Laws eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 837 pages of information about Laws.

Laws eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 837 pages of information about Laws.

Cleinias:  To be sure.

Athenian:  If such convivialities should turn out to have any advantage equal in importance to that of gymnastic, they are in their very nature to be preferred to mere bodily exercise, inasmuch as they have no accompaniment of pain.

Cleinias:  True; but I hardly think that we shall be able to discover any such benefits to be derived from them.

Athenian:  That is just what we must endeavour to show.  And let me ask you a question:—­Do we not distinguish two kinds of fear, which are very different?

Cleinias:  What are they?

Athenian:  There is the fear of expected evil.

Cleinias:  Yes.

Athenian:  And there is the fear of an evil reputation; we are afraid of being thought evil, because we do or say some dishonourable thing, which fear we and all men term shame.

Cleinias:  Certainly.

Athenian:  These are the two fears, as I called them; one of which is the opposite of pain and other fears, and the opposite also of the greatest and most numerous sort of pleasures.

Cleinias:  Very true.

Athenian:  And does not the legislator and every one who is good for anything, hold this fear in the greatest honour?  This is what he terms reverence, and the confidence which is the reverse of this he terms insolence; and the latter he always deems to be a very great evil both to individuals and to states.

Cleinias:  True.

Athenian:  Does not this kind of fear preserve us in many important ways?  What is there which so surely gives victory and safety in war?  For there are two things which give victory—­confidence before enemies, and fear of disgrace before friends.

Cleinias:  There are.

Athenian:  Then each of us should be fearless and also fearful; and why we should be either has now been determined.

Cleinias:  Certainly.

Athenian:  And when we want to make any one fearless, we and the law bring him face to face with many fears.

Cleinias:  Clearly.

Athenian:  And when we want to make him rightly fearful, must we not introduce him to shameless pleasures, and train him to take up arms against them, and to overcome them?  Or does this principle apply to courage only, and must he who would be perfect in valour fight against and overcome his own natural character,—­since if he be unpractised and inexperienced in such conflicts, he will not be half the man which he might have been,—­and are we to suppose, that with temperance it is otherwise, and that he who has never fought with the shameless and unrighteous temptations of his pleasures and lusts, and conquered them, in earnest and in play, by word, deed, and act, will still be perfectly temperate?

Cleinias:  A most unlikely supposition.

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Laws from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.