supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared with the
transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure, knowledge
and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue and pleasure,
the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite, harmony or beauty and
discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so many pairs of opposites,
which in Plato easily pass into one another, and are seldom kept perfectly
distinct. And we must not forget that Plato's conception of pleasure is
the Heracleitean flux transferred to the sphere of human conduct. There is
some degree of unfairness in opposing the principle of good, which is
objective, to the principle of pleasure, which is subjective. For the
assertion of the permanence of good is only based on the assumption of its
objective character. Had Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature of
good, but on the subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have
been found to be as transient and precarious as pleasure.

b. The arts or sciences, when pursued without any view to truth, or the
improvement of human life, are called flatteries. They are all alike
dependent upon the opinion of mankind, from which they are derived. To
Plato the whole world appears to be sunk in error, based on self-interest.
To this is opposed the one wise man hardly professing to have found truth,
yet strong in the conviction that a virtuous life is the only good, whether
regarded with reference to this world or to another. Statesmen, Sophists,
rhetoricians, poets, are alike brought up for judgment. They are the
parodies of wise men, and their arts are the parodies of true arts and
sciences. All that they call science is merely the result of that study of
the tempers of the Great Beast, which he describes in the Republic.

c. Various other points of contact naturally suggest themselves between
the Gorgias and other dialogues, especially the Republic, the Philebus, and
the Protagoras. There are closer resemblances both of spirit and language