The cup is ready, waiting to be mingled, and here are two fountains, one of honey, the other of pure water, out of which to make the fairest possible mixture. There are pure and impure pleasures—pure and impure sciences. Let us consider the sections of each which have the most of purity and truth; to admit them all indiscriminately would be dangerous. First we will take the pure sciences; but shall we mingle the impure—the art which uses the false rule and the false measure? That we must, if we are any of us to find our way home; man cannot live upon pure mathematics alone. And must I include music, which is admitted to be guesswork? “Yes, you must, if human life is to have any humanity.” Well, then, I will open the door and let them all in; they shall mingle in an Homeric “meeting of the waters.” And now we turn to the pleasures; shall I admit them? “Admit first of all the pure pleasures; secondly, the necessary.” And what shall we say about the rest? First, ask the pleasures—they will be too happy to dwell with wisdom. Secondly, ask the arts and sciences—they reply that the excesses of intemperance are the ruin of them; and that they would rather only have the pleasures of health and temperance, which are the handmaidens of virtue. But still we want truth? That is now added; and so the argument is complete, and may be compared to an incorporeal law, which is to hold fair rule over a living body. And now we are at the vestibule of the good, in which there are three chief elements—truth, symmetry, and beauty. These will be the criterion of the comparative claims of pleasure and wisdom.
Which has the greater share of truth? Surely wisdom; for pleasure is the veriest impostor in the world, and the perjuries of lovers have passed into a proverb.
Which of symmetry? Wisdom again; for nothing is more immoderate than pleasure.
Which of beauty? Once more, wisdom; for pleasure is often unseemly, and the greatest pleasures are put out of sight.
Not pleasure, then, ranks first in the scale of good, but measure, and eternal harmony.
Second comes the symmetrical and beautiful and perfect.
Third, mind and wisdom.
Fourth, sciences and arts and true opinions.
Fifth, painless pleasures.
Of a sixth class, I have no more to say. Thus, pleasure and mind may both renounce the claim to the first place. But mind is ten thousand times nearer to the chief good than pleasure. Pleasure ranks fifth and not first, even though all the animals in the world assert the contrary.
From the days of Aristippus and Epicurus to our own times the nature of pleasure has occupied the attention of philosophers. “Is pleasure an evil? a good? the only good?” are the simple forms which the enquiry assumed among the Socratic schools. But at an early stage of the controversy another question was asked: “Do pleasures differ in kind? and are some bad, some good, and some neither bad nor good?” There are bodily and there are mental pleasures, which were at first confused but afterwards distinguished. A distinction was also made between necessary and unnecessary pleasures; and again between pleasures which had or had not corresponding pains. The ancient philosophers were fond of asking, in the language of their age, “Is pleasure a ‘becoming’ only, and therefore transient and relative, or do some pleasures partake of truth and Being?” To these ancient speculations the moderns have added a further question:—“Whose pleasure? The pleasure of yourself, or of your neighbour—of the individual, or of the world?” This little addition has changed the whole aspect of the discussion: the same word is now supposed to include two principles as widely different as benevolence and self-love. Some modern writers have also distinguished between pleasure the test, and pleasure the motive of actions. For the universal test of right actions (how I know them) may not always be the highest or best motive of them (why I do them).
Socrates, as we learn from the Memorabilia of Xenophon, first drew attention to the consequences of actions. Mankind were said by him to act rightly when they knew what they were doing, or, in the language of the “Gorgias,” “did what they would.” He seems to have been the first who maintained that the good was the useful (Memorabilia IV 6, 8). In his eagerness for generalization, seeking, as Aristotle says, for the universal in Ethics (Metaphysics I 6. §§ 2, 3), he took the most obvious intellectual aspect of human action which occurred to him. He meant to emphasize, not pleasure, but the calculation of pleasure; neither is he arguing that pleasure is the chief good, but that we should have a principle of choice. He did not intend to oppose “the useful” to some higher conception, such as the Platonic ideal, but to chance and caprice. The Platonic Socrates pursues the same vein of thought in the “Protagoras” (351 following), where he argues against the so-called sophist that pleasure and pain are the final standards and motives of good and evil, and that the salvation of human life depends upon a right estimate of pleasures greater or less when seen near and at a distance. The testimony of Xenophon is thus confirmed by that of Plato, and we are therefore justified in calling Socrates the first utilitarian; as indeed there is no side or aspect of philosophy which may not with reason be ascribed to him—he is Cynic and Cyrenaic, Platonist and Aristotelian in one. But in the “Phaedo” the Socratic has already passed into a more ideal point of view (68, 69); and he, or rather Plato speaking in his person, expressly
