Why should ultimate reality be something nice and good? It might be something thoroughly nasty. Either your Good is a thing existing outside us like God, or it’s a picture inside us which some people choose to play about with.

PLATO

Now you’re using metaphors –

ANTAGORAS

What metaphors?

PLATO

Inside and outside! Of course Good doesn’t exist like chairs and tables, it’s not [ gestures ] either outside or inside. It’s in our whole way of living, it’s fundamental like truth. If we have the idea of value we necessarily have the idea of perfection as something real.

SOCRATES

So you think everybody knows this?

PLATO

Instinctively, yes. People know that good is real and absolute, not optional and relative, all their life proves it. And when they choose false goods they really know they’re false. We can think everything else away out of life, but not value, that’s in the very – ground of things.

ACASTOS to himself, thinking

We can’t think material objects away out of life – or can we? Or causal connections? Or is that different?

SOCRATES

Is this where you distinguish morality from religion?

PLATO

Yes, except that I don’t. Religion is the love and worship of the good, and that’s the real basis of morality. Duty, that’s what we feel when we want the good but love other things more –

SOCRATES

So some people are religious without knowing it? They mightn’t like that.

PLATO

I suppose so. I don’t like the word religion actually.

TIMONAX

So after all you’re giving up?

PLATO

Nowadays people think of religion as something exotic and formal, and a bit aside from life, whereas what I mean is everywhere, like breathing.

SOCRATES thoughtfully

Sometimes in philosophy we come up against questions which we can’t answer, as if our language were a cage and we were right up against the bars. Acastos said he wanted religion to go on, as if it might or mightn’t go on. What you call the ground of things, proved by everything, if it exists, is bound to go on, it can’t not. But how is it to be expressed? Even your phrase ‘the ground of being’ or whatever is a metaphor which is understood in a tradition. Religion expressed this idea very strongly, very picturesquely. Now it seems like something much harder to explain, you find it hard to explain. Perhaps it needs new metaphors, a new way of thought. But that hasn’t happened yet. People still think of religion in the old way, as something formal, with certain rituals, symbols, familiar pictures. You said religion was spiritual change. What changes people must reach their minds and their hearts. Can religion survive without a mythology? Perhaps the concept is simply breaking up? Concepts don’t live for ever, you yourself said you didn’t like the word ‘religion’. Isn’t that symptomatic?

PLATO