is analysed, Plato distinctly maintains that pleasures differ in kind as well as degree,[1] the lowest being the mixed pleasures of the senses, and the highest and purest the mental enjoyment of music or mathematics. He also holds that wisdom is "ten thousand times better" than pleasure, since it alone satisfies the three criteria of goodness—beauty, symmetry, and truth; while, in the scale of perfection, pleasure is degraded by him to the fifth and sixth places.
The only one of Bentham's four "Sanctions"[2] which he would allow to influence our conduct would be that described in his Myths—the rewards and punishments in a future world. Virtue per se is most excellent—being, in fact, moral health and strength, just as Vice is moral disease; and worldly advantages are not to balance our actions, or influence us in the choice between good and evil. Even in prayer, he maintains that a man should not, pray for gold, or honour, or children, but simply for what is good; and the gods will know best how to turn his prayer to his own profit. "The prayer of a fool," he says again, "is fraught with danger, and likely to end in the opposite of what he desires."[3] In the same spirit he quotes (in his "Alcibiades, ii.") some lines from an old poet, which, should, he thinks, be the model for all prayers: "King Jove, give us what is good, whether we pray for it or
