Book 1
3
The point is also illustrated by our feeling about praises addressed to the gods: it strikes us as absurd that the gods should be referred to our standards, and this is what praising them amounts to, since praise, as we said, involves a reference of its object to something else.
4
But if praise belongs to what is relative, it is clear that the best things do not merit praise, but something greater and better: as indeed is generally recognized, since we speak of the gods as blessed and happy,But we do not praise them. and also blessed is the term that we apply to the most godlike men; and similarly with good things—no one praises happiness as one praises justice, but we call it a blessing, deeming it something higher and more divine than things we praise.
5
Indeed it seems that EudoxusFor a criticism of the hedonism of this unorthodox pupil of Plato see Bk. 10.2, 3. took a good line in advocating the claims of pleasure to the prize of highest excellence, when he held that the fact that pleasure, though a good, is not praised, is an indication that it is superior to the things we praise, as God and the Good are, because they are the standards to which everything else is referred.
