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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: recapitulating the question at issue.
Philebus affirmed pleasure to be the good, and assumed them to be one
nature; I affirmed that they were two natures, and declared that knowledge
was more akin to the good than pleasure. I said that the two together were
more eligible than either taken singly; and to this we adhere. Reason
intimates, as at first, that we should seek the good not in the unmixed
life, but in the mixed.
The cup is ready, waiting to be mingled, and here are two fountains, one of
honey, the other of pure water, out of which to make the fairest possible
mixture. There are pure and impure pleasures--pure and impure sciences.
Let us consider the sections of each which have the most of purity and
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