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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: has said, to interrogate him gently: 'Well, my excellent friend,' say I,
'but if all this be true, I still want to know what is justice.' Thereupon
they think that I ask tiresome questions, and am leaping over the barriers,
and have been already sufficiently answered, and they try to satisfy me
with one derivation after another, and at length they quarrel. For one of
them says that justice is the sun, and that he only is the piercing
(diaionta) and burning (kaonta) element which is the guardian of nature.
And when I joyfully repeat this beautiful notion, I am answered by the
satirical remark, 'What, is there no justice in the world when the sun is
down?' And when I earnestly beg my questioner to tell me his own honest
opinion, he says, 'Fire in the abstract'; but this is not very
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