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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: pleasure will be best understood from an examination of the most intense
pleasures. Now these are the pleasures of the body, not of the mind; the
pleasures of disease and not of health, the pleasures of the intemperate
and not of the temperate. I am speaking, not of the frequency or
continuance, but only of the intensity of such pleasures, and this is given
them by contrast with the pain or sickness of body which precedes them.
Their morbid nature is illustrated by the lesser instances of itching and
scratching, respecting which I swear that I cannot tell whether they are a
pleasure or a pain. (1) Some of these arise out of a transition from one
state of the body to another, as from cold to hot; (2) others are caused by
the contrast of an internal pain and an external pleasure in the body:
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