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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: Neither is he speaking, as in the Protagoras, of virtue as a calculation of
pleasure, an opinion which he afterwards repudiates in the Phaedo. What
then is his meaning? His meaning we shall be able to illustrate best by
parallel notions, which, whether justifiable by logic or not, have always
existed among mankind. We must remind the reader that Socrates himself
implies that he will be understood or appreciated by very few.
He is speaking not of the consciousness of happiness, but of the idea of
happiness. When a martyr dies in a good cause, when a soldier falls in
battle, we do not suppose that death or wounds are without pain, or that
their physical suffering is always compensated by a mental satisfaction.
Still we regard them as happy, and we would a thousand times rather have
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