Pleasures and pains and desires are a part of human nature,and on them every mortal being must of necessity hang and depend with the most eager interest.And therefore we must praise the noblest life,not only as the fairest in appearance,but as being one which,if a man will only taste,and not,while still in his youth,desert for another,he will find to surpass also in the very thing which we all of us desire-I mean in having a greater amount of pleasure and less of pain during the whole of life.And this will be plain,if a man has a true taste of them,as will be quickly and clearly seen.But what is a true taste?That we have to learn from the argument-the point being what is according to nature,and what is not according to nature.One life must be compared with another,the more pleasurable with the more painful,after this manner:-We desire to have pleasure,but we neither desire nor choose pain;and the neutral state we are ready to take in exchange,not for pleasure but for pain;and we also wish for less pain and greater pleasure,but less pleasure and greater pain we do not wish for;and an equal balance of either we cannot venture to assert that we should desire.And all these differ or do not differ severally in number and magnitude and intensity and equality,and in the opposites of these when regarded as objects of choice,in relation to desire.And such being the necessary order of things,we wish for that life in which there are many great and intense elements of pleasure and pain,and in which the pleasures are 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 are small and few and feeble,and the pains exceed.And when,as I said before,there is a balance of pleasure and pain in life,this is to be regarded by us as the balanced life;while other lives are preferred by us because they exceed in what we like,or are rejected by us because they exceed in what we dislike.All the lives of men may be regarded by us as bound up in these,and we must also consider what sort of lives we by nature desire.And if we wish for any others,Isay that we desire them only through some ignorance and inexperience of the lives which actually exist.
Now,what lives are they,and how many in which,having searched out and beheld the objects of will and desire and their opposites,and making of them a law,choosing,I say,the dear and the pleasant and the best and noblest,a man may live in the happiest way possible?Let us say that the temperate life is one kind of life,and the rational another,and the courageous another,and the healthful another;and to these four let us oppose four other lives-the foolish,the cowardly,the intemperate,the diseased.He who knows the temperate life will describe it as in all things gentle,having gentle pains and gentle pleasures,and placid desires and loves not insane;whereas the intemperate life is impetuous in all things,and has violent pains and pleasures,and vehement and stinging desires,and loves utterly insane;and in the temperate life the pleasures exceed the pains,but in the intemperate life the pains exceed the pleasures in greatness and number and frequency.Hence one of the two lives is naturally and necessarily more pleasant and the other more painful,and he who would live pleasantly cannot possibly choose to live intemperately.And if this is true,the inference clearly is that no man is voluntarily intemperate;but that the whole multitude of men lack temperance in their lives,either from ignorance,or from want of self-control,or both.And the same holds of the diseased and healthy life;they both have pleasures and pains,but in health the pleasure exceeds the pain,and in sickness the pain exceeds the pleasure.Now our intention in choosing the lives is not that the painful should exceed,but the life in which pain is exceeded by pleasure we have determined to be the more pleasant life.And we should say that the temperate life has the elements both of pleasure and pain fewer and smaller and less frequent than the intemperate,and the wise life than the foolish life,and the life of courage than the life of cowardice;one of each pair exceeding in pleasure and the other in pain,the courageous surpassing the cowardly,and the wise exceeding the foolish.And so the one dass of lives exceeds the other class in pleasure;the temperate and courageous and wise and healthy exceed the cowardly and foolish and intemperate and diseased lives;and generally speaking,that which has any virtue,whether of body or soul,is pleasanter than the vicious life,and far superior in beauty and rectitude and excellence and reputation,and causes him who lives accordingly to be infinitely happier than the opposite.
Enough of the preamble;and now the laws should follow;or,to speak more correctly,outline of them.As,then,in the case of a web or any other tissue,the warp and the woof cannot be made of the same materials,but the warp is necessarily superior as being stronger,and having a certain character of firmness,whereas the woof is softer and has a proper degree of elasticity;-in a similar manner those who are to hold great offices in states,should be distinguished truly in each case from those who have been but slenderly proven by education.Let us suppose that there are two parts in the constitution of a state-one the creation of offices,the other the laws which are assigned to them to administer.