Protarchus: What is it?
Socrates: When you speak of purity and clearness, or of excess, abundance, greatness and sufficiency, in what relation do these terms stand to truth?
Protarchus: Why do you ask, Socrates?
Socrates: Because, Protarchus, I should wish to test pleasure and knowledge in every possible way, in order that if there be a pure and impure element in either of them, I may present the pure element for judgment, and then they will be more easily judged of by you and by me and by all of us.
Protarchus: Most true.
Socrates: Let us investigate all the pure kinds; first selecting for consideration a single instance.
Protarchus: What instance shall we select?
Socrates: Suppose that we first of all take whiteness.
Protarchus: Very good.
Socrates: How can there be purity in whiteness, and what purity? Is that purest which is greatest or most in quantity, or that which is most unadulterated and freest from any admixture of other colours?
Protarchus: Clearly that which is most unadulterated.
Socrates: True, Protarchus; and so the purest white, and not the greatest or largest in quantity, is to be deemed truest and most beautiful?
Protarchus: Right.
Socrates: And we shall be quite right in saying that a little pure white is whiter and fairer and truer than a great deal that is mixed.
Protarchus: Perfectly right.
Socrates: There is no need of adducing many similar examples in illustration of the argument about pleasure; one such is sufficient to prove to us that a small pleasure or a small amount of pleasure, if pure or unalloyed with pain, is always pleasanter and truer and fairer than a great pleasure or a great amount of pleasure of another kind.
Protarchus: Assuredly; and the instance you have given is quite sufficient.
Socrates: But what do you say of another question:—have we not heard that pleasure is always a generation, and has no true being? Do not certain ingenious philosophers teach this doctrine, and ought not we to be grateful to them?
Protarchus: What do they mean?
Socrates: I will explain to you, my dear Protarchus, what they mean, by putting a question.
Protarchus: Ask, and I will answer.
Socrates: I assume that there are two natures, one self-existent, and the other ever in want of something.
Protarchus: What manner of natures are they?
Socrates: The one majestic ever, the other inferior.
Protarchus: You speak riddles.