite
sufficient.
SOCRATES: But what do you say of another question:—have we not heard
that pleasure is always a generation, and has no true being? Do not certain
ingenious philosophers teach this doctrine, and ought not we to be grateful to
them?
PROTARCHUS: What do they mean?
SOCRATES: I will explain to you, my dear Protarchus, what they mean, by
putting a question.
PROTARCHUS: Ask, and I will answer.
SOCRATES: I assume that there are two natures, one self-existent, and the
other ever in want of something.
PROTARCHUS: What manner of natures are they?
919
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book The Complete Plato"
The Complete Plato
- Title
- The Complete Plato
- Author
- Plato
- Date
- ~347 B.C.
- Language
- English
- License
- PD
- Size
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Pages
- 1612
- Keywords
- Philosophy, Antique, Philosophie, Antike, Dialogues, Metaphysik, Metaphysics, Ideologie, Ideology, Englisch
- Categories
- Geisteswissenschaften
- International