If, then, we divide all the instants of time, whether past, present, or future, into two series--those instants at which Socrates was alive, and those instants at which he was not alive--and leave out of consideration, for the sake of greater simplicity, all those instants before he lived, we see at once, by the simple application of Dedekind's Axiom, that, if Socrates entered into eternal life after his death, there must have been either a last moment of his earthly life _or_ a first moment of his eternal life, but not both. Logic alone can give us no information as to which of these cases actually occurred, and we are thrown back on to a discussion of empirical evidence. It is no unusual thing to read of people who thought "that every moment would be their last." In this case it is quite obvious that they consequently thought that eternity would have no beginning. Now here we must consider two things: (1) It is plainly unsafe to conclude from what people think will happen to what will happen; (2) even if we could so conclude, it would be unsafe to deduce that there was a last moment in the life of Socrates: we could only make the guess plausible, as we should be using the inductive method. There are two other pieces of evidence that there is a last moment of any earthly existence, which we may now briefly consider. That this was so was held by Carlo Michaelstaedter; but since he apparently only believed this because he wanted, by attributing a supposed ethical value to that moment, to give support to his theory of suicide, we ought not to give great weight to this evidence. Secondly, Thomas Hobbes objected to the principle "that a quantity may grow less and less eternally, so as at last to be equal to another quantity; or, which is all one, that there is a last in eternity" as "void of sense." Now, the principle meant is true, so that, although the other proposition mentioned by Hobbes does not follow logically from the first, there is some evidence that this other is true. In fact, that Hobbes thought that such-and-such a proposition followed from another proposition which he wrongly believed to be false, is far better evidence for the truth of such-and-such a proposition than any we have for the truth of most of our most cherished beliefs.