assertion which almost immediately follows, that pleasure and pain
naturally have their seat in the third or mixed class: these two
statements are unreconciled. In like manner, the table of goods does not
distinguish between the two heads of measure and symmetry; and though a
hint is given that the divine mind has the first place, nothing is said of
this in the final summing up. The relation of the goods to the sciences
does not appear; though dialectic may be thought to correspond to the
highest good, the sciences and arts and true opinions are enumerated in the
fourth class. We seem to have an intimation of a further discussion, in
which some topics lightly passed over were to receive a fuller
consideration. The various uses of the word 'mixed,' for the mixed life,
the mixed class of elements, the mixture of pleasures, or of pleasure and
pain, are a further source of perplexity. Our ignorance of the opinions
which Plato is attacking is also an element of obscurity. Many things in a
controversy might seem relevant, if we knew to what they were intended to
refer. But no conjecture will enable us to supply what Plato has not told
us; or to explain, from our fragmentary knowledge of them, the relation in
which his doctrine stood to the Eleatic Being or the Megarian good, or to
the theories of Aristippus or Antisthenes respecting pleasure. Nor are we
able to say how far Plato in the Philebus conceives the finite and infinite
(which occur both in the fragments of Philolaus and in the Pythagorean
table of opposites) in the same manner as contemporary Pythagoreans.

There is little in the characters which is worthy of remark. The Socrates
of the Philebus is devoid of any touch of Socratic irony, though here, as
in the Phaedrus, he twice attributes the flow of his ideas to a sudden
inspiration. The interlocutor Protarchus, the son of Callias, who has been
a hearer of Gorgias, is supposed to begin as a disciple of the partisans of
pleasure, but is drawn over to the opposite side by the arguments of
Socrates. The instincts of ingenuous youth are easily induced to take the