chief difference between subjective pleasure and subjective knowledge in
respect of permanence is that the latter, when our feeble faculties are
able to grasp it, still conveys to us an idea of unchangeableness which
cannot be got rid of.

3. In the language of ancient philosophy, the relative character of
pleasure is described as becoming or generation. This is relative to Being
or Essence, and from one point of view may be regarded as the Heraclitean
flux in contrast with the Eleatic Being; from another, as the transient
enjoyment of eating and drinking compared with the supposed permanence of
intellectual pleasures. But to us the distinction is unmeaning, and
belongs to a stage of philosophy which has passed away. Plato himself
seems to have suspected that the continuance or life of things is quite as
much to be attributed to a principle of rest as of motion (compare Charm.
Cratyl.). A later view of pleasure is found in Aristotle, who agrees with
Plato in many points, e.g. in his view of pleasure as a restoration to
nature, in his distinction between bodily and mental, between necessary and
non-necessary pleasures. But he is also in advance of Plato; for he
affirms that pleasure is not in the body at all; and hence not even the
bodily pleasures are to be spoken of as generations, but only as
accompanied by generation (Nic. Eth.).

4. Plato attempts to identify vicious pleasures with some form of error,
and insists that the term false may be applied to them: in this he appears
to be carrying out in a confused manner the Socratic doctrine, that virtue
is knowledge, vice ignorance. He will allow of no distinction between the
pleasures and the erroneous opinions on which they are founded, whether
arising out of the illusion of distance or not. But to this we naturally
reply with Protarchus, that the pleasure is what it is, although the
calculation may be false, or the after-effects painful. It is difficult to