n the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pass
into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly
that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit
that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that
would make it a cheat would also blot out completely all chance of
discovery, and therefore all pain of discovering.

This is a question on which, beyond pleading that what little we say ought
to be (but seldom is) the result of clear thinking, I propose to say
little, not only because here is not the place for metaphysics, but
because--to quote Jowett again--"considering the 'feebleness of the human
faculties and the uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe
that the fewer our words the better. At the approach of death there is
not much said: good men are too honest to go out of the world professing
more than they know. There is perhaps no important subject about which,
at any time, even religious people speak so little to one another."

I would add that, in my opinion, many men fall into this reticence because
as they grow older the question seems to settle itself without argument,
and they cease by degrees to worry themselves about it. It dies in
sensible men almost insensibly with the death of egoism. At twenty we are
all furious egoists; at forty or thereabouts--and especially if we have
children, as at forty every man ought--our centre of gravity has
completely shifted. We care a great deal about what happens to the next
generation, we care something about our work, but about ourselves and what
becomes of us in the end I really think we care very little. By this
time, if we have taken account of ourselves, ourselves are by no means so
splendidly interesting as they used to be, but subjects rather of humorous
and charitable comprehension.

Of all the opening passages in Plato--master of beautiful openings--I like
best that of the _Laws_. The scene is Crete; the season, midsummer; and
on the long dusty road between Cnosus and the cave and temple of Zeus the
three persons of the dialogue--strangers to one another, but bound on a
common pilgrimage--join company and fall into converse together. One is
an Athenian, one a Cretan, the third a Lacedaemonian, and all are elderly.
Characteristically, the invitation to talk comes from the Athenian.

"It will pass the time pleasantly," he suggests; "for I am told that
the dist