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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: this Critias replies that the science or knowledge of good and evil, and
all the other sciences, are regulated by the higher science or knowledge of
knowledge. Socrates replies by again dividing the abstract from the
concrete, and asks how this knowledge conduces to happiness in the same
definite way in which medicine conduces to health.
And now, after making all these concessions, which are really inadmissible,
we are still as far as ever from ascertaining the nature of temperance,
which Charmides has already discovered, and had therefore better rest in
the knowledge that the more temperate he is the happier he will be, and not
trouble himself with the speculations of Socrates.
In this Dialogue may be noted (1) The Greek ideal of beauty and goodness,
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