Socrates lived seventy years. He was once a youth, once a man, once a greybeard. But what if he had lived a hundred and forty years, experienced once again all the three seasons of life, and had again met Hippias? Or, better still, if the soul, as Socrates taught, is immortal and Socrates now lives somewhere in the moon or Sirius, or in any other place predestined for immortal souls, does he really go on plaguing his companions with discourses on justice, carpenters, and smiths? And does he still emerge victorious as of old from the dispute with Hippias and other persons who dare to affirm that everything (human convictions included) may be, and ought to be, subject to the laws of time, and that mankind not only loses nothing, but gains much by such subjection? IV _Earth and Heaven_ The word justice is on all men's lips. But do men indeed so highly prize justice as one would think, who believed all that has been said and is still being said concerning it? More than this, is it so highly appreciated by its sworn advocates and panegyrists--poets, philosophers, moralists, theologians--even by the best of them, the most sincere and gifted? I doubt it, I doubt it deeply. Glance at the works of any wise man, whether of the modern or the ancient world. Justice, if we understand it as the equality of all living men before the laws of creation--and how else can we understand it?--never occupied any one's attention. Plato never once asked Destiny why she created Thersites contemptible and Patroclus noble. Plato argues that men should be just, but never once dares to arraign the gods for their injustice. If we listen to his discourses, a suspicion will steal into our souls that justice is a virtue for mortals, while the immortals have virtues of their own which have nothing in common with justice. And here is the last trial of earthly virtue. We do not know whether the human soul is mortal or immortal. Some, we know, believe in immortality, others laugh at the belief. If it were proved that they were both in the wrong, and that men's destinies after death are as unequal as they are in life: the successful, the chosen take up their abode in heaven, the others remain to rot in the grave and perish with their mortal clay. (It is true that such an admission is made by our Russian prophet, the priest of love and justice, Dostoevsky, in his _Legend of the Grand Inquisitor._) Now, if it should turn out that Dostoevsky is really immortal, while his innumerable disciples and admirers, the huge mass of grey humanity which is spoken of in _The Grand Inquisitor,_ end their lives in death as they began them with birth, would Dostoevsky himself (whom I have named deliberately as the most passionate defender of the ideal of justice, though there have been yet more fervent and passionate and remarkable defenders of justice on earth whom I ought perhaps to name, were it not that I would avoid speaking lightly of sacred things--let him who finds Dostoevsky