e in all--have
acknowledged that they are good and perfect?

CLEINIAS: Assuredly.

ATHENIAN: But, if they are such as we conceive them to be, can we
possibly suppose that they ever act in the spirit of carelessness
and indolence? For in us inactivity is the child of cowardice, and
carelessness of inactivity and indolence.

CLEINIAS: Most true.

ATHENIAN: Then not from inactivity and carelessness is any God ever
negligent; for there is no cowardice in them.

CLEINIAS: That is very true.

ATHENIAN: Then the alternative which remains is, that if the Gods
neglect the lighter and lesser concerns of the universe, they
neglect them because they know that they ought not to care about such
matters--what other alternative is there but the opposite of their
knowing?

CLEINIAS: There is none.

ATHENIAN: And, O most excellent and best of men, do I understand you to
mean that they are careless because they are ignorant, and do not
know that they ought to take care, or that they know, and yet like the
meanest sort of men, knowing the better, choose the worse because they
are overcome by pleasures and pains?

CLEINIAS: Impossible.

ATHENIAN: Do not all human things partake of the nature of soul? And is
not man the most religious of all animals?

CLEINIAS: That is not to be denied.

ATHENIAN: And we acknowledge that all mortal creatures are the property
of the Gods, to whom also the whole of heaven belongs?

CLEINIAS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: And, therefore, whether a person says that these things are to
the Gods great or small--in either case it would not be natural for the
Gods who own us, and who are the most careful and the best of owners, to
neglect us. There is also a further consideration.

CLEINIAS: What is it?

ATHENIAN: Sensation and power are in an inverse ratio to each other in
respect to their ease and difficulty.

CLEINIAS: What do you mean?

ATHENIAN: I mean that there is greater difficulty in seeing and hearing
the small than the great, but more facility in moving and controlling
and taking care of small and unimportant things than of their opposites.

CLEINIAS: Far more.

ATHENIAN: Suppose the case of a physician who is willing and able to
cure some living thing as a whole--how will the whole fare at his hands
if he takes care only of the greater and neglects the parts which are
lesser?

CLEINIAS: Decidedly not well.

ATHENIAN: No better would be the result with pilots or generals, or
househ