Pleasures and pains and desires are a part of human nature, and onthem every mortal being must of necessity hang and depend with themost eager interest. And therefore we must praise the noblest life,not only as the fairest in appearance, but as being one which, if aman will only taste, and not, while still in his youth, desert foranother, he will find to surpass also in the very thing which we allof us desire-I mean in having a greater amount of pleasure and less ofpain during the whole of life. And this will be plain, if a man hasa true taste of them, as will be quickly and clearly seen. But what isa true taste? That we have to learn from the argument-the pointbeing what is according to nature, and what is not according tonature. One life must be compared with another, the more pleasurablewith the more painful, after this manner:-We desire to havepleasure, but we neither desire nor choose pain; and the neutral statewe are ready to take in exchange, not for pleasure but for pain; andwe also wish for less pain and greater pleasure, but less pleasure andgreater pain we do not wish for; and an equal balance of either wecannot venture to assert that we should desire. And all these differor do not differ severally in number and magnitude and intensity andequality, and in the opposites of these when regarded as objects ofchoice, in relation to desire. And such being the necessary order ofthings, we wish for that life in which there are many great andintense elements of pleasure and pain, and in which the pleasuresare in excess, and do not wish for that in which the opposites exceed;nor, again, do we wish for that in which the clements of either aresmall and few and feeble, and the pains exceed. And when, as I saidbefore, there is a balance of pleasure and pain in life, this is to beregarded by us as the balanced life; while other lives are preferredby us because they exceed in what we like, or are rejected by usbecause they exceed in what we dislike. All the lives of men may beregarded by us as bound up in these, and we must also consider whatsort of lives we by nature desire. And if we wish for any others, Isay that we desire them only through some ignorance and inexperienceof the lives which actually exist.
Now, what lives are they, and how many in which, having searched outand beheld the objects of will and desire and their opposites, andmaking of them a law, choosing, I say, the dear and the pleasant andthe best and noblest, a man may live in the happiest way possible? Letus say that the temperate life is one kind of life, and the rationalanother, and the courageous another, and the healthful another; and tothese four let us oppose four other lives-the foolish, the cowardly,the intemperate, the diseased. He who knows the temperate life willdescribe it as in all things gentle, having gentle pains and gentlepleasures, and placid desires and loves not insane; whereas theintemperate life is impetuous in all things, and has violent pains andpleasures, and vehement and stinging desires, and loves utterlyinsane; and in the temperate life the pleasures exceed the pains,but in the intemperate life the pains exceed the pleasures ingreatness and number and frequency. Hence one of the two lives isnaturally and necessarily more pleasant and the other more painful,and he who would live pleasantly cannot possibly choose to liveintemperately. And if this is true, the inference clearly is that noman is voluntarily intemperate; but that the whole multitude of menlack temperance in their lives, either from ignorance, or from want ofself-control, or both. And the same holds of the diseased andhealthy life; they both have pleasures and pains, but in health thepleasure exceeds the pain, and in sickness the pain exceeds thepleasure. Now our intention in choosing the lives is not that thepainful should exceed, but the life in which pain is exceeded bypleasure we have determined to be the more pleasant life. And weshould say that the temperate life has the elements both of pleasureand pain fewer and smaller and less frequent than the intemperate, andthe wise life than the foolish life, and the life of courage thanthe life of cowardice; one of each pair exceeding in pleasure andthe other in pain, the courageous surpassing the cowardly, and thewise exceeding the foolish. And so the one dass of lives exceeds theother class in pleasure; the temperate and courageous and wise andhealthy exceed the cowardly and foolish and intemperate and diseasedlives; and generally speaking, that which has any virtue, whether ofbody or soul, is pleasanter than the vicious life, and far superior inbeauty and rectitude and excellence and reputation, and causes him wholives accordingly to be infinitely happier than the opposite.
Enough of the preamble; and now the laws should follow; or, to speakmore correctly, outline of them. As, then, in the case of a web or anyother tissue, the warp and the woof cannot be made of the samematerials, but the warp is necessarily superior as being stronger, andhaving a certain character of firmness, whereas the woof is softer andhas a proper degree of elasticity;-in a similar manner those who areto hold great offices in states, should be distinguished truly in eachcase from those who have been but slenderly proven by education. Letus suppose that there are two parts in the constitution of a state-onethe creation of offices, the other the laws which are assigned to themto administer.