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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: mentioned; and whether pleasure and pain, like heat and cold, and other
things of the same kind, are not sometimes to be desired and sometimes not
to be desired, as being not in themselves good, but only sometimes and in
some instances admitting of the nature of good.
PROTARCHUS: You say most truly that this is the track which the
investigation should pursue.
SOCRATES: Well, then, assuming that pain ensues on the dissolution, and
pleasure on the restoration of the harmony, let us now ask what will be the
condition of animated beings who are neither in process of restoration nor
of dissolution. And mind what you say: I ask whether any animal who is in
that condition can possibly have any feeling of pleasure or pain, great or
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