Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that all the gods love a pious act. This situation can be resolved into two components. One is the activity of loving by the gods. The second is the quality of the act that the gods love it. Socrates notes that this holds of any activity, for example, carrying. There is an activity of a person, the carrying, and the quality of the object, that it is carried. The question Socrates raises is which of the two components is more fundamental, the activity or the quality? To we explain the carrying by the fact that the object is carried, or do we explain the fact that the object is carried by the carrying? To Socrates, the latter is clearly the case. He puts it in a very abstract way, stating that a thing is not "being affected because it is something affected, but it is something affected because it is being affected." Suppose you have an object, like a car, that you dearly love. The fact that the car has the quality of being a loved thing derived from your own activity of loving it. You cannot explain your loving it by saying that the car is something loved by you. We might say generally that the active is prior to the passive.
