Yes.
Then can you wonder that persons who are inexperienced in the truth, as they have wrong ideas about many other things, should also have wrong ideas about pleasure and pain and the intermediate state; so that when they are only being [585]drawn towards the painful they feel pain and think the pain which they experience to be real, and in like manner, when drawn away from pain to the neutral or intermediate state, they firmly believe that they have reached the goal of satiety and pleasure; they, not knowing pleasure, err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain, which is like contrasting black with grey instead of white—can you wonder, I say, at this?
No, indeed; I should be much more disposed to wonder at the opposite.
Look at the matter thus:—Hunger, thirst, and the like, [B]are inanitions of the bodily state?
Yes.
And ignorance and folly are inanitions of the soul?
True.
And food and wisdom are the corresponding satisfactions of either?
Certainly.
The intellectual more real than the sensual. And is the satisfaction derived from that which has less or from that which has more existence the truer?