acquit Plato, to use his own language, of being a 'tyro in dialectics,'
when he overlooks such a distinction. Yet, on the other hand, we are
hardly fair judges of confusions of thought in those who view things
differently from ourselves.

5. There appears also to be an incorrectness in the notion which occurs
both here and in the Gorgias, of the simultaneousness of merely bodily
pleasures and pains. We may, perhaps, admit, though even this is not free
from doubt, that the feeling of pleasureable hope or recollection is, or
rather may be, simultaneous with acute bodily suffering. But there is no
such coexistence of the pain of thirst with the pleasures of drinking; they
are not really simultaneous, for the one expels the other. Nor does Plato
seem to have considered that the bodily pleasures, except in certain
extreme cases, are unattended with pain. Few philosophers will deny that a
degree of pleasure attends eating and drinking; and yet surely we might as
well speak of the pains of digestion which follow, as of the pains of
hunger and thirst which precede them. Plato's conception is derived partly
from the extreme case of a man suffering pain from hunger or thirst, partly
from the image of a full and empty vessel. But the truth is rather, that
while the gratification of our bodily desires constantly affords some
degree of pleasure, the antecedent pains are scarcely perceived by us,
being almost done away with by use and regularity.

6. The desire to classify pleasures as accompanied or not accompanied by
antecedent pains, has led Plato to place under one head the pleasures of
smell and sight, as well as those derived from sounds of music and from
knowledge. He would have done better to make a separate class of the
pleasures of smell, having no association of mind, or perhaps to have
divided them into natural and artificial. The pleasures of sight and sound
might then have been regarded as being the expression of ideas. But this