SOCR. When a wind that is dry, being lifted on high, is suddenly pent into these, It swells up their skin, like a bladder, within, by Necessity's changeless decrees: Till compressed very tight, it bursts them outright, and away with an impulse so strong, That at last by the force and the swing of the course, it takes fire as it whizzes along. STREPS. That's exactly the thing, that I suffered one spring, at the great feast of Zeus, I admit: I'd a paunch in the pot, but I wholly forgot about making the safety-valve slit. So it spluttered and swelled, while the saucepan I held, till at last with a vengeance it flew: Took me quite by surprise, dung-bespattered my eyes, and scalded my face black and blue! [Footnote: Aristoph. "Clouds" 358.--Translation by B. B. Rogers.] Nothing could be more amusing than this passage as a burlesque of the physical theories of the time; and nothing could better illustrate the quarrel between science and religion, as it presents itself on the surface to the plain man. But there is more in the quarrel than appears at first sight. The real sting of the comedy from which we have quoted lies in the assumption, adopted throughout the play, that the atheist is also necessarily anti-social and immoral. The physicist, in the person of Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the one hand he is represented as teaching the theory of material causation, on the other the art of lying and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending the school is to learn how not to pay his debts; the achievement of his son is to learn how to dishonour his father. The cult of reason is identified by the poet with the cult of self-interest; the man who does not believe in the gods cannot, he implies, believe in the family or the state. Section 16. Metaphysical Reconstruction--Plato.