disdain the Divine power. On the contrary, my belief is that the
Divinity is too grand to need any service which I could render.

Soc. But the grander that power is, which deigns to tend and wait upon
you, the more you are called upon to honour it.

Ar. Be well assured, if I could believe the gods take thought for all
men, I would not neglect them.

Soc. How can you suppose that they do not so take thought? Who, in the
first place, gave to man alone of living creatures his erect posture,
enabling him to see farther in front of him and to contemplate more
freely the height above, and to be less subject to distress than other
creatures [endowed like himself with eyes and ears and mouth].[12]
Consider next how they gave to the beast of the field[13] feet as a
means of progression only, but to man they gave in addition hands--
those hands which have achieved so much to raise us in the scale of
happiness above all animals. Did they not make the tongue also? which
belongs indeed alike to man and beast, but in man they fashioned it so
as to play on different parts of the mouth at different times, whereby
we can produce articulate speech, and have a code of signals to
express our every want to one another. Or consider the pleasures of
the sexual appetite; limited in the rest of the animal kingdom to
certain seasons, but in the case of man a series prolonged unbroken to
old age. Nor did it content the Godhead merely to watch over the
interests of man's body. What is of far higher import, he implanted in
man the noblest and most excellent type of soul. For what other
creature, to begin with, has a soul to appreciate the existence of the
gods who have arranged this grand and beauteous universe? What other
tribe of animals save man can render service to the gods? How apt is