966–967
Clinias
Clin. It is certainly just, as you say, that the man who is idle or incapable in respect of this subject should be strictly debarred from the ranks of the noble.
10
Athenian
Ath. Are we assured, then, that there are two causes, amongst those we previously discussed,Cp. Plat. Laws 893b. which lead to faith in the gods?
Athenian
Ath. One is our dogma about the soul,—that it is the most ancient and divine of all the things whose motion, when developed into becoming, provides an ever-flowing fount of being; and the other is our dogma concerning the ordering of the motion of the starsCp. Plat. Laws 898c. and all the other bodies under the control of reason, which has made a cosmos of the All.
Ath. For no man that views these objects in no careless or amateurish way has ever proved so godless as not to be affected by them in a way just the opposite of that which most people expect. For they imagine that those who study these objects in astronomy and the other necessary allied arts become atheists through observing, as they suppose, that all things come into being by necessary forces and not by the mental energy of the will aiming at the fulfillment of good.
Clinias
Clin. What in fact is the real state of the case?