higher and truer point of view never appears to have occurred to Plato.
Nor has he any distinction between the fine arts and the mechanical; and,
neither here nor anywhere, an adequate conception of the beautiful in
external things.

7. Plato agrees partially with certain 'surly or fastidious' philosophers,
as he terms them, who defined pleasure to be the absence of pain. They are
also described as eminent in physics. There is unfortunately no school of
Greek philosophy known to us which combined these two characteristics.
Antisthenes, who was an enemy of pleasure, was not a physical philosopher;
the atomists, who were physical philosophers, were not enemies of pleasure.
Yet such a combination of opinions is far from being impossible. Plato's
omission to mention them by name has created the same uncertainty
respecting them which also occurs respecting the 'friends of the ideas' and
the 'materialists' in the Sophist.

On the whole, this discussion is one of the least satisfactory in the
dialogues of Plato. While the ethical nature of pleasure is scarcely
considered, and the merely physical phenomenon imperfectly analysed, too
much weight is given to ideas of measure and number, as the sole principle
of good. The comparison of pleasure and knowledge is really a comparison
of two elements, which have no common measure, and which cannot be excluded
from each other. Feeling is not opposed to knowledge, and in all
consciousness there is an element of both. The most abstract kinds of
knowledge are inseparable from some pleasure or pain, which accompanies the
acquisition or possession of them: the student is liable to grow weary of
them, and soon discovers that continuous mental energy is not granted to
men. The most sensual pleasure, on the other hand, is inseparable from the
consciousness of pleasure; no man can be happy who, to borrow Plato's
illustration, is leading the life of an oyster. Hence (by his own