euphony. Thus far, as I was saying, there is a
general agreement about the nature of justice; but I, Hermogenes, being
an enthusiastic disciple, have been told in a mystery that the justice
of which I am speaking is also the cause of the world: now a cause
is that because of which anything is created; and some one comes and
whispers in my ear that justice is rightly so called because partaking
of the nature of the cause, and I begin, after hearing what he has said,
to interrogate him gently: 'Well, my excellent friend,' say I, 'but if
all this be true, I still want to know what is justice.' Thereupon they
think that I ask tiresome questions, and am leaping over the barriers,
and have been already sufficiently answered, and they try to satisfy me
with one derivation after another, and at length they quarrel. For one
of them says that justice is the sun, and that he only is the piercing
(diaionta) and burning (kaonta) element which is the guardian of nature.
And when I joyfully repeat this beautiful notion, I am answered by the
satirical remark, 'What, is there no justice in the world when the sun
is down?' And when I earnestly beg my questioner to tell me his own
honest opinion, he says, 'Fire in the abstract'; but this is not very
intelligible. Another says, 'No, not fire in the abstract, but the
abstraction of heat in the fire.' Another man professes to laugh at all
this, and says, as Anaxagoras says, that justice is mind, for mind, as
they say, has absolute power, and mixes with nothing, and orders all
things, and passes through all things. At last, my friend, I find myself
in far greater perplexity about the nature of justice than I was before
I began to learn. But still I am of opinion that the name, which has led
me into this digression, was given to justice for the reasons which I
have mentioned.

HERMOGENES: I think, Socrates, that you are not improvising now; you
must have heard this from some one else.

SOCRATES: And not the rest?

HERMOGENES: Hardly.

SOCRATES: Well, then, let me go on in the hope of making you believe in
the originality of the rest. What remains after justice? I do not think
that we have as yet discussed courage (andreia),--injustice (adikia),
which is obviously nothing more than a hindrance to the penetrating
principle (diaiontos), need not be considered. Well, then, the name
of andreia seems to imply a battle;--this battle is in the world of
existence, and according to the doctrine of f