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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Phaedo, by Plato
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Phaedo
+       The Last Hours Of Socrates
+
+Author: Plato
+
+Translator: Benjamin Jowett
+
+Posting Date: October 29, 2008 [EBook #1658]
+Release Date: March, 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHAEDO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher
+
+
+
+
+
+PHAEDO
+
+By Plato
+
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+After an interval of some months or years, and at Phlius, a town of
+Peloponnesus, the tale of the last hours of Socrates is narrated to
+Echecrates and other Phliasians by Phaedo the 'beloved disciple.' The
+Dialogue necessarily takes the form of a narrative, because Socrates has
+to be described acting as well as speaking. The minutest particulars of
+the event are interesting to distant friends, and the narrator has an
+equal interest in them.
+
+During the voyage of the sacred ship to and from Delos, which has
+occupied thirty days, the execution of Socrates has been deferred.
+(Compare Xen. Mem.) The time has been passed by him in conversation with
+a select company of disciples. But now the holy season is over, and the
+disciples meet earlier than usual in order that they may converse with
+Socrates for the last time. Those who were present, and those who might
+have been expected to be present, are mentioned by name. There are
+Simmias and Cebes (Crito), two disciples of Philolaus whom Socrates
+'by his enchantments has attracted from Thebes' (Mem.), Crito the aged
+friend, the attendant of the prison, who is as good as a friend--these
+take part in the conversation. There are present also, Hermogenes,
+from whom Xenophon derived his information about the trial of Socrates
+(Mem.), the 'madman' Apollodorus (Symp.), Euclid and Terpsion from
+Megara (compare Theaet.), Ctesippus, Antisthenes, Menexenus, and some
+other less-known members of the Socratic circle, all of whom are silent
+auditors. Aristippus, Cleombrotus, and Plato are noted as absent. Almost
+as soon as the friends of Socrates enter the prison Xanthippe and her
+children are sent home in the care of one of Crito's servants.
+Socrates himself has just been released from chains, and is led by this
+circumstance to make the natural remark that 'pleasure follows pain.'
+(Observe that Plato is preparing the way for his doctrine of the
+alternation of opposites.) 'Aesop would have represented them in a fable
+as a two-headed creature of the gods.' The mention of Aesop reminds
+Cebes of a question which had been asked by Evenus the poet (compare
+Apol.): 'Why Socrates, who was not a poet, while in prison had been
+putting Aesop into verse?'--'Because several times in his life he had
+been warned in dreams that he should practise music; and as he was about
+to die and was not certain of what was meant, he wished to fulfil the
+admonition in the letter as well as in the spirit, by writing verses as
+well as by cultivating philosophy. Tell this to Evenus; and say that I
+would have him follow me in death.' 'He is not at all the sort of man
+to comply with your request, Socrates.' 'Why, is he not a philosopher?'
+'Yes.' 'Then he will be willing to die, although he will not take his
+own life, for that is held to be unlawful.'
+
+Cebes asks why suicide is thought not to be right, if death is to be
+accounted a good? Well, (1) according to one explanation, because man is
+a prisoner, who must not open the door of his prison and run away--this
+is the truth in a 'mystery.' Or (2) rather, because he is not his own
+property, but a possession of the gods, and has no right to make away
+with that which does not belong to him. But why, asks Cebes, if he is a
+possession of the gods, should he wish to die and leave them? For he is
+under their protection; and surely he cannot take better care of himself
+than they take of him. Simmias explains that Cebes is really referring
+to Socrates, whom they think too unmoved at the prospect of leaving the
+gods and his friends. Socrates answers that he is going to other gods
+who are wise and good, and perhaps to better friends; and he professes
+that he is ready to defend himself against the charge of Cebes.
+The company shall be his judges, and he hopes that he will be more
+successful in convincing them than he had been in convincing the court.
+
+The philosopher desires death--which the wicked world will insinuate
+that he also deserves: and perhaps he does, but not in any sense which
+they are capable of understanding. Enough of them: the real question
+is, What is the nature of that death which he desires? Death is
+the separation of soul and body--and the philosopher desires such
+a separation. He would like to be freed from the dominion of bodily
+pleasures and of the senses, which are always perturbing his mental
+vision. He wants to get rid of eyes and ears, and with the light of the
+mind only to behold the light of truth. All the evils and impurities
+and necessities of men come from the body. And death separates him from
+these corruptions, which in life he cannot wholly lay aside. Why then
+should he repine when the hour of separation arrives? Why, if he is dead
+while he lives, should he fear that other death, through which alone he
+can behold wisdom in her purity?
+
+Besides, the philosopher has notions of good and evil unlike those of
+other men. For they are courageous because they are afraid of greater
+dangers, and temperate because they desire greater pleasures. But he
+disdains this balancing of pleasures and pains, which is the exchange
+of commerce and not of virtue. All the virtues, including wisdom, are
+regarded by him only as purifications of the soul. And this was the
+meaning of the founders of the mysteries when they said, 'Many are the
+wand-bearers but few are the mystics.' (Compare Matt. xxii.: 'Many are
+called but few are chosen.') And in the hope that he is one of these
+mystics, Socrates is now departing. This is his answer to any one who
+charges him with indifference at the prospect of leaving the gods and
+his friends.
+
+Still, a fear is expressed that the soul upon leaving the body may
+vanish away like smoke or air. Socrates in answer appeals first of all
+to the old Orphic tradition that the souls of the dead are in the world
+below, and that the living come from them. This he attempts to found
+on a philosophical assumption that all opposites--e.g. less, greater;
+weaker, stronger; sleeping, waking; life, death--are generated out of
+each other. Nor can the process of generation be only a passage from
+living to dying, for then all would end in death. The perpetual sleeper
+(Endymion) would be no longer distinguished from the rest of mankind.
+The circle of nature is not complete unless the living come from the
+dead as well as pass to them.
+
+The Platonic doctrine of reminiscence is then adduced as a confirmation
+of the pre-existence of the soul. Some proofs of this doctrine are
+demanded. One proof given is the same as that of the Meno, and is
+derived from the latent knowledge of mathematics, which may be elicited
+from an unlearned person when a diagram is presented to him. Again,
+there is a power of association, which from seeing Simmias may remember
+Cebes, or from seeing a picture of Simmias may remember Simmias. The
+lyre may recall the player of the lyre, and equal pieces of wood or
+stone may be associated with the higher notion of absolute equality. But
+here observe that material equalities fall short of the conception of
+absolute equality with which they are compared, and which is the measure
+of them. And the measure or standard must be prior to that which is
+measured, the idea of equality prior to the visible equals. And if prior
+to them, then prior also to the perceptions of the senses which recall
+them, and therefore either given before birth or at birth. But all men
+have not this knowledge, nor have any without a process of reminiscence;
+which is a proof that it is not innate or given at birth, unless indeed
+it was given and taken away at the same instant. But if not given to
+men in birth, it must have been given before birth--this is the only
+alternative which remains. And if we had ideas in a former state, then
+our souls must have existed and must have had intelligence in a former
+state. The pre-existence of the soul stands or falls with the doctrine
+of ideas.
+
+It is objected by Simmias and Cebes that these arguments only prove a
+former and not a future existence. Socrates answers this objection by
+recalling the previous argument, in which he had shown that the living
+come from the dead. But the fear that the soul at departing may vanish
+into air (especially if there is a wind blowing at the time) has not yet
+been charmed away. He proceeds: When we fear that the soul will vanish
+away, let us ask ourselves what is that which we suppose to be liable
+to dissolution? Is it the simple or the compound, the unchanging or the
+changing, the invisible idea or the visible object of sense? Clearly the
+latter and not the former; and therefore not the soul, which in her own
+pure thought is unchangeable, and only when using the senses descends
+into the region of change. Again, the soul commands, the body serves:
+in this respect too the soul is akin to the divine, and the body to the
+mortal. And in every point of view the soul is the image of divinity and
+immortality, and the body of the human and mortal. And whereas the
+body is liable to speedy dissolution, the soul is almost if not quite
+indissoluble. (Compare Tim.) Yet even the body may be preserved for ages
+by the embalmer's art: how unlikely, then, that the soul will perish and
+be dissipated into air while on her way to the good and wise God!
+She has been gathered into herself, holding aloof from the body, and
+practising death all her life long, and she is now finally released from
+the errors and follies and passions of men, and for ever dwells in the
+company of the gods.
+
+But the soul which is polluted and engrossed by the corporeal, and has
+no eye except that of the senses, and is weighed down by the bodily
+appetites, cannot attain to this abstraction. In her fear of the world
+below she lingers about the sepulchre, loath to leave the body which
+she loved, a ghostly apparition, saturated with sense, and therefore
+visible. At length entering into some animal of a nature congenial to
+her former life of sensuality or violence, she takes the form of an ass,
+a wolf or a kite. And of these earthly souls the happiest are those who
+have practised virtue without philosophy; they are allowed to pass into
+gentle and social natures, such as bees and ants. (Compare Republic,
+Meno.) But only the philosopher who departs pure is permitted to enter
+the company of the gods. (Compare Phaedrus.) This is the reason why he
+abstains from fleshly lusts, and not because he fears loss or disgrace,
+which is the motive of other men. He too has been a captive, and the
+willing agent of his own captivity. But philosophy has spoken to him,
+and he has heard her voice; she has gently entreated him, and brought
+him out of the 'miry clay,' and purged away the mists of passion and
+the illusions of sense which envelope him; his soul has escaped from the
+influence of pleasures and pains, which are like nails fastening her to
+the body. To that prison-house she will not return; and therefore she
+abstains from bodily pleasures--not from a desire of having more or
+greater ones, but because she knows that only when calm and free from
+the dominion of the body can she behold the light of truth.
+
+Simmias and Cebes remain in doubt; but they are unwilling to raise
+objections at such a time. Socrates wonders at their reluctance. Let
+them regard him rather as the swan, who, having sung the praises of
+Apollo all his life long, sings at his death more lustily than ever.
+Simmias acknowledges that there is cowardice in not probing truth to the
+bottom. 'And if truth divine and inspired is not to be had, then let
+a man take the best of human notions, and upon this frail bark let him
+sail through life.' He proceeds to state his difficulty: It has been
+argued that the soul is invisible and incorporeal, and therefore
+immortal, and prior to the body. But is not the soul acknowledged to
+be a harmony, and has she not the same relation to the body, as the
+harmony--which like her is invisible--has to the lyre? And yet the
+harmony does not survive the lyre. Cebes has also an objection, which
+like Simmias he expresses in a figure. He is willing to admit that the
+soul is more lasting than the body. But the more lasting nature of the
+soul does not prove her immortality; for after having worn out many
+bodies in a single life, and many more in successive births and
+deaths, she may at last perish, or, as Socrates afterwards restates the
+objection, the very act of birth may be the beginning of her death, and
+her last body may survive her, just as the coat of an old weaver is left
+behind him after he is dead, although a man is more lasting than his
+coat. And he who would prove the immortality of the soul, must prove not
+only that the soul outlives one or many bodies, but that she outlives
+them all.
+
+The audience, like the chorus in a play, for a moment interpret the
+feelings of the actors; there is a temporary depression, and then the
+enquiry is resumed. It is a melancholy reflection that arguments, like
+men, are apt to be deceivers; and those who have been often deceived
+become distrustful both of arguments and of friends. But this
+unfortunate experience should not make us either haters of men or haters
+of arguments. The want of health and truth is not in the argument, but
+in ourselves. Socrates, who is about to die, is sensible of his own
+weakness; he desires to be impartial, but he cannot help feeling that he
+has too great an interest in the truth of the argument. And therefore he
+would have his friends examine and refute him, if they think that he is
+in error.
+
+At his request Simmias and Cebes repeat their objections. They do not
+go to the length of denying the pre-existence of ideas. Simmias is of
+opinion that the soul is a harmony of the body. But the admission of the
+pre-existence of ideas, and therefore of the soul, is at variance with
+this. (Compare a parallel difficulty in Theaet.) For a harmony is
+an effect, whereas the soul is not an effect, but a cause; a harmony
+follows, but the soul leads; a harmony admits of degrees, and the soul
+has no degrees. Again, upon the supposition that the soul is a harmony,
+why is one soul better than another? Are they more or less harmonized,
+or is there one harmony within another? But the soul does not admit of
+degrees, and cannot therefore be more or less harmonized. Further, the
+soul is often engaged in resisting the affections of the body, as Homer
+describes Odysseus 'rebuking his heart.' Could he have written this
+under the idea that the soul is a harmony of the body? Nay rather, are
+we not contradicting Homer and ourselves in affirming anything of the
+sort?
+
+The goddess Harmonia, as Socrates playfully terms the argument of
+Simmias, has been happily disposed of; and now an answer has to be given
+to the Theban Cadmus. Socrates recapitulates the argument of Cebes,
+which, as he remarks, involves the whole question of natural growth or
+causation; about this he proposes to narrate his own mental experience.
+When he was young he had puzzled himself with physics: he had enquired
+into the growth and decay of animals, and the origin of thought, until
+at last he began to doubt the self-evident fact that growth is the
+result of eating and drinking; and so he arrived at the conclusion that
+he was not meant for such enquiries. Nor was he less perplexed with
+notions of comparison and number. At first he had imagined himself to
+understand differences of greater and less, and to know that ten is two
+more than eight, and the like. But now those very notions appeared to
+him to contain a contradiction. For how can one be divided into two? Or
+two be compounded into one? These are difficulties which Socrates cannot
+answer. Of generation and destruction he knows nothing. But he has a
+confused notion of another method in which matters of this sort are to
+be investigated. (Compare Republic; Charm.)
+
+Then he heard some one reading out of a book of Anaxagoras, that mind is
+the cause of all things. And he said to himself: If mind is the cause
+of all things, surely mind must dispose them all for the best. The new
+teacher will show me this 'order of the best' in man and nature. How
+great had been his hopes and how great his disappointment! For he found
+that his new friend was anything but consistent in his use of mind as
+a cause, and that he soon introduced winds, waters, and other eccentric
+notions. (Compare Arist. Metaph.) It was as if a person had said that
+Socrates is sitting here because he is made up of bones and muscles,
+instead of telling the true reason--that he is here because the
+Athenians have thought good to sentence him to death, and he has thought
+good to await his sentence. Had his bones and muscles been left by him
+to their own ideas of right, they would long ago have taken themselves
+off. But surely there is a great confusion of the cause and condition
+in all this. And this confusion also leads people into all sorts of
+erroneous theories about the position and motions of the earth. None of
+them know how much stronger than any Atlas is the power of the best. But
+this 'best' is still undiscovered; and in enquiring after the cause, we
+can only hope to attain the second best.
+
+Now there is a danger in the contemplation of the nature of things, as
+there is a danger in looking at the sun during an eclipse, unless the
+precaution is taken of looking only at the image reflected in the water,
+or in a glass. (Compare Laws; Republic.) 'I was afraid,' says Socrates,
+'that I might injure the eye of the soul. I thought that I had better
+return to the old and safe method of ideas. Though I do not mean to say
+that he who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas sees
+only through a glass darkly, any more than he who contemplates actual
+effects.'
+
+If the existence of ideas is granted to him, Socrates is of opinion that
+he will then have no difficulty in proving the immortality of the soul.
+He will only ask for a further admission:--that beauty is the cause of
+the beautiful, greatness the cause of the great, smallness of the small,
+and so on of other things. This is a safe and simple answer, which
+escapes the contradictions of greater and less (greater by reason of
+that which is smaller!), of addition and subtraction, and the other
+difficulties of relation. These subtleties he is for leaving to wiser
+heads than his own; he prefers to test ideas by the consistency of their
+consequences, and, if asked to give an account of them, goes back to
+some higher idea or hypothesis which appears to him to be the best,
+until at last he arrives at a resting-place. (Republic; Phil.)
+
+The doctrine of ideas, which has long ago received the assent of the
+Socratic circle, is now affirmed by the Phliasian auditor to command
+the assent of any man of sense. The narrative is continued; Socrates is
+desirous of explaining how opposite ideas may appear to co-exist but do
+not really co-exist in the same thing or person. For example, Simmias
+may be said to have greatness and also smallness, because he is greater
+than Socrates and less than Phaedo. And yet Simmias is not really great
+and also small, but only when compared to Phaedo and Socrates. I use the
+illustration, says Socrates, because I want to show you not only that
+ideal opposites exclude one another, but also the opposites in us. I,
+for example, having the attribute of smallness remain small, and cannot
+become great: the smallness which is in me drives out greatness.
+
+One of the company here remarked that this was inconsistent with the
+old assertion that opposites generated opposites. But that, replies
+Socrates, was affirmed, not of opposite ideas either in us or in
+nature, but of opposition in the concrete--not of life and death, but
+of individuals living and dying. When this objection has been removed,
+Socrates proceeds: This doctrine of the mutual exclusion of opposites
+is not only true of the opposites themselves, but of things which are
+inseparable from them. For example, cold and heat are opposed; and fire,
+which is inseparable from heat, cannot co-exist with cold, or snow,
+which is inseparable from cold, with heat. Again, the number three
+excludes the number four, because three is an odd number and four is
+an even number, and the odd is opposed to the even. Thus we are able to
+proceed a step beyond 'the safe and simple answer.' We may say, not
+only that the odd excludes the even, but that the number three, which
+participates in oddness, excludes the even. And in like manner, not only
+does life exclude death, but the soul, of which life is the inseparable
+attribute, also excludes death. And that of which life is the
+inseparable attribute is by the force of the terms imperishable. If the
+odd principle were imperishable, then the number three would not perish
+but remove, on the approach of the even principle. But the immortal is
+imperishable; and therefore the soul on the approach of death does not
+perish but removes.
+
+Thus all objections appear to be finally silenced. And now the
+application has to be made: If the soul is immortal, 'what manner of
+persons ought we to be?' having regard not only to time but to eternity.
+For death is not the end of all, and the wicked is not released from his
+evil by death; but every one carries with him into the world below that
+which he is or has become, and that only.
+
+For after death the soul is carried away to judgment, and when she has
+received her punishment returns to earth in the course of ages. The wise
+soul is conscious of her situation, and follows the attendant angel who
+guides her through the windings of the world below; but the impure soul
+wanders hither and thither without companion or guide, and is carried
+at last to her own place, as the pure soul is also carried away to hers.
+'In order that you may understand this, I must first describe to you the
+nature and conformation of the earth.'
+
+Now the whole earth is a globe placed in the centre of the heavens, and
+is maintained there by the perfection of balance. That which we call the
+earth is only one of many small hollows, wherein collect the mists and
+waters and the thick lower air; but the true earth is above, and is in
+a finer and subtler element. And if, like birds, we could fly to the
+surface of the air, in the same manner that fishes come to the top of
+the sea, then we should behold the true earth and the true heaven and
+the true stars. Our earth is everywhere corrupted and corroded; and even
+the land which is fairer than the sea, for that is a mere chaos or waste
+of water and mud and sand, has nothing to show in comparison of the
+other world. But the heavenly earth is of divers colours, sparkling with
+jewels brighter than gold and whiter than any snow, having flowers and
+fruits innumerable. And the inhabitants dwell some on the shore of the
+sea of air, others in 'islets of the blest,' and they hold converse
+with the gods, and behold the sun, moon and stars as they truly are, and
+their other blessedness is of a piece with this.
+
+The hollows on the surface of the globe vary in size and shape from that
+which we inhabit: but all are connected by passages and perforations in
+the interior of the earth. And there is one huge chasm or opening called
+Tartarus, into which streams of fire and water and liquid mud are ever
+flowing; of these small portions find their way to the surface and
+form seas and rivers and volcanoes. There is a perpetual inhalation and
+exhalation of the air rising and falling as the waters pass into the
+depths of the earth and return again, in their course forming lakes
+and rivers, but never descending below the centre of the earth; for on
+either side the rivers flowing either way are stopped by a precipice.
+These rivers are many and mighty, and there are four principal ones,
+Oceanus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and Cocytus. Oceanus is the river
+which encircles the earth; Acheron takes an opposite direction, and
+after flowing under the earth through desert places, at last reaches the
+Acherusian lake,--this is the river at which the souls of the dead await
+their return to earth. Pyriphlegethon is a stream of fire, which coils
+round the earth and flows into the depths of Tartarus. The fourth river,
+Cocytus, is that which is called by the poets the Stygian river, and
+passes into and forms the lake Styx, from the waters of which it gains
+new and strange powers. This river, too, falls into Tartarus.
+
+The dead are first of all judged according to their deeds, and those who
+are incurable are thrust into Tartarus, from which they never come out.
+Those who have only committed venial sins are first purified of them,
+and then rewarded for the good which they have done. Those who have
+committed crimes, great indeed, but not unpardonable, are thrust
+into Tartarus, but are cast forth at the end of a year by way of
+Pyriphlegethon or Cocytus, and these carry them as far as the Acherusian
+lake, where they call upon their victims to let them come out of the
+rivers into the lake. And if they prevail, then they are let out and
+their sufferings cease: if not, they are borne unceasingly into Tartarus
+and back again, until they at last obtain mercy. The pure souls also
+receive their reward, and have their abode in the upper earth, and a
+select few in still fairer 'mansions.'
+
+Socrates is not prepared to insist on the literal accuracy of this
+description, but he is confident that something of the kind is true.
+He who has sought after the pleasures of knowledge and rejected the
+pleasures of the body, has reason to be of good hope at the approach of
+death; whose voice is already speaking to him, and who will one day be
+heard calling all men.
+
+The hour has come at which he must drink the poison, and not much
+remains to be done. How shall they bury him? That is a question which he
+refuses to entertain, for they are burying, not him, but his dead body.
+His friends had once been sureties that he would remain, and they shall
+now be sureties that he has run away. Yet he would not die without the
+customary ceremonies of washing and burial. Shall he make a libation of
+the poison? In the spirit he will, but not in the letter. One request he
+utters in the very act of death, which has been a puzzle to after ages.
+With a sort of irony he remembers that a trifling religious duty is
+still unfulfilled, just as above he desires before he departs to compose
+a few verses in order to satisfy a scruple about a dream--unless,
+indeed, we suppose him to mean, that he was now restored to health, and
+made the customary offering to Asclepius in token of his recovery.
+
+*****
+
+1. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has sunk deep into
+the heart of the human race; and men are apt to rebel against any
+examination of the nature or grounds of their belief. They do not like
+to acknowledge that this, as well as the other 'eternal ideas; of
+man, has a history in time, which may be traced in Greek poetry or
+philosophy, and also in the Hebrew Scriptures. They convert feeling into
+reasoning, and throw a network of dialectics over that which is really
+a deeply-rooted instinct. In the same temper which Socrates reproves in
+himself they are disposed to think that even fallacies will do no harm,
+for they will die with them, and while they live they will gain by the
+delusion. And when they consider the numberless bad arguments which have
+been pressed into the service of theology, they say, like the companions
+of Socrates, 'What argument can we ever trust again?' But there is a
+better and higher spirit to be gathered from the Phaedo, as well as from
+the other writings of Plato, which says that first principles should
+be most constantly reviewed (Phaedo and Crat.), and that the highest
+subjects demand of us the greatest accuracy (Republic); also that we
+must not become misologists because arguments are apt to be deceivers.
+
+2. In former ages there was a customary rather than a reasoned belief
+in the immortality of the soul. It was based on the authority of the
+Church, on the necessity of such a belief to morality and the order of
+society, on the evidence of an historical fact, and also on analogies
+and figures of speech which filled up the void or gave an expression
+in words to a cherished instinct. The mass of mankind went on their
+way busy with the affairs of this life, hardly stopping to think about
+another. But in our own day the question has been reopened, and it is
+doubtful whether the belief which in the first ages of Christianity
+was the strongest motive of action can survive the conflict with a
+scientific age in which the rules of evidence are stricter and the mind
+has become more sensitive to criticism. It has faded into the distance
+by a natural process as it was removed further and further from the
+historical fact on which it has been supposed to rest. Arguments derived
+from material things such as the seed and the ear of corn or transitions
+in the life of animals from one state of being to another (the chrysalis
+and the butterfly) are not 'in pari materia' with arguments from
+the visible to the invisible, and are therefore felt to be no longer
+applicable. The evidence to the historical fact seems to be weaker than
+was once supposed: it is not consistent with itself, and is based upon
+documents which are of unknown origin. The immortality of man must be
+proved by other arguments than these if it is again to become a living
+belief. We must ask ourselves afresh why we still maintain it, and seek
+to discover a foundation for it in the nature of God and in the first
+principles of morality.
+
+3. At the outset of the discussion we may clear away a confusion. We
+certainly do not mean by the immortality of the soul the immortality of
+fame, which whether worth having or not can only be ascribed to a very
+select class of the whole race of mankind, and even the interest in
+these few is comparatively short-lived. To have been a benefactor to the
+world, whether in a higher or a lower sphere of life and thought, is a
+great thing: to have the reputation of being one, when men have passed
+out of the sphere of earthly praise or blame, is hardly worthy of
+consideration. The memory of a great man, so far from being immortal,
+is really limited to his own generation:--so long as his friends or his
+disciples are alive, so long as his books continue to be read, so long
+as his political or military successes fill a page in the history of
+his country. The praises which are bestowed upon him at his death hardly
+last longer than the flowers which are strewed upon his coffin or the
+'immortelles' which are laid upon his tomb. Literature makes the most
+of its heroes, but the true man is well aware that far from enjoying an
+immortality of fame, in a generation or two, or even in a much shorter
+time, he will be forgotten and the world will get on without him.
+
+4. Modern philosophy is perplexed at this whole question, which is
+sometimes fairly given up and handed over to the realm of faith. The
+perplexity should not be forgotten by us when we attempt to submit the
+Phaedo of Plato to the requirements of logic. For what idea can we form
+of the soul when separated from the body? Or how can the soul be united
+with the body and still be independent? Is the soul related to the
+body as the ideal to the real, or as the whole to the parts, or as the
+subject to the object, or as the cause to the effect, or as the end to
+the means? Shall we say with Aristotle, that the soul is the entelechy
+or form of an organized living body? or with Plato, that she has a life
+of her own? Is the Pythagorean image of the harmony, or that of the
+monad, the truer expression? Is the soul related to the body as sight to
+the eye, or as the boatman to his boat? (Arist. de Anim.) And in
+another state of being is the soul to be conceived of as vanishing into
+infinity, hardly possessing an existence which she can call her own,
+as in the pantheistic system of Spinoza: or as an individual informing
+another body and entering into new relations, but retaining her own
+character? (Compare Gorgias.) Or is the opposition of soul and body a
+mere illusion, and the true self neither soul nor body, but the union
+of the two in the 'I' which is above them? And is death the assertion
+of this individuality in the higher nature, and the falling away into
+nothingness of the lower? Or are we vainly attempting to pass
+the boundaries of human thought? The body and the soul seem to be
+inseparable, not only in fact, but in our conceptions of them; and any
+philosophy which too closely unites them, or too widely separates them,
+either in this life or in another, disturbs the balance of human nature.
+No thinker has perfectly adjusted them, or been entirely consistent with
+himself in describing their relation to one another. Nor can we
+wonder that Plato in the infancy of human thought should have confused
+mythology and philosophy, or have mistaken verbal arguments for real
+ones.
+
+5. Again, believing in the immortality of the soul, we must still
+ask the question of Socrates, 'What is that which we suppose to be
+immortal?' Is it the personal and individual element in us, or the
+spiritual and universal? Is it the principle of knowledge or of
+goodness, or the union of the two? Is it the mere force of life which is
+determined to be, or the consciousness of self which cannot be got rid
+of, or the fire of genius which refuses to be extinguished? Or is there
+a hidden being which is allied to the Author of all existence, who is
+because he is perfect, and to whom our ideas of perfection give us a
+title to belong? Whatever answer is given by us to these questions,
+there still remains the necessity of allowing the permanence of evil, if
+not for ever, at any rate for a time, in order that the wicked 'may not
+have too good a bargain.' For the annihilation of evil at death, or the
+eternal duration of it, seem to involve equal difficulties in the moral
+government of the universe. Sometimes we are led by our feelings, rather
+than by our reason, to think of the good and wise only as existing in
+another life. Why should the mean, the weak, the idiot, the infant,
+the herd of men who have never in any proper sense the use of reason,
+reappear with blinking eyes in the light of another world? But our
+second thought is that the hope of humanity is a common one, and that
+all or none will be partakers of immortality. Reason does not allow us
+to suppose that we have any greater claims than others, and experience
+may often reveal to us unexpected flashes of the higher nature in
+those whom we had despised. Why should the wicked suffer any more than
+ourselves? had we been placed in their circumstances should we have been
+any better than they? The worst of men are objects of pity rather than
+of anger to the philanthropist; must they not be equally such to divine
+benevolence? Even more than the good they have need of another life; not
+that they may be punished, but that they may be educated. These are
+a few of the reflections which arise in our minds when we attempt to
+assign any form to our conceptions of a future state.
+
+There are some other questions which are disturbing to us because we
+have no answer to them. What is to become of the animals in a future
+state? Have we not seen dogs more faithful and intelligent than men,
+and men who are more stupid and brutal than any animals? Does their life
+cease at death, or is there some 'better thing reserved' also for
+them? They may be said to have a shadow or imitation of morality, and
+imperfect moral claims upon the benevolence of man and upon the justice
+of God. We cannot think of the least or lowest of them, the insect, the
+bird, the inhabitants of the sea or the desert, as having any place in
+a future world, and if not all, why should those who are specially
+attached to man be deemed worthy of any exceptional privilege? When we
+reason about such a subject, almost at once we degenerate into nonsense.
+It is a passing thought which has no real hold on the mind. We may argue
+for the existence of animals in a future state from the attributes of
+God, or from texts of Scripture ('Are not two sparrows sold for one
+farthing?' etc.), but the truth is that we are only filling up the void
+of another world with our own fancies. Again, we often talk about
+the origin of evil, that great bugbear of theologians, by which they
+frighten us into believing any superstition. What answer can be made
+to the old commonplace, 'Is not God the author of evil, if he knowingly
+permitted, but could have prevented it?' Even if we assume that the
+inequalities of this life are rectified by some transposition of human
+beings in another, still the existence of the very least evil if it
+could have been avoided, seems to be at variance with the love and
+justice of God. And so we arrive at the conclusion that we are carrying
+logic too far, and that the attempt to frame the world according to a
+rule of divine perfection is opposed to experience and had better be
+given up. The case of the animals is our own. We must admit that the
+Divine Being, although perfect himself, has placed us in a state of life
+in which we may work together with him for good, but we are very far
+from having attained to it.
+
+6. Again, ideas must be given through something; and we are always prone
+to argue about the soul from analogies of outward things which may serve
+to embody our thoughts, but are also partly delusive. For we cannot
+reason from the natural to the spiritual, or from the outward to the
+inward. The progress of physiological science, without bringing us
+nearer to the great secret, has tended to remove some erroneous notions
+respecting the relations of body and mind, and in this we have the
+advantage of the ancients. But no one imagines that any seed of
+immortality is to be discerned in our mortal frames. Most people have
+been content to rest their belief in another life on the agreement of
+the more enlightened part of mankind, and on the inseparable connection
+of such a doctrine with the existence of a God--also in a less degree
+on the impossibility of doubting about the continued existence of those
+whom we love and reverence in this world. And after all has been
+said, the figure, the analogy, the argument, are felt to be only
+approximations in different forms to an expression of the common
+sentiment of the human heart. That we shall live again is far more
+certain than that we shall take any particular form of life.
+
+7. When we speak of the immortality of the soul, we must ask further
+what we mean by the word immortality. For of the duration of a living
+being in countless ages we can form no conception; far less than a three
+years' old child of the whole of life. The naked eye might as well try
+to see the furthest star in the infinity of heaven. Whether time and
+space really exist when we take away the limits of them may be doubted;
+at any rate the thought of them when unlimited us so overwhelming to us
+as to lose all distinctness. Philosophers have spoken of them as forms
+of the human mind, but what is the mind without them? As then infinite
+time, or an existence out of time, which are the only possible
+explanations of eternal duration, are equally inconceivable to us, let
+us substitute for them a hundred or a thousand years after death, and
+ask not what will be our employment in eternity, but what will happen to
+us in that definite portion of time; or what is now happening to those
+who passed out of life a hundred or a thousand years ago. Do we imagine
+that the wicked are suffering torments, or that the good are singing the
+praises of God, during a period longer than that of a whole life, or
+of ten lives of men? Is the suffering physical or mental? And does the
+worship of God consist only of praise, or of many forms of service? Who
+are the wicked, and who are the good, whom we venture to divide by a
+hard and fast line; and in which of the two classes should we place
+ourselves and our friends? May we not suspect that we are making
+differences of kind, because we are unable to imagine differences
+of degree?--putting the whole human race into heaven or hell for the
+greater convenience of logical division? Are we not at the same time
+describing them both in superlatives, only that we may satisfy the
+demands of rhetoric? What is that pain which does not become deadened
+after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or
+happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains
+are short in proportion as they are keen; of any others which are both
+intense and lasting we have no experience, and can form no idea.
+The words or figures of speech which we use are not consistent with
+themselves. For are we not imagining Heaven under the similitude of
+a church, and Hell as a prison, or perhaps a madhouse or chamber of
+horrors? And yet to beings constituted as we are, the monotony of
+singing psalms would be as great an infliction as the pains of hell,
+and might be even pleasantly interrupted by them. Where are the actions
+worthy of rewards greater than those which are conferred on the greatest
+benefactors of mankind? And where are the crimes which according to
+Plato's merciful reckoning,--more merciful, at any rate, than the
+eternal damnation of so-called Christian teachers,--for every ten years
+in this life deserve a hundred of punishment in the life to come?
+We should be ready to die of pity if we could see the least of the
+sufferings which the writers of Infernos and Purgatorios have attributed
+to the damned. Yet these joys and terrors seem hardly to exercise an
+appreciable influence over the lives of men. The wicked man when old,
+is not, as Plato supposes (Republic), more agitated by the terrors of
+another world when he is nearer to them, nor the good in an ecstasy at
+the joys of which he is soon to be the partaker. Age numbs the sense of
+both worlds; and the habit of life is strongest in death. Even the dying
+mother is dreaming of her lost children as they were forty or fifty
+years before, 'pattering over the boards,' not of reunion with them
+in another state of being. Most persons when the last hour comes are
+resigned to the order of nature and the will of God. They are not
+thinking of Dante's Inferno or Paradiso, or of the Pilgrim's Progress.
+Heaven and hell are not realities to them, but words or ideas; the
+outward symbols of some great mystery, they hardly know what. Many
+noble poems and pictures have been suggested by the traditional
+representations of them, which have been fixed in forms of art and can
+no longer be altered. Many sermons have been filled with descriptions
+of celestial or infernal mansions. But hardly even in childhood did the
+thought of heaven and hell supply the motives of our actions, or at any
+time seriously affect the substance of our belief.
+
+8. Another life must be described, if at all, in forms of thought
+and not of sense. To draw pictures of heaven and hell, whether in the
+language of Scripture or any other, adds nothing to our real knowledge,
+but may perhaps disguise our ignorance. The truest conception which
+we can form of a future life is a state of progress or education--a
+progress from evil to good, from ignorance to knowledge. To this we are
+led by the analogy of the present life, in which we see different races
+and nations of men, and different men and women of the same nation,
+in various states or stages of cultivation; some more and some less
+developed, and all of them capable of improvement under favourable
+circumstances. There are punishments too of children when they are
+growing up inflicted by their parents, of elder offenders which are
+imposed by the law of the land, of all men at all times of life,
+which are attached by the laws of nature to the performance of certain
+actions. All these punishments are really educational; that is to say,
+they are not intended to retaliate on the offender, but to teach him
+a lesson. Also there is an element of chance in them, which is another
+name for our ignorance of the laws of nature. There is evil too
+inseparable from good (compare Lysis); not always punished here, as good
+is not always rewarded. It is capable of being indefinitely diminished;
+and as knowledge increases, the element of chance may more and more
+disappear.
+
+For we do not argue merely from the analogy of the present state of this
+world to another, but from the analogy of a probable future to which we
+are tending. The greatest changes of which we have had experience as yet
+are due to our increasing knowledge of history and of nature. They
+have been produced by a few minds appearing in three or four favoured
+nations, in a comparatively short period of time. May we be allowed to
+imagine the minds of men everywhere working together during many ages
+for the completion of our knowledge? May not the science of physiology
+transform the world? Again, the majority of mankind have really
+experienced some moral improvement; almost every one feels that he has
+tendencies to good, and is capable of becoming better. And these germs
+of good are often found to be developed by new circumstances, like
+stunted trees when transplanted to a better soil. The differences
+between the savage and the civilized man, or between the civilized
+man in old and new countries, may be indefinitely increased. The first
+difference is the effect of a few thousand, the second of a few hundred
+years. We congratulate ourselves that slavery has become industry;
+that law and constitutional government have superseded despotism and
+violence; that an ethical religion has taken the place of Fetichism.
+There may yet come a time when the many may be as well off as the few;
+when no one will be weighed down by excessive toil; when the necessity
+of providing for the body will not interfere with mental improvement;
+when the physical frame may be strengthened and developed; and the
+religion of all men may become a reasonable service.
+
+Nothing therefore, either in the present state of man or in the
+tendencies of the future, as far as we can entertain conjecture of them,
+would lead us to suppose that God governs us vindictively in this
+world, and therefore we have no reason to infer that he will govern us
+vindictively in another. The true argument from analogy is not, 'This
+life is a mixed state of justice and injustice, of great waste, of
+sudden casualties, of disproportionate punishments, and therefore the
+like inconsistencies, irregularities, injustices are to be expected
+in another;' but 'This life is subject to law, and is in a state of
+progress, and therefore law and progress may be believed to be the
+governing principles of another.' All the analogies of this world would
+be against unmeaning punishments inflicted a hundred or a thousand years
+after an offence had been committed. Suffering there might be as a
+part of education, but not hopeless or protracted; as there might be
+a retrogression of individuals or of bodies of men, yet not such as to
+interfere with a plan for the improvement of the whole (compare Laws.)
+
+9. But some one will say: That we cannot reason from the seen to the
+unseen, and that we are creating another world after the image of this,
+just as men in former ages have created gods in their own likeness. And
+we, like the companions of Socrates, may feel discouraged at hearing
+our favourite 'argument from analogy' thus summarily disposed of. Like
+himself, too, we may adduce other arguments in which he seems to have
+anticipated us, though he expresses them in different language. For we
+feel that the soul partakes of the ideal and invisible; and can never
+fall into the error of confusing the external circumstances of man with
+his higher self; or his origin with his nature. It is as repugnant to
+us as it was to him to imagine that our moral ideas are to be attributed
+only to cerebral forces. The value of a human soul, like the value of a
+man's life to himself, is inestimable, and cannot be reckoned in earthly
+or material things. The human being alone has the consciousness of truth
+and justice and love, which is the consciousness of God. And the soul
+becoming more conscious of these, becomes more conscious of her own
+immortality.
+
+10. The last ground of our belief in immortality, and the strongest, is
+the perfection of the divine nature. The mere fact of the existence of
+God does not tend to show the continued existence of man. An evil God
+or an indifferent God might have had the power, but not the will, to
+preserve us. He might have regarded us as fitted to minister to his
+service by a succession of existences,--like the animals, without
+attributing to each soul an incomparable value. But if he is perfect,
+he must will that all rational beings should partake of that perfection
+which he himself is. In the words of the Timaeus, he is good, and
+therefore he desires that all other things should be as like himself as
+possible. And the manner in which he accomplishes this is by permitting
+evil, or rather degrees of good, which are otherwise called evil.
+For all progress is good relatively to the past, and yet may be
+comparatively evil when regarded in the light of the future. Good and
+evil are relative terms, and degrees of evil are merely the negative
+aspect of degrees of good. Of the absolute goodness of any finite nature
+we can form no conception; we are all of us in process of transition
+from one degree of good or evil to another. The difficulties which
+are urged about the origin or existence of evil are mere dialectical
+puzzles, standing in the same relation to Christian philosophy as the
+puzzles of the Cynics and Megarians to the philosophy of Plato. They
+arise out of the tendency of the human mind to regard good and evil both
+as relative and absolute; just as the riddles about motion are to be
+explained by the double conception of space or matter, which the human
+mind has the power of regarding either as continuous or discrete.
+
+In speaking of divine perfection, we mean to say that God is just and
+true and loving, the author of order and not of disorder, of good and
+not of evil. Or rather, that he is justice, that he is truth, that he
+is love, that he is order, that he is the very progress of which we were
+speaking; and that wherever these qualities are present, whether in the
+human soul or in the order of nature, there is God. We might still see
+him everywhere, if we had not been mistakenly seeking for him apart from
+us, instead of in us; away from the laws of nature, instead of in
+them. And we become united to him not by mystical absorption, but by
+partaking, whether consciously or unconsciously, of that truth and
+justice and love which he himself is.
+
+Thus the belief in the immortality of the soul rests at last on the
+belief in God. If there is a good and wise God, then there is a progress
+of mankind towards perfection; and if there is no progress of men
+towards perfection, then there is no good and wise God. We cannot
+suppose that the moral government of God of which we see the beginnings
+in the world and in ourselves will cease when we pass out of life.
+
+11. Considering the 'feebleness of the human faculties and the
+uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe that the fewer
+our words the better. At the approach of death there is not much said;
+good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they
+know. There is perhaps no important subject about which, at any time,
+even religious people speak so little to one another. In the fulness
+of life the thought of death is mostly awakened by the sight or
+recollection of the death of others rather than by the prospect of our
+own. We must also acknowledge that there are degrees of the belief in
+immortality, and many forms in which it presents itself to the mind.
+Some persons will say no more than that they trust in God, and that they
+leave all to Him. It is a great part of true religion not to pretend
+to know more than we do. Others when they quit this world are comforted
+with the hope 'That they will see and know their friends in heaven.' But
+it is better to leave them in the hands of God and to be assured that
+'no evil shall touch them.' There are others again to whom the belief in
+a divine personality has ceased to have any longer a meaning; yet they
+are satisfied that the end of all is not here, but that something still
+remains to us, 'and some better thing for the good than for the evil.'
+They are persuaded, in spite of their theological nihilism, that the
+ideas of justice and truth and holiness and love are realities. They
+cherish an enthusiastic devotion to the first principles of morality.
+Through these they see, or seem to see, darkly, and in a figure, that
+the soul is immortal.
+
+But besides differences of theological opinion which must ever prevail
+about things unseen, the hope of immortality is weaker or stronger in
+men at one time of life than at another; it even varies from day to day.
+It comes and goes; the mind, like the sky, is apt to be overclouded.
+Other generations of men may have sometimes lived under an 'eclipse of
+faith,' to us the total disappearance of it might be compared to the
+'sun falling from heaven.' And we may sometimes have to begin again and
+acquire the belief for ourselves; or to win it back again when it is
+lost. It is really weakest in the hour of death. For Nature, like a kind
+mother or nurse, lays us to sleep without frightening us; physicians,
+who are the witnesses of such scenes, say that under ordinary
+circumstances there is no fear of the future. Often, as Plato tells
+us, death is accompanied 'with pleasure.' (Tim.) When the end is still
+uncertain, the cry of many a one has been, 'Pray, that I may be taken.'
+The last thoughts even of the best men depend chiefly on the accidents
+of their bodily state. Pain soon overpowers the desire of life; old age,
+like the child, is laid to sleep almost in a moment. The long experience
+of life will often destroy the interest which mankind have in it. So
+various are the feelings with which different persons draw near to
+death; and still more various the forms in which imagination clothes it.
+For this alternation of feeling compare the Old Testament,--Psalm vi.;
+Isaiah; Eccles.
+
+12. When we think of God and of man in his relation to God; of the
+imperfection of our present state and yet of the progress which is
+observable in the history of the world and of the human mind; of the
+depth and power of our moral ideas which seem to partake of the very
+nature of God Himself; when we consider the contrast between the
+physical laws to which we are subject and the higher law which raises us
+above them and is yet a part of them; when we reflect on our capacity of
+becoming the 'spectators of all time and all existence,' and of framing
+in our own minds the ideal of a perfect Being; when we see how the
+human mind in all the higher religions of the world, including Buddhism,
+notwithstanding some aberrations, has tended towards such a belief--we
+have reason to think that our destiny is different from that of animals;
+and though we cannot altogether shut out the childish fear that the soul
+upon leaving the body may 'vanish into thin air,' we have still, so far
+as the nature of the subject admits, a hope of immortality with which we
+comfort ourselves on sufficient grounds. The denial of the belief takes
+the heart out of human life; it lowers men to the level of the material.
+As Goethe also says, 'He is dead even in this world who has no belief in
+another.'
+
+13. It is well also that we should sometimes think of the forms of
+thought under which the idea of immortality is most naturally presented
+to us. It is clear that to our minds the risen soul can no longer be
+described, as in a picture, by the symbol of a creature half-bird,
+half-human, nor in any other form of sense. The multitude of angels, as
+in Milton, singing the Almighty's praises, are a noble image, and may
+furnish a theme for the poet or the painter, but they are no longer an
+adequate expression of the kingdom of God which is within us. Neither is
+there any mansion, in this world or another, in which the departed can
+be imagined to dwell and carry on their occupations. When this earthly
+tabernacle is dissolved, no other habitation or building can take them
+in: it is in the language of ideas only that we speak of them.
+
+First of all there is the thought of rest and freedom from pain; they
+have gone home, as the common saying is, and the cares of this world
+touch them no more. Secondly, we may imagine them as they were at
+their best and brightest, humbly fulfilling their daily round of
+duties--selfless, childlike, unaffected by the world; when the eye was
+single and the whole body seemed to be full of light; when the mind was
+clear and saw into the purposes of God. Thirdly, we may think of them
+as possessed by a great love of God and man, working out His will at a
+further stage in the heavenly pilgrimage. And yet we acknowledge that
+these are the things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard and therefore
+it hath not entered into the heart of man in any sensible manner to
+conceive them. Fourthly, there may have been some moments in our own
+lives when we have risen above ourselves, or been conscious of our truer
+selves, in which the will of God has superseded our wills, and we have
+entered into communion with Him, and been partakers for a brief season
+of the Divine truth and love, in which like Christ we have been inspired
+to utter the prayer, 'I in them, and thou in me, that we may be all made
+perfect in one.' These precious moments, if we have ever known them, are
+the nearest approach which we can make to the idea of immortality.
+
+14. Returning now to the earlier stage of human thought which is
+represented by the writings of Plato, we find that many of the
+same questions have already arisen: there is the same tendency to
+materialism; the same inconsistency in the application of the idea of
+mind; the same doubt whether the soul is to be regarded as a cause or as
+an effect; the same falling back on moral convictions. In the Phaedo the
+soul is conscious of her divine nature, and the separation from the body
+which has been commenced in this life is perfected in another. Beginning
+in mystery, Socrates, in the intermediate part of the Dialogue, attempts
+to bring the doctrine of a future life into connection with his theory
+of knowledge. In proportion as he succeeds in this, the individual seems
+to disappear in a more general notion of the soul; the contemplation of
+ideas 'under the form of eternity' takes the place of past and future
+states of existence. His language may be compared to that of some modern
+philosophers, who speak of eternity, not in the sense of perpetual
+duration of time, but as an ever-present quality of the soul. Yet at
+the conclusion of the Dialogue, having 'arrived at the end of the
+intellectual world' (Republic), he replaces the veil of mythology,
+and describes the soul and her attendant genius in the language of the
+mysteries or of a disciple of Zoroaster. Nor can we fairly demand of
+Plato a consistency which is wanting among ourselves, who acknowledge
+that another world is beyond the range of human thought, and yet are
+always seeking to represent the mansions of heaven or hell in
+the colours of the painter, or in the descriptions of the poet or
+rhetorician.
+
+15. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul was not new to the
+Greeks in the age of Socrates, but, like the unity of God, had a
+foundation in the popular belief. The old Homeric notion of a gibbering
+ghost flitting away to Hades; or of a few illustrious heroes enjoying
+the isles of the blest; or of an existence divided between the two; or
+the Hesiodic, of righteous spirits, who become guardian angels,--had
+given place in the mysteries and the Orphic poets to representations,
+partly fanciful, of a future state of rewards and punishments. (Laws.)
+The reticence of the Greeks on public occasions and in some part of
+their literature respecting this 'underground' religion, is not to be
+taken as a measure of the diffusion of such beliefs. If Pericles in the
+funeral oration is silent on the consolations of immortality, the
+poet Pindar and the tragedians on the other hand constantly assume the
+continued existence of the dead in an upper or under world. Darius
+and Laius are still alive; Antigone will be dear to her brethren after
+death; the way to the palace of Cronos is found by those who 'have
+thrice departed from evil.' The tragedy of the Greeks is not 'rounded'
+by this life, but is deeply set in decrees of fate and mysterious
+workings of powers beneath the earth. In the caricature of Aristophanes
+there is also a witness to the common sentiment. The Ionian and
+Pythagorean philosophies arose, and some new elements were added to the
+popular belief. The individual must find an expression as well as the
+world. Either the soul was supposed to exist in the form of a magnet, or
+of a particle of fire, or of light, or air, or water; or of a number or
+of a harmony of number; or to be or have, like the stars, a principle
+of motion (Arist. de Anim.). At length Anaxagoras, hardly distinguishing
+between life and mind, or between mind human and divine, attained
+the pure abstraction; and this, like the other abstractions of Greek
+philosophy, sank deep into the human intelligence. The opposition of
+the intelligible and the sensible, and of God to the world, supplied an
+analogy which assisted in the separation of soul and body. If ideas were
+separable from phenomena, mind was also separable from matter; if the
+ideas were eternal, the mind that conceived them was eternal too. As
+the unity of God was more distinctly acknowledged, the conception of the
+human soul became more developed. The succession, or alternation of
+life and death, had occurred to Heracleitus. The Eleatic Parmenides had
+stumbled upon the modern thesis, that 'thought and being are the same.'
+The Eastern belief in transmigration defined the sense of individuality;
+and some, like Empedocles, fancied that the blood which they had shed
+in another state of being was crying against them, and that for thirty
+thousand years they were to be 'fugitives and vagabonds upon the earth.'
+The desire of recognizing a lost mother or love or friend in the world
+below (Phaedo) was a natural feeling which, in that age as well as in
+every other, has given distinctness to the hope of immortality. Nor were
+ethical considerations wanting, partly derived from the necessity of
+punishing the greater sort of criminals, whom no avenging power of this
+world could reach. The voice of conscience, too, was heard reminding
+the good man that he was not altogether innocent. (Republic.) To these
+indistinct longings and fears an expression was given in the mysteries
+and Orphic poets: a 'heap of books' (Republic), passing under the names
+of Musaeus and Orpheus in Plato's time, were filled with notions of an
+under-world.
+
+16. Yet after all the belief in the individuality of the soul after
+death had but a feeble hold on the Greek mind. Like the personality of
+God, the personality of man in a future state was not inseparably bound
+up with the reality of his existence. For the distinction between the
+personal and impersonal, and also between the divine and human, was far
+less marked to the Greek than to ourselves. And as Plato readily passes
+from the notion of the good to that of God, he also passes almost
+imperceptibly to himself and his reader from the future life of the
+individual soul to the eternal being of the absolute soul. There has
+been a clearer statement and a clearer denial of the belief in modern
+times than is found in early Greek philosophy, and hence the comparative
+silence on the whole subject which is often remarked in ancient writers,
+and particularly in Aristotle. For Plato and Aristotle are not further
+removed in their teaching about the immortality of the soul than they
+are in their theory of knowledge.
+
+17. Living in an age when logic was beginning to mould human thought,
+Plato naturally cast his belief in immortality into a logical form. And
+when we consider how much the doctrine of ideas was also one of words,
+it is not surprising that he should have fallen into verbal fallacies:
+early logic is always mistaking the truth of the form for the truth of
+the matter. It is easy to see that the alternation of opposites is
+not the same as the generation of them out of each other; and that the
+generation of them out of each other, which is the first argument in
+the Phaedo, is at variance with their mutual exclusion of each other,
+whether in themselves or in us, which is the last. For even if we admit
+the distinction which he draws between the opposites and the things
+which have the opposites, still individuals fall under the latter class;
+and we have to pass out of the region of human hopes and fears to a
+conception of an abstract soul which is the impersonation of the ideas.
+Such a conception, which in Plato himself is but half expressed, is
+unmeaning to us, and relative only to a particular stage in the history
+of thought. The doctrine of reminiscence is also a fragment of a former
+world, which has no place in the philosophy of modern times. But Plato
+had the wonders of psychology just opening to him, and he had not the
+explanation of them which is supplied by the analysis of language and
+the history of the human mind. The question, 'Whence come our abstract
+ideas?' he could only answer by an imaginary hypothesis. Nor is it
+difficult to see that his crowning argument is purely verbal, and is
+but the expression of an instinctive confidence put into a logical
+form:--'The soul is immortal because it contains a principle of
+imperishableness.' Nor does he himself seem at all to be aware that
+nothing is added to human knowledge by his 'safe and simple answer,'
+that beauty is the cause of the beautiful; and that he is merely
+reasserting the Eleatic being 'divided by the Pythagorean numbers,'
+against the Heracleitean doctrine of perpetual generation. The answer to
+the 'very serious question' of generation and destruction is really
+the denial of them. For this he would substitute, as in the Republic, a
+system of ideas, tested, not by experience, but by their consequences,
+and not explained by actual causes, but by a higher, that is, a more
+general notion. Consistency with themselves is the only test which is to
+be applied to them. (Republic, and Phaedo.)
+
+18. To deal fairly with such arguments, they should be translated as
+far as possible into their modern equivalents. 'If the ideas of men are
+eternal, their souls are eternal, and if not the ideas, then not the
+souls.' Such an argument stands nearly in the same relation to Plato and
+his age, as the argument from the existence of God to immortality among
+ourselves. 'If God exists, then the soul exists after death; and if
+there is no God, there is no existence of the soul after death.' For
+the ideas are to his mind the reality, the truth, the principle of
+permanence, as well as of intelligence and order in the world. When
+Simmias and Cebes say that they are more strongly persuaded of the
+existence of ideas than they are of the immortality of the soul, they
+represent fairly enough the order of thought in Greek philosophy. And we
+might say in the same way that we are more certain of the existence
+of God than we are of the immortality of the soul, and are led by the
+belief in the one to a belief in the other. The parallel, as Socrates
+would say, is not perfect, but agrees in as far as the mind in either
+case is regarded as dependent on something above and beyond herself. The
+analogy may even be pressed a step further: 'We are more certain of our
+ideas of truth and right than we are of the existence of God, and
+are led on in the order of thought from one to the other.' Or more
+correctly: 'The existence of right and truth is the existence of God,
+and can never for a moment be separated from Him.'
+
+19. The main argument of the Phaedo is derived from the existence of
+eternal ideas of which the soul is a partaker; the other argument of the
+alternation of opposites is replaced by this. And there have not been
+wanting philosophers of the idealist school who have imagined that the
+doctrine of the immortality of the soul is a theory of knowledge, and
+that in what has preceded Plato is accommodating himself to the popular
+belief. Such a view can only be elicited from the Phaedo by what may
+be termed the transcendental method of interpretation, and is obviously
+inconsistent with the Gorgias and the Republic. Those who maintain
+it are immediately compelled to renounce the shadow which they have
+grasped, as a play of words only. But the truth is, that Plato in his
+argument for the immortality of the soul has collected many elements of
+proof or persuasion, ethical and mythological as well as dialectical,
+which are not easily to be reconciled with one another; and he is as
+much in earnest about his doctrine of retribution, which is repeated
+in all his more ethical writings, as about his theory of knowledge.
+And while we may fairly translate the dialectical into the language of
+Hegel, and the religious and mythological into the language of Dante or
+Bunyan, the ethical speaks to us still in the same voice, and appeals to
+a common feeling.
+
+20. Two arguments of this ethical character occur in the Phaedo. The
+first may be described as the aspiration of the soul after another state
+of being. Like the Oriental or Christian mystic, the philosopher is
+seeking to withdraw from impurities of sense, to leave the world and the
+things of the world, and to find his higher self. Plato recognizes in
+these aspirations the foretaste of immortality; as Butler and Addison in
+modern times have argued, the one from the moral tendencies of mankind,
+the other from the progress of the soul towards perfection. In using
+this argument Plato has certainly confused the soul which has left the
+body, with the soul of the good and wise. (Compare Republic.) Such a
+confusion was natural, and arose partly out of the antithesis of soul
+and body. The soul in her own essence, and the soul 'clothed upon' with
+virtues and graces, were easily interchanged with one another, because
+on a subject which passes expression the distinctions of language can
+hardly be maintained.
+
+21. The ethical proof of the immortality of the soul is derived from the
+necessity of retribution. The wicked would be too well off if their
+evil deeds came to an end. It is not to be supposed that an Ardiaeus,
+an Archelaus, an Ismenias could ever have suffered the penalty of
+their crimes in this world. The manner in which this retribution is
+accomplished Plato represents under the figures of mythology. Doubtless
+he felt that it was easier to improve than to invent, and that in
+religion especially the traditional form was required in order to give
+verisimilitude to the myth. The myth too is far more probable to that
+age than to ours, and may fairly be regarded as 'one guess among
+many' about the nature of the earth, which he cleverly supports by the
+indications of geology. Not that he insists on the absolute truth of
+his own particular notions: 'no man of sense will be confident in such
+matters; but he will be confident that something of the kind is true.'
+As in other passages (Gorg., Tim., compare Crito), he wins belief for
+his fictions by the moderation of his statements; he does not, like
+Dante or Swedenborg, allow himself to be deceived by his own creations.
+
+The Dialogue must be read in the light of the situation. And first of
+all we are struck by the calmness of the scene. Like the spectators
+at the time, we cannot pity Socrates; his mien and his language are
+so noble and fearless. He is the same that he ever was, but milder and
+gentler, and he has in no degree lost his interest in dialectics;
+he will not forego the delight of an argument in compliance with the
+jailer's intimation that he should not heat himself with talking. At
+such a time he naturally expresses the hope of his life, that he has
+been a true mystic and not a mere retainer or wand-bearer: and he refers
+to passages of his personal history. To his old enemies the Comic
+poets, and to the proceedings on the trial, he alludes playfully; but he
+vividly remembers the disappointment which he felt in reading the books
+of Anaxagoras. The return of Xanthippe and his children indicates that
+the philosopher is not 'made of oak or rock.' Some other traits of his
+character may be noted; for example, the courteous manner in which
+he inclines his head to the last objector, or the ironical touch, 'Me
+already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls;' or
+the depreciation of the arguments with which 'he comforted himself and
+them;' or his fear of 'misology;' or his references to Homer; or the
+playful smile with which he 'talks like a book' about greater and less;
+or the allusion to the possibility of finding another teacher among
+barbarous races (compare Polit.); or the mysterious reference to another
+science (mathematics?) of generation and destruction for which he is
+vainly feeling. There is no change in him; only now he is invested with
+a sort of sacred character, as the prophet or priest of Apollo the God
+of the festival, in whose honour he first of all composes a hymn,
+and then like the swan pours forth his dying lay. Perhaps the extreme
+elevation of Socrates above his own situation, and the ordinary
+interests of life (compare his jeu d'esprit about his burial, in which
+for a moment he puts on the 'Silenus mask'), create in the mind of the
+reader an impression stronger than could be derived from arguments that
+such a one has in him 'a principle which does not admit of death.'
+
+The other persons of the Dialogue may be considered under two heads: (1)
+private friends; (2) the respondents in the argument.
+
+First there is Crito, who has been already introduced to us in the
+Euthydemus and the Crito; he is the equal in years of Socrates, and
+stands in quite a different relation to him from his younger disciples.
+He is a man of the world who is rich and prosperous (compare the jest
+in the Euthydemus), the best friend of Socrates, who wants to know his
+commands, in whose presence he talks to his family, and who performs
+the last duty of closing his eyes. It is observable too that, as in the
+Euthydemus, Crito shows no aptitude for philosophical discussions. Nor
+among the friends of Socrates must the jailer be forgotten, who seems
+to have been introduced by Plato in order to show the impression made
+by the extraordinary man on the common. The gentle nature of the man
+is indicated by his weeping at the announcement of his errand and then
+turning away, and also by the words of Socrates to his disciples: 'How
+charming the man is! since I have been in prison he has been always
+coming to me, and is as good as could be to me.' We are reminded
+too that he has retained this gentle nature amid scenes of death and
+violence by the contrasts which he draws between the behaviour of
+Socrates and of others when about to die.
+
+Another person who takes no part in the philosophical discussion is the
+excitable Apollodorus, the same who, in the Symposium, of which he is
+the narrator, is called 'the madman,' and who testifies his grief by the
+most violent emotions. Phaedo is also present, the 'beloved disciple'
+as he may be termed, who is described, if not 'leaning on his bosom,'
+as seated next to Socrates, who is playing with his hair. He too, like
+Apollodorus, takes no part in the discussion, but he loves above all
+things to hear and speak of Socrates after his death. The calmness
+of his behaviour, veiling his face when he can no longer restrain
+his tears, contrasts with the passionate outcries of the other. At a
+particular point the argument is described as falling before the attack
+of Simmias. A sort of despair is introduced in the minds of the company.
+The effect of this is heightened by the description of Phaedo, who has
+been the eye-witness of the scene, and by the sympathy of his Phliasian
+auditors who are beginning to think 'that they too can never trust an
+argument again.' And the intense interest of the company is communicated
+not only to the first auditors, but to us who in a distant country read
+the narrative of their emotions after more than two thousand years have
+passed away.
+
+The two principal interlocutors are Simmias and Cebes, the disciples of
+Philolaus the Pythagorean philosopher of Thebes. Simmias is described
+in the Phaedrus as fonder of an argument than any man living; and
+Cebes, although finally persuaded by Socrates, is said to be the most
+incredulous of human beings. It is Cebes who at the commencement of
+the Dialogue asks why 'suicide is held to be unlawful,' and who
+first supplies the doctrine of recollection in confirmation of the
+pre-existence of the soul. It is Cebes who urges that the pre-existence
+does not necessarily involve the future existence of the soul, as is
+shown by the illustration of the weaver and his coat. Simmias, on the
+other hand, raises the question about harmony and the lyre, which is
+naturally put into the mouth of a Pythagorean disciple. It is Simmias,
+too, who first remarks on the uncertainty of human knowledge, and
+only at last concedes to the argument such a qualified approval as is
+consistent with the feebleness of the human faculties. Cebes is the
+deeper and more consecutive thinker, Simmias more superficial and
+rhetorical; they are distinguished in much the same manner as Adeimantus
+and Glaucon in the Republic.
+
+Other persons, Menexenus, Ctesippus, Lysis, are old friends; Evenus
+has been already satirized in the Apology; Aeschines and Epigenes
+were present at the trial; Euclid and Terpsion will reappear in the
+Introduction to the Theaetetus, Hermogenes has already appeared in
+the Cratylus. No inference can fairly be drawn from the absence of
+Aristippus, nor from the omission of Xenophon, who at the time of
+Socrates' death was in Asia. The mention of Plato's own absence seems
+like an expression of sorrow, and may, perhaps, be an indication that
+the report of the conversation is not to be taken literally.
+
+The place of the Dialogue in the series is doubtful. The doctrine of
+ideas is certainly carried beyond the Socratic point of view; in no
+other of the writings of Plato is the theory of them so completely
+developed. Whether the belief in immortality can be attributed to
+Socrates or not is uncertain; the silence of the Memorabilia, and of the
+earlier Dialogues of Plato, is an argument to the contrary. Yet in the
+Cyropaedia Xenophon has put language into the mouth of the dying Cyrus
+which recalls the Phaedo, and may have been derived from the teaching of
+Socrates. It may be fairly urged that the greatest religious interest of
+mankind could not have been wholly ignored by one who passed his life in
+fulfilling the commands of an oracle, and who recognized a Divine plan
+in man and nature. (Xen. Mem.) And the language of the Apology and of
+the Crito confirms this view.
+
+The Phaedo is not one of the Socratic Dialogues of Plato; nor, on the
+other hand, can it be assigned to that later stage of the Platonic
+writings at which the doctrine of ideas appears to be forgotten. It
+belongs rather to the intermediate period of the Platonic philosophy,
+which roughly corresponds to the Phaedrus, Gorgias, Republic,
+Theaetetus. Without pretending to determine the real time of their
+composition, the Symposium, Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Phaedo may be
+conveniently read by us in this order as illustrative of the life of
+Socrates. Another chain may be formed of the Meno, Phaedrus, Phaedo,
+in which the immortality of the soul is connected with the doctrine of
+ideas. In the Meno the theory of ideas is based on the ancient belief in
+transmigration, which reappears again in the Phaedrus as well as in the
+Republic and Timaeus, and in all of them is connected with a doctrine of
+retribution. In the Phaedrus the immortality of the soul is supposed to
+rest on the conception of the soul as a principle of motion, whereas in
+the Republic the argument turns on the natural continuance of the soul,
+which, if not destroyed by her own proper evil, can hardly be destroyed
+by any other. The soul of man in the Timaeus is derived from the Supreme
+Creator, and either returns after death to her kindred star, or descends
+into the lower life of an animal. The Apology expresses the same view
+as the Phaedo, but with less confidence; there the probability of death
+being a long sleep is not excluded. The Theaetetus also describes, in a
+digression, the desire of the soul to fly away and be with God--'and to
+fly to him is to be like him.' The Symposium may be observed to
+resemble as well as to differ from the Phaedo. While the first notion of
+immortality is only in the way of natural procreation or of posthumous
+fame and glory, the higher revelation of beauty, like the good in the
+Republic, is the vision of the eternal idea. So deeply rooted in
+Plato's mind is the belief in immortality; so various are the forms of
+expression which he employs.
+
+As in several other Dialogues, there is more of system in the Phaedo
+than appears at first sight. The succession of arguments is based on
+previous philosophies; beginning with the mysteries and the Heracleitean
+alternation of opposites, and proceeding to the Pythagorean harmony and
+transmigration; making a step by the aid of Platonic reminiscence, and
+a further step by the help of the nous of Anaxagoras; until at last we
+rest in the conviction that the soul is inseparable from the ideas,
+and belongs to the world of the invisible and unknown. Then, as in
+the Gorgias or Republic, the curtain falls, and the veil of mythology
+descends upon the argument. After the confession of Socrates that he is
+an interested party, and the acknowledgment that no man of sense will
+think the details of his narrative true, but that something of the kind
+is true, we return from speculation to practice. He is himself more
+confident of immortality than he is of his own arguments; and the
+confidence which he expresses is less strong than that which his
+cheerfulness and composure in death inspire in us.
+
+Difficulties of two kinds occur in the Phaedo--one kind to be explained
+out of contemporary philosophy, the other not admitting of an entire
+solution. (1) The difficulty which Socrates says that he experienced in
+explaining generation and corruption; the assumption of hypotheses which
+proceed from the less general to the more general, and are tested by
+their consequences; the puzzle about greater and less; the resort to the
+method of ideas, which to us appear only abstract terms,--these are to
+be explained out of the position of Socrates and Plato in the history of
+philosophy. They were living in a twilight between the sensible and
+the intellectual world, and saw no way of connecting them. They
+could neither explain the relation of ideas to phenomena, nor their
+correlation to one another. The very idea of relation or comparison was
+embarrassing to them. Yet in this intellectual uncertainty they had a
+conception of a proof from results, and of a moral truth, which remained
+unshaken amid the questionings of philosophy. (2) The other is a
+difficulty which is touched upon in the Republic as well as in the
+Phaedo, and is common to modern and ancient philosophy. Plato is not
+altogether satisfied with his safe and simple method of ideas. He wants
+to have proved to him by facts that all things are for the best, and
+that there is one mind or design which pervades them all. But this
+'power of the best' he is unable to explain; and therefore takes refuge
+in universal ideas. And are not we at this day seeking to discover that
+which Socrates in a glass darkly foresaw?
+
+Some resemblances to the Greek drama may be noted in all the Dialogues
+of Plato. The Phaedo is the tragedy of which Socrates is the protagonist
+and Simmias and Cebes the secondary performers, standing to them in the
+same relation as to Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic. No Dialogue
+has a greater unity of subject and feeling. Plato has certainly
+fulfilled the condition of Greek, or rather of all art, which requires
+that scenes of death and suffering should be clothed in beauty. The
+gathering of the friends at the commencement of the Dialogue, the
+dismissal of Xanthippe, whose presence would have been out of place at
+a philosophical discussion, but who returns again with her children to
+take a final farewell, the dejection of the audience at the temporary
+overthrow of the argument, the picture of Socrates playing with the
+hair of Phaedo, the final scene in which Socrates alone retains his
+composure--are masterpieces of art. And the chorus at the end might have
+interpreted the feeling of the play: 'There can no evil happen to a good
+man in life or death.'
+
+'The art of concealing art' is nowhere more perfect than in those
+writings of Plato which describe the trial and death of Socrates. Their
+charm is their simplicity, which gives them verisimilitude; and yet
+they touch, as if incidentally, and because they were suitable to the
+occasion, on some of the deepest truths of philosophy. There is nothing
+in any tragedy, ancient or modern, nothing in poetry or history (with
+one exception), like the last hours of Socrates in Plato. The master
+could not be more fitly occupied at such a time than in discoursing of
+immortality; nor the disciples more divinely consoled. The arguments,
+taken in the spirit and not in the letter, are our arguments; and
+Socrates by anticipation may be even thought to refute some 'eccentric
+notions; current in our own age. For there are philosophers among
+ourselves who do not seem to understand how much stronger is the power
+of intelligence, or of the best, than of Atlas, or mechanical force.
+How far the words attributed to Socrates were actually uttered by him we
+forbear to ask; for no answer can be given to this question. And it
+is better to resign ourselves to the feeling of a great work, than to
+linger among critical uncertainties.
+
+
+
+
+PHAEDO
+
+
+PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE:
+
+Phaedo, who is the narrator of the dialogue to Echecrates of Phlius.
+Socrates, Apollodorus, Simmias, Cebes, Crito and an Attendant of the
+Prison.
+
+SCENE: The Prison of Socrates.
+
+PLACE OF THE NARRATION: Phlius.
+
+
+
+ECHECRATES: Were you yourself, Phaedo, in the prison with Socrates on
+the day when he drank the poison?
+
+PHAEDO: Yes, Echecrates, I was.
+
+ECHECRATES: I should so like to hear about his death. What did he say in
+his last hours? We were informed that he died by taking poison, but no
+one knew anything more; for no Phliasian ever goes to Athens now, and it
+is a long time since any stranger from Athens has found his way hither;
+so that we had no clear account.
+
+PHAEDO: Did you not hear of the proceedings at the trial?
+
+ECHECRATES: Yes; some one told us about the trial, and we could not
+understand why, having been condemned, he should have been put to death,
+not at the time, but long afterwards. What was the reason of this?
+
+PHAEDO: An accident, Echecrates: the stern of the ship which the
+Athenians send to Delos happened to have been crowned on the day before
+he was tried.
+
+ECHECRATES: What is this ship?
+
+PHAEDO: It is the ship in which, according to Athenian tradition,
+Theseus went to Crete when he took with him the fourteen youths, and was
+the saviour of them and of himself. And they were said to have vowed
+to Apollo at the time, that if they were saved they would send a yearly
+mission to Delos. Now this custom still continues, and the whole period
+of the voyage to and from Delos, beginning when the priest of Apollo
+crowns the stern of the ship, is a holy season, during which the city is
+not allowed to be polluted by public executions; and when the vessel
+is detained by contrary winds, the time spent in going and returning
+is very considerable. As I was saying, the ship was crowned on the day
+before the trial, and this was the reason why Socrates lay in prison and
+was not put to death until long after he was condemned.
+
+ECHECRATES: What was the manner of his death, Phaedo? What was said or
+done? And which of his friends were with him? Or did the authorities
+forbid them to be present--so that he had no friends near him when he
+died?
+
+PHAEDO: No; there were several of them with him.
+
+ECHECRATES: If you have nothing to do, I wish that you would tell me
+what passed, as exactly as you can.
+
+PHAEDO: I have nothing at all to do, and will try to gratify your wish.
+To be reminded of Socrates is always the greatest delight to me, whether
+I speak myself or hear another speak of him.
+
+ECHECRATES: You will have listeners who are of the same mind with you,
+and I hope that you will be as exact as you can.
+
+PHAEDO: I had a singular feeling at being in his company. For I
+could hardly believe that I was present at the death of a friend, and
+therefore I did not pity him, Echecrates; he died so fearlessly, and
+his words and bearing were so noble and gracious, that to me he appeared
+blessed. I thought that in going to the other world he could not be
+without a divine call, and that he would be happy, if any man ever was,
+when he arrived there, and therefore I did not pity him as might have
+seemed natural at such an hour. But I had not the pleasure which I
+usually feel in philosophical discourse (for philosophy was the theme
+of which we spoke). I was pleased, but in the pleasure there was also a
+strange admixture of pain; for I reflected that he was soon to die, and
+this double feeling was shared by us all; we were laughing and weeping
+by turns, especially the excitable Apollodorus--you know the sort of
+man?
+
+ECHECRATES: Yes.
+
+PHAEDO: He was quite beside himself; and I and all of us were greatly
+moved.
+
+ECHECRATES: Who were present?
+
+PHAEDO: Of native Athenians there were, besides Apollodorus, Critobulus
+and his father Crito, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, Antisthenes;
+likewise Ctesippus of the deme of Paeania, Menexenus, and some others;
+Plato, if I am not mistaken, was ill.
+
+ECHECRATES: Were there any strangers?
+
+PHAEDO: Yes, there were; Simmias the Theban, and Cebes, and Phaedondes;
+Euclid and Terpison, who came from Megara.
+
+ECHECRATES: And was Aristippus there, and Cleombrotus?
+
+PHAEDO: No, they were said to be in Aegina.
+
+ECHECRATES: Any one else?
+
+PHAEDO: I think that these were nearly all.
+
+ECHECRATES: Well, and what did you talk about?
+
+PHAEDO: I will begin at the beginning, and endeavour to repeat the
+entire conversation. On the previous days we had been in the habit of
+assembling early in the morning at the court in which the trial took
+place, and which is not far from the prison. There we used to wait
+talking with one another until the opening of the doors (for they were
+not opened very early); then we went in and generally passed the day
+with Socrates. On the last morning we assembled sooner than usual,
+having heard on the day before when we quitted the prison in the evening
+that the sacred ship had come from Delos, and so we arranged to meet
+very early at the accustomed place. On our arrival the jailer who
+answered the door, instead of admitting us, came out and told us to stay
+until he called us. 'For the Eleven,' he said, 'are now with Socrates;
+they are taking off his chains, and giving orders that he is to die
+to-day.' He soon returned and said that we might come in. On entering we
+found Socrates just released from chains, and Xanthippe, whom you know,
+sitting by him, and holding his child in her arms. When she saw us she
+uttered a cry and said, as women will: 'O Socrates, this is the last
+time that either you will converse with your friends, or they with you.'
+Socrates turned to Crito and said: 'Crito, let some one take her home.'
+Some of Crito's people accordingly led her away, crying out and beating
+herself. And when she was gone, Socrates, sitting up on the couch, bent
+and rubbed his leg, saying, as he was rubbing: How singular is the
+thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be
+thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at
+the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled
+to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single
+head. And I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had remembered them, he
+would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and
+how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is
+the reason why when one comes the other follows, as I know by my own
+experience now, when after the pain in my leg which was caused by the
+chain pleasure appears to succeed.
+
+Upon this Cebes said: I am glad, Socrates, that you have mentioned the
+name of Aesop. For it reminds me of a question which has been asked by
+many, and was asked of me only the day before yesterday by Evenus the
+poet--he will be sure to ask it again, and therefore if you would like
+me to have an answer ready for him, you may as well tell me what I
+should say to him:--he wanted to know why you, who never before wrote
+a line of poetry, now that you are in prison are turning Aesop's fables
+into verse, and also composing that hymn in honour of Apollo.
+
+Tell him, Cebes, he replied, what is the truth--that I had no idea of
+rivalling him or his poems; to do so, as I knew, would be no easy task.
+But I wanted to see whether I could purge away a scruple which I felt
+about the meaning of certain dreams. In the course of my life I have
+often had intimations in dreams 'that I should compose music.' The same
+dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but
+always saying the same or nearly the same words: 'Cultivate and make
+music,' said the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only
+intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which
+has been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music.
+The dream was bidding me do what I was already doing, in the same way
+that the competitor in a race is bidden by the spectators to run when he
+is already running. But I was not certain of this, for the dream might
+have meant music in the popular sense of the word, and being under
+sentence of death, and the festival giving me a respite, I thought that
+it would be safer for me to satisfy the scruple, and, in obedience to
+the dream, to compose a few verses before I departed. And first I made
+a hymn in honour of the god of the festival, and then considering that a
+poet, if he is really to be a poet, should not only put together words,
+but should invent stories, and that I have no invention, I took some
+fables of Aesop, which I had ready at hand and which I knew--they were
+the first I came upon--and turned them into verse. Tell this to Evenus,
+Cebes, and bid him be of good cheer; say that I would have him come
+after me if he be a wise man, and not tarry; and that to-day I am likely
+to be going, for the Athenians say that I must.
+
+Simmias said: What a message for such a man! having been a frequent
+companion of his I should say that, as far as I know him, he will never
+take your advice unless he is obliged.
+
+Why, said Socrates,--is not Evenus a philosopher?
+
+I think that he is, said Simmias.
+
+Then he, or any man who has the spirit of philosophy, will be willing to
+die, but he will not take his own life, for that is held to be unlawful.
+
+Here he changed his position, and put his legs off the couch on to the
+ground, and during the rest of the conversation he remained sitting.
+
+Why do you say, enquired Cebes, that a man ought not to take his own
+life, but that the philosopher will be ready to follow the dying?
+
+Socrates replied: And have you, Cebes and Simmias, who are the disciples
+of Philolaus, never heard him speak of this?
+
+Yes, but his language was obscure, Socrates.
+
+My words, too, are only an echo; but there is no reason why I should not
+repeat what I have heard: and indeed, as I am going to another place,
+it is very meet for me to be thinking and talking of the nature of
+the pilgrimage which I am about to make. What can I do better in the
+interval between this and the setting of the sun?
+
+Then tell me, Socrates, why is suicide held to be unlawful? as I have
+certainly heard Philolaus, about whom you were just now asking, affirm
+when he was staying with us at Thebes: and there are others who say the
+same, although I have never understood what was meant by any of them.
+
+Do not lose heart, replied Socrates, and the day may come when you will
+understand. I suppose that you wonder why, when other things which are
+evil may be good at certain times and to certain persons, death is to
+be the only exception, and why, when a man is better dead, he is not
+permitted to be his own benefactor, but must wait for the hand of
+another.
+
+Very true, said Cebes, laughing gently and speaking in his native
+Boeotian.
+
+I admit the appearance of inconsistency in what I am saying; but
+there may not be any real inconsistency after all. There is a doctrine
+whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open
+the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite
+understand. Yet I too believe that the gods are our guardians, and that
+we are a possession of theirs. Do you not agree?
+
+Yes, I quite agree, said Cebes.
+
+And if one of your own possessions, an ox or an ass, for example, took
+the liberty of putting himself out of the way when you had given no
+intimation of your wish that he should die, would you not be angry with
+him, and would you not punish him if you could?
+
+Certainly, replied Cebes.
+
+Then, if we look at the matter thus, there may be reason in saying that
+a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him, as
+he is now summoning me.
+
+Yes, Socrates, said Cebes, there seems to be truth in what you say. And
+yet how can you reconcile this seemingly true belief that God is our
+guardian and we his possessions, with the willingness to die which we
+were just now attributing to the philosopher? That the wisest of men
+should be willing to leave a service in which they are ruled by the gods
+who are the best of rulers, is not reasonable; for surely no wise man
+thinks that when set at liberty he can take better care of himself than
+the gods take of him. A fool may perhaps think so--he may argue that he
+had better run away from his master, not considering that his duty is
+to remain to the end, and not to run away from the good, and that there
+would be no sense in his running away. The wise man will want to be ever
+with him who is better than himself. Now this, Socrates, is the reverse
+of what was just now said; for upon this view the wise man should sorrow
+and the fool rejoice at passing out of life.
+
+The earnestness of Cebes seemed to please Socrates. Here, said he,
+turning to us, is a man who is always inquiring, and is not so easily
+convinced by the first thing which he hears.
+
+And certainly, added Simmias, the objection which he is now making does
+appear to me to have some force. For what can be the meaning of a truly
+wise man wanting to fly away and lightly leave a master who is better
+than himself? And I rather imagine that Cebes is referring to you; he
+thinks that you are too ready to leave us, and too ready to leave the
+gods whom you acknowledge to be our good masters.
+
+Yes, replied Socrates; there is reason in what you say. And so you think
+that I ought to answer your indictment as if I were in a court?
+
+We should like you to do so, said Simmias.
+
+Then I must try to make a more successful defence before you than I
+did when before the judges. For I am quite ready to admit, Simmias and
+Cebes, that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded in
+the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of
+which I am as certain as I can be of any such matters), and secondly
+(though I am not so sure of this last) to men departed, better than
+those whom I leave behind; and therefore I do not grieve as I might have
+done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the
+dead, and as has been said of old, some far better thing for the good
+than for the evil.
+
+But do you mean to take away your thoughts with you, Socrates? said
+Simmias. Will you not impart them to us?--for they are a benefit
+in which we too are entitled to share. Moreover, if you succeed in
+convincing us, that will be an answer to the charge against yourself.
+
+I will do my best, replied Socrates. But you must first let me hear what
+Crito wants; he has long been wishing to say something to me.
+
+Only this, Socrates, replied Crito:--the attendant who is to give you
+the poison has been telling me, and he wants me to tell you, that you
+are not to talk much, talking, he says, increases heat, and this is
+apt to interfere with the action of the poison; persons who excite
+themselves are sometimes obliged to take a second or even a third dose.
+
+Then, said Socrates, let him mind his business and be prepared to give
+the poison twice or even thrice if necessary; that is all.
+
+I knew quite well what you would say, replied Crito; but I was obliged
+to satisfy him.
+
+Never mind him, he said.
+
+And now, O my judges, I desire to prove to you that the real philosopher
+has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after
+death he may hope to obtain the greatest good in the other world. And
+how this may be, Simmias and Cebes, I will endeavour to explain. For I
+deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood
+by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and
+dying; and if this be so, and he has had the desire of death all his
+life long, why when his time comes should he repine at that which he has
+been always pursuing and desiring?
+
+Simmias said laughingly: Though not in a laughing humour, you have made
+me laugh, Socrates; for I cannot help thinking that the many when they
+hear your words will say how truly you have described philosophers, and
+our people at home will likewise say that the life which philosophers
+desire is in reality death, and that they have found them out to be
+deserving of the death which they desire.
+
+And they are right, Simmias, in thinking so, with the exception of the
+words 'they have found them out'; for they have not found out either
+what is the nature of that death which the true philosopher deserves,
+or how he deserves or desires death. But enough of them:--let us discuss
+the matter among ourselves: Do we believe that there is such a thing as
+death?
+
+To be sure, replied Simmias.
+
+Is it not the separation of soul and body? And to be dead is the
+completion of this; when the soul exists in herself, and is released
+from the body and the body is released from the soul, what is this but
+death?
+
+Just so, he replied.
+
+There is another question, which will probably throw light on our
+present inquiry if you and I can agree about it:--Ought the philosopher
+to care about the pleasures--if they are to be called pleasures--of
+eating and drinking?
+
+Certainly not, answered Simmias.
+
+And what about the pleasures of love--should he care for them?
+
+By no means.
+
+And will he think much of the other ways of indulging the body, for
+example, the acquisition of costly raiment, or sandals, or other
+adornments of the body? Instead of caring about them, does he not rather
+despise anything more than nature needs? What do you say?
+
+I should say that the true philosopher would despise them.
+
+Would you not say that he is entirely concerned with the soul and not
+with the body? He would like, as far as he can, to get away from the
+body and to turn to the soul.
+
+Quite true.
+
+In matters of this sort philosophers, above all other men, may be
+observed in every sort of way to dissever the soul from the communion of
+the body.
+
+Very true.
+
+Whereas, Simmias, the rest of the world are of opinion that to him who
+has no sense of pleasure and no part in bodily pleasure, life is not
+worth having; and that he who is indifferent about them is as good as
+dead.
+
+That is also true.
+
+What again shall we say of the actual acquirement of knowledge?--is the
+body, if invited to share in the enquiry, a hinderer or a helper? I mean
+to say, have sight and hearing any truth in them? Are they not, as the
+poets are always telling us, inaccurate witnesses? and yet, if even
+they are inaccurate and indistinct, what is to be said of the other
+senses?--for you will allow that they are the best of them?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+Then when does the soul attain truth?--for in attempting to consider
+anything in company with the body she is obviously deceived.
+
+True.
+
+Then must not true existence be revealed to her in thought, if at all?
+
+Yes.
+
+And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of
+these things trouble her--neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any
+pleasure,--when she takes leave of the body, and has as little as
+possible to do with it, when she has no bodily sense or desire, but is
+aspiring after true being?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And in this the philosopher dishonours the body; his soul runs away from
+his body and desires to be alone and by herself?
+
+That is true.
+
+Well, but there is another thing, Simmias: Is there or is there not an
+absolute justice?
+
+Assuredly there is.
+
+And an absolute beauty and absolute good?
+
+Of course.
+
+But did you ever behold any of them with your eyes?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or did you ever reach them with any other bodily sense?--and I speak not
+of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength,
+and of the essence or true nature of everything. Has the reality of them
+ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs? or rather, is not
+the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made
+by him who so orders his intellectual vision as to have the most exact
+conception of the essence of each thing which he considers?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And he attains to the purest knowledge of them who goes to each with the
+mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight
+or any other sense together with reason, but with the very light of the
+mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each; he who
+has got rid, as far as he can, of eyes and ears and, so to speak, of the
+whole body, these being in his opinion distracting elements which when
+they infect the soul hinder her from acquiring truth and knowledge--who,
+if not he, is likely to attain the knowledge of true being?
+
+What you say has a wonderful truth in it, Socrates, replied Simmias.
+
+And when real philosophers consider all these things, will they not be
+led to make a reflection which they will express in words something like
+the following? 'Have we not found,' they will say, 'a path of thought
+which seems to bring us and our argument to the conclusion, that while
+we are in the body, and while the soul is infected with the evils of the
+body, our desire will not be satisfied? and our desire is of the truth.
+For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere
+requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and
+impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and
+lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and
+in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all.
+Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body
+and the lusts of the body? wars are occasioned by the love of money, and
+money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body;
+and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to
+philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure and
+betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always breaking in
+upon us, causing turmoil and confusion in our enquiries, and so amazing
+us that we are prevented from seeing the truth. It has been proved to us
+by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we
+must be quit of the body--the soul in herself must behold things in
+themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of
+which we say that we are lovers, not while we live, but after death; for
+if while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge,
+one of two things follows--either knowledge is not to be attained at
+all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul
+will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present
+life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we
+have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are
+not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the
+hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid
+of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with
+the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is
+no other than the light of truth.' For the impure are not permitted to
+approach the pure. These are the sort of words, Simmias, which the true
+lovers of knowledge cannot help saying to one another, and thinking. You
+would agree; would you not?
+
+Undoubtedly, Socrates.
+
+But, O my friend, if this is true, there is great reason to hope that,
+going whither I go, when I have come to the end of my journey, I shall
+attain that which has been the pursuit of my life. And therefore I go on
+my way rejoicing, and not I only, but every other man who believes that
+his mind has been made ready and that he is in a manner purified.
+
+Certainly, replied Simmias.
+
+And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body,
+as I was saying before; the habit of the soul gathering and collecting
+herself into herself from all sides out of the body; the dwelling in
+her own place alone, as in another life, so also in this, as far as she
+can;--the release of the soul from the chains of the body?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed
+death?
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And the true philosophers, and they only, are ever seeking to release
+the soul. Is not the separation and release of the soul from the body
+their especial study?
+
+That is true.
+
+And, as I was saying at first, there would be a ridiculous contradiction
+in men studying to live as nearly as they can in a state of death, and
+yet repining when it comes upon them.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the true philosophers, Simmias, are always occupied in the practice
+of dying, wherefore also to them least of all men is death terrible.
+Look at the matter thus:--if they have been in every way the enemies of
+the body, and are wanting to be alone with the soul, when this desire of
+theirs is granted, how inconsistent would they be if they trembled and
+repined, instead of rejoicing at their departure to that place where,
+when they arrive, they hope to gain that which in life they desired--and
+this was wisdom--and at the same time to be rid of the company of their
+enemy. Many a man has been willing to go to the world below animated
+by the hope of seeing there an earthly love, or wife, or son, and
+conversing with them. And will he who is a true lover of wisdom, and is
+strongly persuaded in like manner that only in the world below he can
+worthily enjoy her, still repine at death? Will he not depart with joy?
+Surely he will, O my friend, if he be a true philosopher. For he will
+have a firm conviction that there and there only, he can find wisdom
+in her purity. And if this be true, he would be very absurd, as I was
+saying, if he were afraid of death.
+
+He would, indeed, replied Simmias.
+
+And when you see a man who is repining at the approach of death, is not
+his reluctance a sufficient proof that he is not a lover of wisdom, but
+a lover of the body, and probably at the same time a lover of either
+money or power, or both?
+
+Quite so, he replied.
+
+And is not courage, Simmias, a quality which is specially characteristic
+of the philosopher?
+
+Certainly.
+
+There is temperance again, which even by the vulgar is supposed to
+consist in the control and regulation of the passions, and in the sense
+of superiority to them--is not temperance a virtue belonging to those
+only who despise the body, and who pass their lives in philosophy?
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+For the courage and temperance of other men, if you will consider them,
+are really a contradiction.
+
+How so?
+
+Well, he said, you are aware that death is regarded by men in general as
+a great evil.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And do not courageous men face death because they are afraid of yet
+greater evils?
+
+That is quite true.
+
+Then all but the philosophers are courageous only from fear, and because
+they are afraid; and yet that a man should be courageous from fear, and
+because he is a coward, is surely a strange thing.
+
+Very true.
+
+And are not the temperate exactly in the same case? They are temperate
+because they are intemperate--which might seem to be a contradiction,
+but is nevertheless the sort of thing which happens with this foolish
+temperance. For there are pleasures which they are afraid of losing; and
+in their desire to keep them, they abstain from some pleasures, because
+they are overcome by others; and although to be conquered by pleasure is
+called by men intemperance, to them the conquest of pleasure consists in
+being conquered by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that, in
+a sense, they are made temperate through intemperance.
+
+Such appears to be the case.
+
+Yet the exchange of one fear or pleasure or pain for another fear or
+pleasure or pain, and of the greater for the less, as if they were
+coins, is not the exchange of virtue. O my blessed Simmias, is there not
+one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged?--and that
+is wisdom; and only in exchange for this, and in company with this, is
+anything truly bought or sold, whether courage or temperance or justice.
+And is not all true virtue the companion of wisdom, no matter what fears
+or pleasures or other similar goods or evils may or may not attend her?
+But the virtue which is made up of these goods, when they are severed
+from wisdom and exchanged with one another, is a shadow of virtue only,
+nor is there any freedom or health or truth in her; but in the true
+exchange there is a purging away of all these things, and temperance,
+and justice, and courage, and wisdom herself are the purgation of them.
+The founders of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning,
+and were not talking nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago
+that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below
+will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and
+purification will dwell with the gods. For 'many,' as they say in the
+mysteries, 'are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics,'--meaning,
+as I interpret the words, 'the true philosophers.' In the number
+of whom, during my whole life, I have been seeking, according to my
+ability, to find a place;--whether I have sought in a right way or not,
+and whether I have succeeded or not, I shall truly know in a little
+while, if God will, when I myself arrive in the other world--such is my
+belief. And therefore I maintain that I am right, Simmias and Cebes,
+in not grieving or repining at parting from you and my masters in this
+world, for I believe that I shall equally find good masters and friends
+in another world. But most men do not believe this saying; if then I
+succeed in convincing you by my defence better than I did the Athenian
+judges, it will be well.
+
+Cebes answered: I agree, Socrates, in the greater part of what you say.
+But in what concerns the soul, men are apt to be incredulous; they fear
+that when she has left the body her place may be nowhere, and that on
+the very day of death she may perish and come to an end--immediately on
+her release from the body, issuing forth dispersed like smoke or air
+and in her flight vanishing away into nothingness. If she could only be
+collected into herself after she has obtained release from the evils of
+which you are speaking, there would be good reason to hope, Socrates,
+that what you say is true. But surely it requires a great deal of
+argument and many proofs to show that when the man is dead his soul yet
+exists, and has any force or intelligence.
+
+True, Cebes, said Socrates; and shall I suggest that we converse a
+little of the probabilities of these things?
+
+I am sure, said Cebes, that I should greatly like to know your opinion
+about them.
+
+I reckon, said Socrates, that no one who heard me now, not even if he
+were one of my old enemies, the Comic poets, could accuse me of idle
+talking about matters in which I have no concern:--If you please, then,
+we will proceed with the inquiry.
+
+Suppose we consider the question whether the souls of men after death
+are or are not in the world below. There comes into my mind an ancient
+doctrine which affirms that they go from hence into the other world, and
+returning hither, are born again from the dead. Now if it be true that
+the living come from the dead, then our souls must exist in the other
+world, for if not, how could they have been born again? And this would
+be conclusive, if there were any real evidence that the living are only
+born from the dead; but if this is not so, then other arguments will
+have to be adduced.
+
+Very true, replied Cebes.
+
+Then let us consider the whole question, not in relation to man only,
+but in relation to animals generally, and to plants, and to everything
+of which there is generation, and the proof will be easier. Are not all
+things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I mean
+such things as good and evil, just and unjust--and there are innumerable
+other opposites which are generated out of opposites. And I want to show
+that in all opposites there is of necessity a similar alternation;
+I mean to say, for example, that anything which becomes greater must
+become greater after being less.
+
+True.
+
+And that which becomes less must have been once greater and then have
+become less.
+
+Yes.
+
+And the weaker is generated from the stronger, and the swifter from the
+slower.
+
+Very true.
+
+And the worse is from the better, and the more just is from the more
+unjust.
+
+Of course.
+
+And is this true of all opposites? and are we convinced that all of them
+are generated out of opposites?
+
+Yes.
+
+And in this universal opposition of all things, are there not also two
+intermediate processes which are ever going on, from one to the other
+opposite, and back again; where there is a greater and a less there is
+also an intermediate process of increase and diminution, and that which
+grows is said to wax, and that which decays to wane?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And there are many other processes, such as division and composition,
+cooling and heating, which equally involve a passage into and out of one
+another. And this necessarily holds of all opposites, even though not
+always expressed in words--they are really generated out of one another,
+and there is a passing or process from one to the other of them?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Well, and is there not an opposite of life, as sleep is the opposite of
+waking?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And what is it?
+
+Death, he answered.
+
+And these, if they are opposites, are generated the one from the other,
+and have there their two intermediate processes also?
+
+Of course.
+
+Now, said Socrates, I will analyze one of the two pairs of opposites
+which I have mentioned to you, and also its intermediate processes, and
+you shall analyze the other to me. One of them I term sleep, the other
+waking. The state of sleep is opposed to the state of waking, and out
+of sleeping waking is generated, and out of waking, sleeping; and the
+process of generation is in the one case falling asleep, and in the
+other waking up. Do you agree?
+
+I entirely agree.
+
+Then, suppose that you analyze life and death to me in the same manner.
+Is not death opposed to life?
+
+Yes.
+
+And they are generated one from the other?
+
+Yes.
+
+What is generated from the living?
+
+The dead.
+
+And what from the dead?
+
+I can only say in answer--the living.
+
+Then the living, whether things or persons, Cebes, are generated from
+the dead?
+
+That is clear, he replied.
+
+Then the inference is that our souls exist in the world below?
+
+That is true.
+
+And one of the two processes or generations is visible--for surely the
+act of dying is visible?
+
+Surely, he said.
+
+What then is to be the result? Shall we exclude the opposite process?
+And shall we suppose nature to walk on one leg only? Must we not rather
+assign to death some corresponding process of generation?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And what is that process?
+
+Return to life.
+
+And return to life, if there be such a thing, is the birth of the dead
+into the world of the living?
+
+Quite true.
+
+Then here is a new way by which we arrive at the conclusion that the
+living come from the dead, just as the dead come from the living; and
+this, if true, affords a most certain proof that the souls of the dead
+exist in some place out of which they come again.
+
+Yes, Socrates, he said; the conclusion seems to flow necessarily out of
+our previous admissions.
+
+And that these admissions were not unfair, Cebes, he said, may be shown,
+I think, as follows: If generation were in a straight line only, and
+there were no compensation or circle in nature, no turn or return of
+elements into their opposites, then you know that all things would at
+last have the same form and pass into the same state, and there would be
+no more generation of them.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+A simple thing enough, which I will illustrate by the case of sleep,
+he replied. You know that if there were no alternation of sleeping
+and waking, the tale of the sleeping Endymion would in the end have no
+meaning, because all other things would be asleep, too, and he would not
+be distinguishable from the rest. Or if there were composition only,
+and no division of substances, then the chaos of Anaxagoras would come
+again. And in like manner, my dear Cebes, if all things which partook
+of life were to die, and after they were dead remained in the form
+of death, and did not come to life again, all would at last die, and
+nothing would be alive--what other result could there be? For if the
+living spring from any other things, and they too die, must not all
+things at last be swallowed up in death? (But compare Republic.)
+
+There is no escape, Socrates, said Cebes; and to me your argument seems
+to be absolutely true.
+
+Yes, he said, Cebes, it is and must be so, in my opinion; and we have
+not been deluded in making these admissions; but I am confident that
+there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring
+from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence, and that
+the good souls have a better portion than the evil.
+
+Cebes added: Your favorite doctrine, Socrates, that knowledge is simply
+recollection, if true, also necessarily implies a previous time in
+which we have learned that which we now recollect. But this would be
+impossible unless our soul had been in some place before existing in the
+form of man; here then is another proof of the soul's immortality.
+
+But tell me, Cebes, said Simmias, interposing, what arguments are urged
+in favour of this doctrine of recollection. I am not very sure at the
+moment that I remember them.
+
+One excellent proof, said Cebes, is afforded by questions. If you put
+a question to a person in a right way, he will give a true answer of
+himself, but how could he do this unless there were knowledge and right
+reason already in him? And this is most clearly shown when he is taken
+to a diagram or to anything of that sort. (Compare Meno.)
+
+But if, said Socrates, you are still incredulous, Simmias, I would ask
+you whether you may not agree with me when you look at the matter
+in another way;--I mean, if you are still incredulous as to whether
+knowledge is recollection.
+
+Incredulous, I am not, said Simmias; but I want to have this doctrine
+of recollection brought to my own recollection, and, from what Cebes has
+said, I am beginning to recollect and be convinced; but I should still
+like to hear what you were going to say.
+
+This is what I would say, he replied:--We should agree, if I am not
+mistaken, that what a man recollects he must have known at some previous
+time.
+
+Very true.
+
+And what is the nature of this knowledge or recollection? I mean to
+ask, Whether a person who, having seen or heard or in any way perceived
+anything, knows not only that, but has a conception of something
+else which is the subject, not of the same but of some other kind of
+knowledge, may not be fairly said to recollect that of which he has the
+conception?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean what I may illustrate by the following instance:--The knowledge
+of a lyre is not the same as the knowledge of a man?
+
+True.
+
+And yet what is the feeling of lovers when they recognize a lyre, or
+a garment, or anything else which the beloved has been in the habit of
+using? Do not they, from knowing the lyre, form in the mind's eye an
+image of the youth to whom the lyre belongs? And this is recollection.
+In like manner any one who sees Simmias may remember Cebes; and there
+are endless examples of the same thing.
+
+Endless, indeed, replied Simmias.
+
+And recollection is most commonly a process of recovering that which has
+been already forgotten through time and inattention.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Well; and may you not also from seeing the picture of a horse or a
+lyre remember a man? and from the picture of Simmias, you may be led to
+remember Cebes?
+
+True.
+
+Or you may also be led to the recollection of Simmias himself?
+
+Quite so.
+
+And in all these cases, the recollection may be derived from things
+either like or unlike?
+
+It may be.
+
+And when the recollection is derived from like things, then another
+consideration is sure to arise, which is--whether the likeness in any
+degree falls short or not of that which is recollected?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And shall we proceed a step further, and affirm that there is such a
+thing as equality, not of one piece of wood or stone with another, but
+that, over and above this, there is absolute equality? Shall we say so?
+
+Say so, yes, replied Simmias, and swear to it, with all the confidence
+in life.
+
+And do we know the nature of this absolute essence?
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And whence did we obtain our knowledge? Did we not see equalities of
+material things, such as pieces of wood and stones, and gather from
+them the idea of an equality which is different from them? For you will
+acknowledge that there is a difference. Or look at the matter in another
+way:--Do not the same pieces of wood or stone appear at one time equal,
+and at another time unequal?
+
+That is certain.
+
+But are real equals ever unequal? or is the idea of equality the same as
+of inequality?
+
+Impossible, Socrates.
+
+Then these (so-called) equals are not the same with the idea of
+equality?
+
+I should say, clearly not, Socrates.
+
+And yet from these equals, although differing from the idea of equality,
+you conceived and attained that idea?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Which might be like, or might be unlike them?
+
+Yes.
+
+But that makes no difference; whenever from seeing one thing you
+conceived another, whether like or unlike, there must surely have been
+an act of recollection?
+
+Very true.
+
+But what would you say of equal portions of wood and stone, or other
+material equals? and what is the impression produced by them? Are they
+equals in the same sense in which absolute equality is equal? or do they
+fall short of this perfect equality in a measure?
+
+Yes, he said, in a very great measure too.
+
+And must we not allow, that when I or any one, looking at any object,
+observes that the thing which he sees aims at being some other thing,
+but falls short of, and cannot be, that other thing, but is inferior, he
+who makes this observation must have had a previous knowledge of that to
+which the other, although similar, was inferior?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And has not this been our own case in the matter of equals and of
+absolute equality?
+
+Precisely.
+
+Then we must have known equality previously to the time when we first
+saw the material equals, and reflected that all these apparent equals
+strive to attain absolute equality, but fall short of it?
+
+Very true.
+
+And we recognize also that this absolute equality has only been known,
+and can only be known, through the medium of sight or touch, or of some
+other of the senses, which are all alike in this respect?
+
+Yes, Socrates, as far as the argument is concerned, one of them is the
+same as the other.
+
+From the senses then is derived the knowledge that all sensible things
+aim at an absolute equality of which they fall short?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then before we began to see or hear or perceive in any way, we must have
+had a knowledge of absolute equality, or we could not have referred to
+that standard the equals which are derived from the senses?--for to that
+they all aspire, and of that they fall short.
+
+No other inference can be drawn from the previous statements.
+
+And did we not see and hear and have the use of our other senses as soon
+as we were born?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then we must have acquired the knowledge of equality at some previous
+time?
+
+Yes.
+
+That is to say, before we were born, I suppose?
+
+True.
+
+And if we acquired this knowledge before we were born, and were born
+having the use of it, then we also knew before we were born and at the
+instant of birth not only the equal or the greater or the less, but all
+other ideas; for we are not speaking only of equality, but of beauty,
+goodness, justice, holiness, and of all which we stamp with the name of
+essence in the dialectical process, both when we ask and when we answer
+questions. Of all this we may certainly affirm that we acquired the
+knowledge before birth?
+
+We may.
+
+But if, after having acquired, we have not forgotten what in each case
+we acquired, then we must always have come into life having knowledge,
+and shall always continue to know as long as life lasts--for knowing
+is the acquiring and retaining knowledge and not forgetting. Is not
+forgetting, Simmias, just the losing of knowledge?
+
+Quite true, Socrates.
+
+But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at
+birth, and if afterwards by the use of the senses we recovered what
+we previously knew, will not the process which we call learning be a
+recovering of the knowledge which is natural to us, and may not this be
+rightly termed recollection?
+
+Very true.
+
+So much is clear--that when we perceive something, either by the help of
+sight, or hearing, or some other sense, from that perception we are
+able to obtain a notion of some other thing like or unlike which is
+associated with it but has been forgotten. Whence, as I was saying, one
+of two alternatives follows:--either we had this knowledge at birth, and
+continued to know through life; or, after birth, those who are said to
+learn only remember, and learning is simply recollection.
+
+Yes, that is quite true, Socrates.
+
+And which alternative, Simmias, do you prefer? Had we the knowledge at
+our birth, or did we recollect the things which we knew previously to
+our birth?
+
+I cannot decide at the moment.
+
+At any rate you can decide whether he who has knowledge will or will not
+be able to render an account of his knowledge? What do you say?
+
+Certainly, he will.
+
+But do you think that every man is able to give an account of these very
+matters about which we are speaking?
+
+Would that they could, Socrates, but I rather fear that to-morrow, at
+this time, there will no longer be any one alive who is able to give an
+account of them such as ought to be given.
+
+Then you are not of opinion, Simmias, that all men know these things?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+They are in process of recollecting that which they learned before?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But when did our souls acquire this knowledge?--not since we were born
+as men?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And therefore, previously?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then, Simmias, our souls must also have existed without bodies before
+they were in the form of man, and must have had intelligence.
+
+Unless indeed you suppose, Socrates, that these notions are given us at
+the very moment of birth; for this is the only time which remains.
+
+Yes, my friend, but if so, when do we lose them? for they are not in
+us when we are born--that is admitted. Do we lose them at the moment of
+receiving them, or if not at what other time?
+
+No, Socrates, I perceive that I was unconsciously talking nonsense.
+
+Then may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there
+is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all
+things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our
+former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them,
+finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession--then
+our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be
+no force in the argument? There is the same proof that these ideas must
+have existed before we were born, as that our souls existed before we
+were born; and if not the ideas, then not the souls.
+
+Yes, Socrates; I am convinced that there is precisely the same necessity
+for the one as for the other; and the argument retreats successfully
+to the position that the existence of the soul before birth cannot be
+separated from the existence of the essence of which you speak. For
+there is nothing which to my mind is so patent as that beauty, goodness,
+and the other notions of which you were just now speaking, have a most
+real and absolute existence; and I am satisfied with the proof.
+
+Well, but is Cebes equally satisfied? for I must convince him too.
+
+I think, said Simmias, that Cebes is satisfied: although he is the most
+incredulous of mortals, yet I believe that he is sufficiently convinced
+of the existence of the soul before birth. But that after death the soul
+will continue to exist is not yet proven even to my own satisfaction.
+I cannot get rid of the feeling of the many to which Cebes was
+referring--the feeling that when the man dies the soul will be
+dispersed, and that this may be the extinction of her. For admitting
+that she may have been born elsewhere, and framed out of other elements,
+and was in existence before entering the human body, why after having
+entered in and gone out again may she not herself be destroyed and come
+to an end?
+
+Very true, Simmias, said Cebes; about half of what was required has been
+proven; to wit, that our souls existed before we were born:--that the
+soul will exist after death as well as before birth is the other half of
+which the proof is still wanting, and has to be supplied; when that is
+given the demonstration will be complete.
+
+But that proof, Simmias and Cebes, has been already given, said
+Socrates, if you put the two arguments together--I mean this and the
+former one, in which we admitted that everything living is born of the
+dead. For if the soul exists before birth, and in coming to life and
+being born can be born only from death and dying, must she not after
+death continue to exist, since she has to be born again?--Surely the
+proof which you desire has been already furnished. Still I suspect
+that you and Simmias would be glad to probe the argument further. Like
+children, you are haunted with a fear that when the soul leaves the
+body, the wind may really blow her away and scatter her; especially if a
+man should happen to die in a great storm and not when the sky is calm.
+
+Cebes answered with a smile: Then, Socrates, you must argue us out of
+our fears--and yet, strictly speaking, they are not our fears, but there
+is a child within us to whom death is a sort of hobgoblin; him too we
+must persuade not to be afraid when he is alone in the dark.
+
+Socrates said: Let the voice of the charmer be applied daily until you
+have charmed away the fear.
+
+And where shall we find a good charmer of our fears, Socrates, when you
+are gone?
+
+Hellas, he replied, is a large place, Cebes, and has many good men, and
+there are barbarous races not a few: seek for him among them all, far
+and wide, sparing neither pains nor money; for there is no better way
+of spending your money. And you must seek among yourselves too; for you
+will not find others better able to make the search.
+
+The search, replied Cebes, shall certainly be made. And now, if
+you please, let us return to the point of the argument at which we
+digressed.
+
+By all means, replied Socrates; what else should I please?
+
+Very good.
+
+Must we not, said Socrates, ask ourselves what that is which, as we
+imagine, is liable to be scattered, and about which we fear? and what
+again is that about which we have no fear? And then we may proceed
+further to enquire whether that which suffers dispersion is or is not
+of the nature of soul--our hopes and fears as to our own souls will turn
+upon the answers to these questions.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now the compound or composite may be supposed to be naturally capable,
+as of being compounded, so also of being dissolved; but that which is
+uncompounded, and that only, must be, if anything is, indissoluble.
+
+Yes; I should imagine so, said Cebes.
+
+And the uncompounded may be assumed to be the same and unchanging,
+whereas the compound is always changing and never the same.
+
+I agree, he said.
+
+Then now let us return to the previous discussion. Is that idea or
+essence, which in the dialectical process we define as essence or true
+existence--whether essence of equality, beauty, or anything else--are
+these essences, I say, liable at times to some degree of change? or
+are they each of them always what they are, having the same simple
+self-existent and unchanging forms, not admitting of variation at all,
+or in any way, or at any time?
+
+They must be always the same, Socrates, replied Cebes.
+
+And what would you say of the many beautiful--whether men or horses or
+garments or any other things which are named by the same names and may
+be called equal or beautiful,--are they all unchanging and the same
+always, or quite the reverse? May they not rather be described as almost
+always changing and hardly ever the same, either with themselves or with
+one another?
+
+The latter, replied Cebes; they are always in a state of change.
+
+And these you can touch and see and perceive with the senses, but
+the unchanging things you can only perceive with the mind--they are
+invisible and are not seen?
+
+That is very true, he said.
+
+Well, then, added Socrates, let us suppose that there are two sorts of
+existences--one seen, the other unseen.
+
+Let us suppose them.
+
+The seen is the changing, and the unseen is the unchanging?
+
+That may be also supposed.
+
+And, further, is not one part of us body, another part soul?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And to which class is the body more alike and akin?
+
+Clearly to the seen--no one can doubt that.
+
+And is the soul seen or not seen?
+
+Not by man, Socrates.
+
+And what we mean by 'seen' and 'not seen' is that which is or is not
+visible to the eye of man?
+
+Yes, to the eye of man.
+
+And is the soul seen or not seen?
+
+Not seen.
+
+Unseen then?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the soul is more like to the unseen, and the body to the seen?
+
+That follows necessarily, Socrates.
+
+And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an
+instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight
+or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through
+the body is perceiving through the senses)--were we not saying that the
+soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable,
+and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like
+a drunkard, when she touches change?
+
+Very true.
+
+But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the
+other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and
+unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives,
+when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases
+from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is
+unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom?
+
+That is well and truly said, Socrates, he replied.
+
+And to which class is the soul more nearly alike and akin, as far as may
+be inferred from this argument, as well as from the preceding one?
+
+I think, Socrates, that, in the opinion of every one who follows the
+argument, the soul will be infinitely more like the unchangeable--even
+the most stupid person will not deny that.
+
+And the body is more like the changing?
+
+Yes.
+
+Yet once more consider the matter in another light: When the soul and
+the body are united, then nature orders the soul to rule and govern, and
+the body to obey and serve. Now which of these two functions is akin to
+the divine? and which to the mortal? Does not the divine appear to you
+to be that which naturally orders and rules, and the mortal to be that
+which is subject and servant?
+
+True.
+
+And which does the soul resemble?
+
+The soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortal--there can be no
+doubt of that, Socrates.
+
+Then reflect, Cebes: of all which has been said is not this the
+conclusion?--that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine,
+and immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and
+unchangeable; and that the body is in the very likeness of the human,
+and mortal, and unintellectual, and multiform, and dissoluble, and
+changeable. Can this, my dear Cebes, be denied?
+
+It cannot.
+
+But if it be true, then is not the body liable to speedy dissolution?
+and is not the soul almost or altogether indissoluble?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And do you further observe, that after a man is dead, the body, or
+visible part of him, which is lying in the visible world, and is
+called a corpse, and would naturally be dissolved and decomposed and
+dissipated, is not dissolved or decomposed at once, but may remain for a
+for some time, nay even for a long time, if the constitution be sound at
+the time of death, and the season of the year favourable? For the body
+when shrunk and embalmed, as the manner is in Egypt, may remain almost
+entire through infinite ages; and even in decay, there are still
+some portions, such as the bones and ligaments, which are practically
+indestructible:--Do you agree?
+
+Yes.
+
+And is it likely that the soul, which is invisible, in passing to the
+place of the true Hades, which like her is invisible, and pure, and
+noble, and on her way to the good and wise God, whither, if God will, my
+soul is also soon to go,--that the soul, I repeat, if this be her nature
+and origin, will be blown away and destroyed immediately on quitting the
+body, as the many say? That can never be, my dear Simmias and Cebes.
+The truth rather is, that the soul which is pure at departing and draws
+after her no bodily taint, having never voluntarily during life had
+connection with the body, which she is ever avoiding, herself gathered
+into herself;--and making such abstraction her perpetual study--which
+means that she has been a true disciple of philosophy; and therefore
+has in fact been always engaged in the practice of dying? For is not
+philosophy the practice of death?--
+
+Certainly--
+
+That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world--to
+the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she is secure of
+bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and
+wild passions and all other human ills, and for ever dwells, as they say
+of the initiated, in company with the gods (compare Apol.). Is not this
+true, Cebes?
+
+Yes, said Cebes, beyond a doubt.
+
+But the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her
+departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is
+in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures
+of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in
+a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste, and use for the
+purposes of his lusts,--the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear
+and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark
+and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy;--do you suppose
+that such a soul will depart pure and unalloyed?
+
+Impossible, he replied.
+
+She is held fast by the corporeal, which the continual association and
+constant care of the body have wrought into her nature.
+
+Very true.
+
+And this corporeal element, my friend, is heavy and weighty and earthy,
+and is that element of sight by which a soul is depressed and dragged
+down again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the
+invisible and of the world below--prowling about tombs and sepulchres,
+near which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions
+of souls which have not departed pure, but are cloyed with sight and
+therefore visible.
+
+(Compare Milton, Comus:--
+
+     'But when lust,
+     By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
+     But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,
+     Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
+     The soul grows clotted by contagion,
+     Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose,
+     The divine property of her first being.
+     Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp
+     Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres,
+     Lingering, and sitting by a new made grave,
+     As loath to leave the body that it lov'd,
+     And linked itself by carnal sensuality
+     To a degenerate and degraded state.')
+
+That is very likely, Socrates.
+
+Yes, that is very likely, Cebes; and these must be the souls, not of the
+good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about such places
+in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they
+continue to wander until through the craving after the corporeal which
+never leaves them, they are imprisoned finally in another body. And they
+may be supposed to find their prisons in the same natures which they
+have had in their former lives.
+
+What natures do you mean, Socrates?
+
+What I mean is that men who have followed after gluttony, and
+wantonness, and drunkenness, and have had no thought of avoiding them,
+would pass into asses and animals of that sort. What do you think?
+
+I think such an opinion to be exceedingly probable.
+
+And those who have chosen the portion of injustice, and tyranny, and
+violence, will pass into wolves, or into hawks and kites;--whither else
+can we suppose them to go?
+
+Yes, said Cebes; with such natures, beyond question.
+
+And there is no difficulty, he said, in assigning to all of them places
+answering to their several natures and propensities?
+
+There is not, he said.
+
+Some are happier than others; and the happiest both in themselves and
+in the place to which they go are those who have practised the civil and
+social virtues which are called temperance and justice, and are acquired
+by habit and attention without philosophy and mind. (Compare Republic.)
+
+Why are they the happiest?
+
+Because they may be expected to pass into some gentle and social kind
+which is like their own, such as bees or wasps or ants, or back again
+into the form of man, and just and moderate men may be supposed to
+spring from them.
+
+Very likely.
+
+No one who has not studied philosophy and who is not entirely pure at
+the time of his departure is allowed to enter the company of the Gods,
+but the lover of knowledge only. And this is the reason, Simmias and
+Cebes, why the true votaries of philosophy abstain from all fleshly
+lusts, and hold out against them and refuse to give themselves up to
+them,--not because they fear poverty or the ruin of their families, like
+the lovers of money, and the world in general; nor like the lovers of
+power and honour, because they dread the dishonour or disgrace of evil
+deeds.
+
+No, Socrates, that would not become them, said Cebes.
+
+No indeed, he replied; and therefore they who have any care of their
+own souls, and do not merely live moulding and fashioning the body, say
+farewell to all this; they will not walk in the ways of the blind: and
+when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they
+feel that they ought not to resist her influence, and whither she leads
+they turn and follow.
+
+What do you mean, Socrates?
+
+I will tell you, he said. The lovers of knowledge are conscious that
+the soul was simply fastened and glued to the body--until philosophy
+received her, she could only view real existence through the bars of
+a prison, not in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of
+every sort of ignorance; and by reason of lust had become the principal
+accomplice in her own captivity. This was her original state; and
+then, as I was saying, and as the lovers of knowledge are well aware,
+philosophy, seeing how terrible was her confinement, of which she was
+to herself the cause, received and gently comforted her and sought to
+release her, pointing out that the eye and the ear and the other senses
+are full of deception, and persuading her to retire from them, and
+abstain from all but the necessary use of them, and be gathered up and
+collected into herself, bidding her trust in herself and her own pure
+apprehension of pure existence, and to mistrust whatever comes to her
+through other channels and is subject to variation; for such things
+are visible and tangible, but what she sees in her own nature is
+intelligible and invisible. And the soul of the true philosopher thinks
+that she ought not to resist this deliverance, and therefore abstains
+from pleasures and desires and pains and fears, as far as she is
+able; reflecting that when a man has great joys or sorrows or fears or
+desires, he suffers from them, not merely the sort of evil which might
+be anticipated--as for example, the loss of his health or property which
+he has sacrificed to his lusts--but an evil greater far, which is the
+greatest and worst of all evils, and one of which he never thinks.
+
+What is it, Socrates? said Cebes.
+
+The evil is that when the feeling of pleasure or pain is most intense,
+every soul of man imagines the objects of this intense feeling to be
+then plainest and truest: but this is not so, they are really the things
+of sight.
+
+Very true.
+
+And is not this the state in which the soul is most enthralled by the
+body?
+
+How so?
+
+Why, because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails
+and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and
+believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from
+agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to
+have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at
+her departure to the world below, but is always infected by the body;
+and so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows,
+and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and
+simple.
+
+Most true, Socrates, answered Cebes.
+
+And this, Cebes, is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are
+temperate and brave; and not for the reason which the world gives.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Certainly not! The soul of a philosopher will reason in quite another
+way; she will not ask philosophy to release her in order that when
+released she may deliver herself up again to the thraldom of pleasures
+and pains, doing a work only to be undone again, weaving instead of
+unweaving her Penelope's web. But she will calm passion, and follow
+reason, and dwell in the contemplation of her, beholding the true
+and divine (which is not matter of opinion), and thence deriving
+nourishment. Thus she seeks to live while she lives, and after death she
+hopes to go to her own kindred and to that which is like her, and to be
+freed from human ills. Never fear, Simmias and Cebes, that a soul which
+has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure
+from the body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere
+and nothing.
+
+When Socrates had done speaking, for a considerable time there was
+silence; he himself appeared to be meditating, as most of us were, on
+what had been said; only Cebes and Simmias spoke a few words to one
+another. And Socrates observing them asked what they thought of the
+argument, and whether there was anything wanting? For, said he, there
+are many points still open to suspicion and attack, if any one were
+disposed to sift the matter thoroughly. Should you be considering
+some other matter I say no more, but if you are still in doubt do not
+hesitate to say exactly what you think, and let us have anything better
+which you can suggest; and if you think that I can be of any use, allow
+me to help you.
+
+Simmias said: I must confess, Socrates, that doubts did arise in our
+minds, and each of us was urging and inciting the other to put the
+question which we wanted to have answered and which neither of us liked
+to ask, fearing that our importunity might be troublesome under present
+at such a time.
+
+Socrates replied with a smile: O Simmias, what are you saying? I am
+not very likely to persuade other men that I do not regard my present
+situation as a misfortune, if I cannot even persuade you that I am no
+worse off now than at any other time in my life. Will you not allow that
+I have as much of the spirit of prophecy in me as the swans? For they,
+when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long,
+do then sing more lustily than ever, rejoicing in the thought that
+they are about to go away to the god whose ministers they are. But men,
+because they are themselves afraid of death, slanderously affirm of the
+swans that they sing a lament at the last, not considering that no bird
+sings when cold, or hungry, or in pain, not even the nightingale, nor
+the swallow, nor yet the hoopoe; which are said indeed to tune a lay of
+sorrow, although I do not believe this to be true of them any more than
+of the swans. But because they are sacred to Apollo, they have the gift
+of prophecy, and anticipate the good things of another world, wherefore
+they sing and rejoice in that day more than they ever did before. And I
+too, believing myself to be the consecrated servant of the same God, and
+the fellow-servant of the swans, and thinking that I have received from
+my master gifts of prophecy which are not inferior to theirs, would not
+go out of life less merrily than the swans. Never mind then, if this be
+your only objection, but speak and ask anything which you like, while
+the eleven magistrates of Athens allow.
+
+Very good, Socrates, said Simmias; then I will tell you my difficulty,
+and Cebes will tell you his. I feel myself, (and I daresay that you have
+the same feeling), how hard or rather impossible is the attainment of
+any certainty about questions such as these in the present life. And yet
+I should deem him a coward who did not prove what is said about them to
+the uttermost, or whose heart failed him before he had examined them
+on every side. For he should persevere until he has achieved one of two
+things: either he should discover, or be taught the truth about them;
+or, if this be impossible, I would have him take the best and most
+irrefragable of human theories, and let this be the raft upon which he
+sails through life--not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some
+word of God which will more surely and safely carry him. And now, as
+you bid me, I will venture to question you, and then I shall not have to
+reproach myself hereafter with not having said at the time what I think.
+For when I consider the matter, either alone or with Cebes, the argument
+does certainly appear to me, Socrates, to be not sufficient.
+
+Socrates answered: I dare say, my friend, that you may be right, but I
+should like to know in what respect the argument is insufficient.
+
+In this respect, replied Simmias:--Suppose a person to use the same
+argument about harmony and the lyre--might he not say that harmony is
+a thing invisible, incorporeal, perfect, divine, existing in the lyre
+which is harmonized, but that the lyre and the strings are matter and
+material, composite, earthy, and akin to mortality? And when some one
+breaks the lyre, or cuts and rends the strings, then he who takes this
+view would argue as you do, and on the same analogy, that the harmony
+survives and has not perished--you cannot imagine, he would say, that
+the lyre without the strings, and the broken strings themselves which
+are mortal remain, and yet that the harmony, which is of heavenly and
+immortal nature and kindred, has perished--perished before the mortal.
+The harmony must still be somewhere, and the wood and strings will decay
+before anything can happen to that. The thought, Socrates, must have
+occurred to your own mind that such is our conception of the soul;
+and that when the body is in a manner strung and held together by the
+elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, then the soul is the harmony or
+due proportionate admixture of them. But if so, whenever the strings of
+the body are unduly loosened or overstrained through disease or other
+injury, then the soul, though most divine, like other harmonies of music
+or of works of art, of course perishes at once, although the material
+remains of the body may last for a considerable time, until they are
+either decayed or burnt. And if any one maintains that the soul, being
+the harmony of the elements of the body, is first to perish in that
+which is called death, how shall we answer him?
+
+Socrates looked fixedly at us as his manner was, and said with a smile:
+Simmias has reason on his side; and why does not some one of you who
+is better able than myself answer him? for there is force in his attack
+upon me. But perhaps, before we answer him, we had better also hear what
+Cebes has to say that we may gain time for reflection, and when they
+have both spoken, we may either assent to them, if there is truth in
+what they say, or if not, we will maintain our position. Please to tell
+me then, Cebes, he said, what was the difficulty which troubled you?
+
+Cebes said: I will tell you. My feeling is that the argument is where it
+was, and open to the same objections which were urged before; for I am
+ready to admit that the existence of the soul before entering into
+the bodily form has been very ingeniously, and, if I may say so, quite
+sufficiently proven; but the existence of the soul after death is still,
+in my judgment, unproven. Now my objection is not the same as that of
+Simmias; for I am not disposed to deny that the soul is stronger and
+more lasting than the body, being of opinion that in all such respects
+the soul very far excels the body. Well, then, says the argument to me,
+why do you remain unconvinced?--When you see that the weaker continues
+in existence after the man is dead, will you not admit that the more
+lasting must also survive during the same period of time? Now I will
+ask you to consider whether the objection, which, like Simmias, I will
+express in a figure, is of any weight. The analogy which I will adduce
+is that of an old weaver, who dies, and after his death somebody
+says:--He is not dead, he must be alive;--see, there is the coat which
+he himself wove and wore, and which remains whole and undecayed. And
+then he proceeds to ask of some one who is incredulous, whether a man
+lasts longer, or the coat which is in use and wear; and when he is
+answered that a man lasts far longer, thinks that he has thus certainly
+demonstrated the survival of the man, who is the more lasting, because
+the less lasting remains. But that, Simmias, as I would beg you to
+remark, is a mistake; any one can see that he who talks thus is talking
+nonsense. For the truth is, that the weaver aforesaid, having woven and
+worn many such coats, outlived several of them, and was outlived by the
+last; but a man is not therefore proved to be slighter and weaker than
+a coat. Now the relation of the body to the soul may be expressed in a
+similar figure; and any one may very fairly say in like manner that the
+soul is lasting, and the body weak and shortlived in comparison. He may
+argue in like manner that every soul wears out many bodies, especially
+if a man live many years. While he is alive the body deliquesces and
+decays, and the soul always weaves another garment and repairs the
+waste. But of course, whenever the soul perishes, she must have on her
+last garment, and this will survive her; and then at length, when
+the soul is dead, the body will show its native weakness, and quickly
+decompose and pass away. I would therefore rather not rely on the
+argument from superior strength to prove the continued existence of the
+soul after death. For granting even more than you affirm to be possible,
+and acknowledging not only that the soul existed before birth, but also
+that the souls of some exist, and will continue to exist after death,
+and will be born and die again and again, and that there is a
+natural strength in the soul which will hold out and be born many
+times--nevertheless, we may be still inclined to think that she will
+weary in the labours of successive births, and may at last succumb in
+one of her deaths and utterly perish; and this death and dissolution of
+the body which brings destruction to the soul may be unknown to any of
+us, for no one of us can have had any experience of it: and if so,
+then I maintain that he who is confident about death has but a foolish
+confidence, unless he is able to prove that the soul is altogether
+immortal and imperishable. But if he cannot prove the soul's
+immortality, he who is about to die will always have reason to fear that
+when the body is disunited, the soul also may utterly perish.
+
+All of us, as we afterwards remarked to one another, had an unpleasant
+feeling at hearing what they said. When we had been so firmly convinced
+before, now to have our faith shaken seemed to introduce a confusion and
+uncertainty, not only into the previous argument, but into any future
+one; either we were incapable of forming a judgment, or there were no
+grounds of belief.
+
+ECHECRATES: There I feel with you--by heaven I do, Phaedo, and when you
+were speaking, I was beginning to ask myself the same question: What
+argument can I ever trust again? For what could be more convincing than
+the argument of Socrates, which has now fallen into discredit? That
+the soul is a harmony is a doctrine which has always had a wonderful
+attraction for me, and, when mentioned, came back to me at once, as my
+own original conviction. And now I must begin again and find another
+argument which will assure me that when the man is dead the soul
+survives. Tell me, I implore you, how did Socrates proceed? Did he
+appear to share the unpleasant feeling which you mention? or did he
+calmly meet the attack? And did he answer forcibly or feebly? Narrate
+what passed as exactly as you can.
+
+PHAEDO: Often, Echecrates, I have wondered at Socrates, but never more
+than on that occasion. That he should be able to answer was nothing,
+but what astonished me was, first, the gentle and pleasant and approving
+manner in which he received the words of the young men, and then his
+quick sense of the wound which had been inflicted by the argument, and
+the readiness with which he healed it. He might be compared to a general
+rallying his defeated and broken army, urging them to accompany him and
+return to the field of argument.
+
+ECHECRATES: What followed?
+
+PHAEDO: You shall hear, for I was close to him on his right hand, seated
+on a sort of stool, and he on a couch which was a good deal higher.
+He stroked my head, and pressed the hair upon my neck--he had a way of
+playing with my hair; and then he said: To-morrow, Phaedo, I suppose
+that these fair locks of yours will be severed.
+
+Yes, Socrates, I suppose that they will, I replied.
+
+Not so, if you will take my advice.
+
+What shall I do with them? I said.
+
+To-day, he replied, and not to-morrow, if this argument dies and we
+cannot bring it to life again, you and I will both shave our locks; and
+if I were you, and the argument got away from me, and I could not hold
+my ground against Simmias and Cebes, I would myself take an oath, like
+the Argives, not to wear hair any more until I had renewed the conflict
+and defeated them.
+
+Yes, I said, but Heracles himself is said not to be a match for two.
+
+Summon me then, he said, and I will be your Iolaus until the sun goes
+down.
+
+I summon you rather, I rejoined, not as Heracles summoning Iolaus, but
+as Iolaus might summon Heracles.
+
+That will do as well, he said. But first let us take care that we avoid
+a danger.
+
+Of what nature? I said.
+
+Lest we become misologists, he replied, no worse thing can happen to a
+man than this. For as there are misanthropists or haters of men, there
+are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same
+cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises out of the
+too great confidence of inexperience;--you trust a man and think him
+altogether true and sound and faithful, and then in a little while he
+turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and
+when this has happened several times to a man, especially when it
+happens among those whom he deems to be his own most trusted and
+familiar friends, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates
+all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. You must
+have observed this trait of character?
+
+I have.
+
+And is not the feeling discreditable? Is it not obvious that such an
+one having to deal with other men, was clearly without any experience of
+human nature; for experience would have taught him the true state of
+the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great
+majority are in the interval between them.
+
+What do you mean? I said.
+
+I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and very small,
+that nothing is more uncommon than a very large or very small man; and
+this applies generally to all extremes, whether of great and small, or
+swift and slow, or fair and foul, or black and white: and whether
+the instances you select be men or dogs or anything else, few are the
+extremes, but many are in the mean between them. Did you never observe
+this?
+
+Yes, I said, I have.
+
+And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition in
+evil, the worst would be found to be very few?
+
+Yes, that is very likely, I said.
+
+Yes, that is very likely, he replied; although in this respect arguments
+are unlike men--there I was led on by you to say more than I had
+intended; but the point of comparison was, that when a simple man who
+has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he
+afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and
+then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great
+disputers, as you know, come to think at last that they have grown to be
+the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and
+instability of all arguments, or indeed, of all things, which, like the
+currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ebb and
+flow.
+
+That is quite true, I said.
+
+Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and how melancholy, if there be such a thing as
+truth or certainty or possibility of knowledge--that a man should have
+lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then
+turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want
+of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer
+the blame from himself to arguments in general: and for ever afterwards
+should hate and revile them, and lose truth and the knowledge of
+realities.
+
+Yes, indeed, I said; that is very melancholy.
+
+Let us then, in the first place, he said, be careful of allowing or of
+admitting into our souls the notion that there is no health or soundness
+in any arguments at all. Rather say that we have not yet attained to
+soundness in ourselves, and that we must struggle manfully and do our
+best to gain health of mind--you and all other men having regard to the
+whole of your future life, and I myself in the prospect of death. For at
+this moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher;
+like the vulgar, I am only a partisan. Now the partisan, when he is
+engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question,
+but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.
+And the difference between him and me at the present moment is merely
+this--that whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says is
+true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to convince my hearers
+is a secondary matter with me. And do but see how much I gain by the
+argument. For if what I say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of
+the truth, but if there be nothing after death, still, during the short
+time that remains, I shall not distress my friends with lamentations,
+and my ignorance will not last, but will die with me, and therefore
+no harm will be done. This is the state of mind, Simmias and Cebes, in
+which I approach the argument. And I would ask you to be thinking of
+the truth and not of Socrates: agree with me, if I seem to you to be
+speaking the truth; or if not, withstand me might and main, that I may
+not deceive you as well as myself in my enthusiasm, and like the bee,
+leave my sting in you before I die.
+
+And now let us proceed, he said. And first of all let me be sure that
+I have in my mind what you were saying. Simmias, if I remember rightly,
+has fears and misgivings whether the soul, although a fairer and diviner
+thing than the body, being as she is in the form of harmony, may not
+perish first. On the other hand, Cebes appeared to grant that the soul
+was more lasting than the body, but he said that no one could know
+whether the soul, after having worn out many bodies, might not perish
+herself and leave her last body behind her; and that this is death,
+which is the destruction not of the body but of the soul, for in the
+body the work of destruction is ever going on. Are not these, Simmias
+and Cebes, the points which we have to consider?
+
+They both agreed to this statement of them.
+
+He proceeded: And did you deny the force of the whole preceding
+argument, or of a part only?
+
+Of a part only, they replied.
+
+And what did you think, he said, of that part of the argument in which
+we said that knowledge was recollection, and hence inferred that the
+soul must have previously existed somewhere else before she was enclosed
+in the body?
+
+Cebes said that he had been wonderfully impressed by that part of the
+argument, and that his conviction remained absolutely unshaken. Simmias
+agreed, and added that he himself could hardly imagine the possibility
+of his ever thinking differently.
+
+But, rejoined Socrates, you will have to think differently, my Theban
+friend, if you still maintain that harmony is a compound, and that the
+soul is a harmony which is made out of strings set in the frame of the
+body; for you will surely never allow yourself to say that a harmony is
+prior to the elements which compose it.
+
+Never, Socrates.
+
+But do you not see that this is what you imply when you say that the
+soul existed before she took the form and body of man, and was made up
+of elements which as yet had no existence? For harmony is not like
+the soul, as you suppose; but first the lyre, and the strings, and the
+sounds exist in a state of discord, and then harmony is made last of
+all, and perishes first. And how can such a notion of the soul as this
+agree with the other?
+
+Not at all, replied Simmias.
+
+And yet, he said, there surely ought to be harmony in a discourse of
+which harmony is the theme.
+
+There ought, replied Simmias.
+
+But there is no harmony, he said, in the two propositions that knowledge
+is recollection, and that the soul is a harmony. Which of them will you
+retain?
+
+I think, he replied, that I have a much stronger faith, Socrates, in the
+first of the two, which has been fully demonstrated to me, than in
+the latter, which has not been demonstrated at all, but rests only on
+probable and plausible grounds; and is therefore believed by the many. I
+know too well that these arguments from probabilities are impostors, and
+unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to
+be deceptive--in geometry, and in other things too. But the doctrine of
+knowledge and recollection has been proven to me on trustworthy grounds;
+and the proof was that the soul must have existed before she came into
+the body, because to her belongs the essence of which the very name
+implies existence. Having, as I am convinced, rightly accepted this
+conclusion, and on sufficient grounds, I must, as I suppose, cease to
+argue or allow others to argue that the soul is a harmony.
+
+Let me put the matter, Simmias, he said, in another point of view: Do
+you imagine that a harmony or any other composition can be in a state
+other than that of the elements, out of which it is compounded?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or do or suffer anything other than they do or suffer?
+
+He agreed.
+
+Then a harmony does not, properly speaking, lead the parts or elements
+which make up the harmony, but only follows them.
+
+He assented.
+
+For harmony cannot possibly have any motion, or sound, or other quality
+which is opposed to its parts.
+
+That would be impossible, he replied.
+
+And does not the nature of every harmony depend upon the manner in which
+the elements are harmonized?
+
+I do not understand you, he said.
+
+I mean to say that a harmony admits of degrees, and is more of a
+harmony, and more completely a harmony, when more truly and fully
+harmonized, to any extent which is possible; and less of a harmony, and
+less completely a harmony, when less truly and fully harmonized.
+
+True.
+
+But does the soul admit of degrees? or is one soul in the very least
+degree more or less, or more or less completely, a soul than another?
+
+Not in the least.
+
+Yet surely of two souls, one is said to have intelligence and virtue,
+and to be good, and the other to have folly and vice, and to be an evil
+soul: and this is said truly?
+
+Yes, truly.
+
+But what will those who maintain the soul to be a harmony say of this
+presence of virtue and vice in the soul?--will they say that here is
+another harmony, and another discord, and that the virtuous soul is
+harmonized, and herself being a harmony has another harmony within her,
+and that the vicious soul is inharmonical and has no harmony within her?
+
+I cannot tell, replied Simmias; but I suppose that something of the sort
+would be asserted by those who say that the soul is a harmony.
+
+And we have already admitted that no soul is more a soul than another;
+which is equivalent to admitting that harmony is not more or less
+harmony, or more or less completely a harmony?
+
+Quite true.
+
+And that which is not more or less a harmony is not more or less
+harmonized?
+
+True.
+
+And that which is not more or less harmonized cannot have more or less
+of harmony, but only an equal harmony?
+
+Yes, an equal harmony.
+
+Then one soul not being more or less absolutely a soul than another, is
+not more or less harmonized?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And therefore has neither more nor less of discord, nor yet of harmony?
+
+She has not.
+
+And having neither more nor less of harmony or of discord, one soul
+has no more vice or virtue than another, if vice be discord and virtue
+harmony?
+
+Not at all more.
+
+Or speaking more correctly, Simmias, the soul, if she is a harmony, will
+never have any vice; because a harmony, being absolutely a harmony, has
+no part in the inharmonical.
+
+No.
+
+And therefore a soul which is absolutely a soul has no vice?
+
+How can she have, if the previous argument holds?
+
+Then, if all souls are equally by their nature souls, all souls of all
+living creatures will be equally good?
+
+I agree with you, Socrates, he said.
+
+And can all this be true, think you? he said; for these are the
+consequences which seem to follow from the assumption that the soul is a
+harmony?
+
+It cannot be true.
+
+Once more, he said, what ruler is there of the elements of human nature
+other than the soul, and especially the wise soul? Do you know of any?
+
+Indeed, I do not.
+
+And is the soul in agreement with the affections of the body? or is she
+at variance with them? For example, when the body is hot and thirsty,
+does not the soul incline us against drinking? and when the body
+is hungry, against eating? And this is only one instance out of ten
+thousand of the opposition of the soul to the things of the body.
+
+Very true.
+
+But we have already acknowledged that the soul, being a harmony, can
+never utter a note at variance with the tensions and relaxations and
+vibrations and other affections of the strings out of which she is
+composed; she can only follow, she cannot lead them?
+
+It must be so, he replied.
+
+And yet do we not now discover the soul to be doing the exact
+opposite--leading the elements of which she is believed to be composed;
+almost always opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout
+life, sometimes more violently with the pains of medicine and gymnastic;
+then again more gently; now threatening, now admonishing the desires,
+passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself, as Homer
+in the Odyssee represents Odysseus doing in the words--
+
+'He beat his breast, and thus reproached his heart: Endure, my heart;
+far worse hast thou endured!'
+
+Do you think that Homer wrote this under the idea that the soul is a
+harmony capable of being led by the affections of the body, and not
+rather of a nature which should lead and master them--herself a far
+diviner thing than any harmony?
+
+Yes, Socrates, I quite think so.
+
+Then, my friend, we can never be right in saying that the soul is a
+harmony, for we should contradict the divine Homer, and contradict
+ourselves.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Thus much, said Socrates, of Harmonia, your Theban goddess, who has
+graciously yielded to us; but what shall I say, Cebes, to her husband
+Cadmus, and how shall I make peace with him?
+
+I think that you will discover a way of propitiating him, said Cebes; I
+am sure that you have put the argument with Harmonia in a manner that
+I could never have expected. For when Simmias was mentioning his
+difficulty, I quite imagined that no answer could be given to him, and
+therefore I was surprised at finding that his argument could not sustain
+the first onset of yours, and not impossibly the other, whom you call
+Cadmus, may share a similar fate.
+
+Nay, my good friend, said Socrates, let us not boast, lest some evil eye
+should put to flight the word which I am about to speak. That, however,
+may be left in the hands of those above, while I draw near in Homeric
+fashion, and try the mettle of your words. Here lies the point:--You
+want to have it proven to you that the soul is imperishable and
+immortal, and the philosopher who is confident in death appears to you
+to have but a vain and foolish confidence, if he believes that he will
+fare better in the world below than one who has led another sort of
+life, unless he can prove this; and you say that the demonstration of
+the strength and divinity of the soul, and of her existence prior to our
+becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality. Admitting the
+soul to be longlived, and to have known and done much in a former state,
+still she is not on that account immortal; and her entrance into
+the human form may be a sort of disease which is the beginning of
+dissolution, and may at last, after the toils of life are over, end in
+that which is called death. And whether the soul enters into the body
+once only or many times, does not, as you say, make any difference in
+the fears of individuals. For any man, who is not devoid of sense,
+must fear, if he has no knowledge and can give no account of the soul's
+immortality. This, or something like this, I suspect to be your notion,
+Cebes; and I designedly recur to it in order that nothing may escape us,
+and that you may, if you wish, add or subtract anything.
+
+But, said Cebes, as far as I see at present, I have nothing to add or
+subtract: I mean what you say that I mean.
+
+Socrates paused awhile, and seemed to be absorbed in reflection. At
+length he said: You are raising a tremendous question, Cebes, involving
+the whole nature of generation and corruption, about which, if you like,
+I will give you my own experience; and if anything which I say is likely
+to avail towards the solution of your difficulty you may make use of it.
+
+I should very much like, said Cebes, to hear what you have to say.
+
+Then I will tell you, said Socrates. When I was young, Cebes, I had a
+prodigious desire to know that department of philosophy which is called
+the investigation of nature; to know the causes of things, and why
+a thing is and is created or destroyed appeared to me to be a lofty
+profession; and I was always agitating myself with the consideration of
+questions such as these:--Is the growth of animals the result of some
+decay which the hot and cold principle contracts, as some have said? Is
+the blood the element with which we think, or the air, or the fire? or
+perhaps nothing of the kind--but the brain may be the originating
+power of the perceptions of hearing and sight and smell, and memory
+and opinion may come from them, and science may be based on memory and
+opinion when they have attained fixity. And then I went on to examine
+the corruption of them, and then to the things of heaven and earth, and
+at last I concluded myself to be utterly and absolutely incapable
+of these enquiries, as I will satisfactorily prove to you. For I was
+fascinated by them to such a degree that my eyes grew blind to things
+which I had seemed to myself, and also to others, to know quite well; I
+forgot what I had before thought self-evident truths; e.g. such a fact
+as that the growth of man is the result of eating and drinking; for when
+by the digestion of food flesh is added to flesh and bone to bone, and
+whenever there is an aggregation of congenial elements, the lesser
+bulk becomes larger and the small man great. Was not that a reasonable
+notion?
+
+Yes, said Cebes, I think so.
+
+Well; but let me tell you something more. There was a time when I
+thought that I understood the meaning of greater and less pretty well;
+and when I saw a great man standing by a little one, I fancied that one
+was taller than the other by a head; or one horse would appear to
+be greater than another horse: and still more clearly did I seem to
+perceive that ten is two more than eight, and that two cubits are more
+than one, because two is the double of one.
+
+And what is now your notion of such matters? said Cebes.
+
+I should be far enough from imagining, he replied, that I knew the cause
+of any of them, by heaven I should; for I cannot satisfy myself that,
+when one is added to one, the one to which the addition is made becomes
+two, or that the two units added together make two by reason of the
+addition. I cannot understand how, when separated from the other, each
+of them was one and not two, and now, when they are brought together,
+the mere juxtaposition or meeting of them should be the cause of their
+becoming two: neither can I understand how the division of one is the
+way to make two; for then a different cause would produce the same
+effect,--as in the former instance the addition and juxtaposition of one
+to one was the cause of two, in this the separation and subtraction of
+one from the other would be the cause. Nor am I any longer satisfied
+that I understand the reason why one or anything else is either
+generated or destroyed or is at all, but I have in my mind some confused
+notion of a new method, and can never admit the other.
+
+Then I heard some one reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras,
+that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at this
+notion, which appeared quite admirable, and I said to myself: If mind
+is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each
+particular in the best place; and I argued that if any one desired to
+find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of
+anything, he must find out what state of being or doing or suffering was
+best for that thing, and therefore a man had only to consider the best
+for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, since the
+same science comprehended both. And I rejoiced to think that I had found
+in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired,
+and I imagined that he would tell me first whether the earth is flat or
+round; and whichever was true, he would proceed to explain the cause and
+the necessity of this being so, and then he would teach me the nature of
+the best and show that this was best; and if he said that the earth was
+in the centre, he would further explain that this position was the best,
+and I should be satisfied with the explanation given, and not want any
+other sort of cause. And I thought that I would then go on and ask him
+about the sun and moon and stars, and that he would explain to me their
+comparative swiftness, and their returnings and various states, active
+and passive, and how all of them were for the best. For I could not
+imagine that when he spoke of mind as the disposer of them, he would
+give any other account of their being as they are, except that this was
+best; and I thought that when he had explained to me in detail the cause
+of each and the cause of all, he would go on to explain to me what was
+best for each and what was good for all. These hopes I would not have
+sold for a large sum of money, and I seized the books and read them as
+fast as I could in my eagerness to know the better and the worse.
+
+What expectations I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed!
+As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any
+other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and
+water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who
+began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions
+of Socrates, but who, when he endeavoured to explain the causes of my
+several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my
+body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say,
+are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic,
+and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of
+flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their
+joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able
+to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved
+posture--that is what he would say, and he would have a similar
+explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and
+air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the
+same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the
+Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought
+it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for
+I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have
+gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia--by the dog they would, if they
+had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not
+chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running
+away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts. There is
+surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may
+be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts
+of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do
+because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and
+not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of
+speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the
+condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always
+mistaking and misnaming. And thus one man makes a vortex all round and
+steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a support to
+the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which in arranging
+them as they are arranges them for the best never enters into their
+minds; and instead of finding any superior strength in it, they rather
+expect to discover another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more
+everlasting and more containing than the good;--of the obligatory and
+containing power of the good they think nothing; and yet this is the
+principle which I would fain learn if any one would teach me. But as I
+have failed either to discover myself, or to learn of any one else,
+the nature of the best, I will exhibit to you, if you like, what I have
+found to be the second best mode of enquiring into the cause.
+
+I should very much like to hear, he replied.
+
+Socrates proceeded:--I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation
+of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of
+my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing
+on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of only
+looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some similar medium.
+So in my own case, I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether
+if I looked at things with my eyes or tried to apprehend them by the
+help of the senses. And I thought that I had better have recourse to the
+world of mind and seek there the truth of existence. I dare say that
+the simile is not perfect--for I am very far from admitting that he who
+contemplates existences through the medium of thought, sees them only
+'through a glass darkly,' any more than he who considers them in action
+and operation. However, this was the method which I adopted: I first
+assumed some principle which I judged to be the strongest, and then I
+affirmed as true whatever seemed to agree with this, whether relating
+to the cause or to anything else; and that which disagreed I regarded
+as untrue. But I should like to explain my meaning more clearly, as I do
+not think that you as yet understand me.
+
+No indeed, replied Cebes, not very well.
+
+There is nothing new, he said, in what I am about to tell you; but
+only what I have been always and everywhere repeating in the previous
+discussion and on other occasions: I want to show you the nature of that
+cause which has occupied my thoughts. I shall have to go back to those
+familiar words which are in the mouth of every one, and first of all
+assume that there is an absolute beauty and goodness and greatness, and
+the like; grant me this, and I hope to be able to show you the nature of
+the cause, and to prove the immortality of the soul.
+
+Cebes said: You may proceed at once with the proof, for I grant you
+this.
+
+Well, he said, then I should like to know whether you agree with me
+in the next step; for I cannot help thinking, if there be anything
+beautiful other than absolute beauty should there be such, that it can
+be beautiful only in as far as it partakes of absolute beauty--and I
+should say the same of everything. Do you agree in this notion of the
+cause?
+
+Yes, he said, I agree.
+
+He proceeded: I know nothing and can understand nothing of any other of
+those wise causes which are alleged; and if a person says to me that
+the bloom of colour, or form, or any such thing is a source of beauty,
+I leave all that, which is only confusing to me, and simply and singly,
+and perhaps foolishly, hold and am assured in my own mind that nothing
+makes a thing beautiful but the presence and participation of beauty in
+whatever way or manner obtained; for as to the manner I am uncertain,
+but I stoutly contend that by beauty all beautiful things become
+beautiful. This appears to me to be the safest answer which I can give,
+either to myself or to another, and to this I cling, in the persuasion
+that this principle will never be overthrown, and that to myself or
+to any one who asks the question, I may safely reply, That by beauty
+beautiful things become beautiful. Do you not agree with me?
+
+I do.
+
+And that by greatness only great things become great and greater
+greater, and by smallness the less become less?
+
+True.
+
+Then if a person were to remark that A is taller by a head than B, and
+B less by a head than A, you would refuse to admit his statement, and
+would stoutly contend that what you mean is only that the greater is
+greater by, and by reason of, greatness, and the less is less only by,
+and by reason of, smallness; and thus you would avoid the danger of
+saying that the greater is greater and the less less by the measure of
+the head, which is the same in both, and would also avoid the monstrous
+absurdity of supposing that the greater man is greater by reason of the
+head, which is small. You would be afraid to draw such an inference,
+would you not?
+
+Indeed, I should, said Cebes, laughing.
+
+In like manner you would be afraid to say that ten exceeded eight by,
+and by reason of, two; but would say by, and by reason of, number; or
+you would say that two cubits exceed one cubit not by a half, but by
+magnitude?-for there is the same liability to error in all these cases.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Again, would you not be cautious of affirming that the addition of
+one to one, or the division of one, is the cause of two? And you would
+loudly asseverate that you know of no way in which anything comes
+into existence except by participation in its own proper essence,
+and consequently, as far as you know, the only cause of two is
+the participation in duality--this is the way to make two, and the
+participation in one is the way to make one. You would say: I will let
+alone puzzles of division and addition--wiser heads than mine may answer
+them; inexperienced as I am, and ready to start, as the proverb says,
+at my own shadow, I cannot afford to give up the sure ground of a
+principle. And if any one assails you there, you would not mind him,
+or answer him, until you had seen whether the consequences which follow
+agree with one another or not, and when you are further required to give
+an explanation of this principle, you would go on to assume a higher
+principle, and a higher, until you found a resting-place in the best of
+the higher; but you would not confuse the principle and the consequences
+in your reasoning, like the Eristics--at least if you wanted to discover
+real existence. Not that this confusion signifies to them, who never
+care or think about the matter at all, for they have the wit to be well
+pleased with themselves however great may be the turmoil of their ideas.
+But you, if you are a philosopher, will certainly do as I say.
+
+What you say is most true, said Simmias and Cebes, both speaking at
+once.
+
+ECHECRATES: Yes, Phaedo; and I do not wonder at their assenting. Any
+one who has the least sense will acknowledge the wonderful clearness of
+Socrates' reasoning.
+
+PHAEDO: Certainly, Echecrates; and such was the feeling of the whole
+company at the time.
+
+ECHECRATES: Yes, and equally of ourselves, who were not of the company,
+and are now listening to your recital. But what followed?
+
+PHAEDO: After all this had been admitted, and they had that ideas exist,
+and that other things participate in them and derive their names from
+them, Socrates, if I remember rightly, said:--
+
+This is your way of speaking; and yet when you say that Simmias is
+greater than Socrates and less than Phaedo, do you not predicate of
+Simmias both greatness and smallness?
+
+Yes, I do.
+
+But still you allow that Simmias does not really exceed Socrates, as
+the words may seem to imply, because he is Simmias, but by reason of the
+size which he has; just as Simmias does not exceed Socrates because he
+is Simmias, any more than because Socrates is Socrates, but because he
+has smallness when compared with the greatness of Simmias?
+
+True.
+
+And if Phaedo exceeds him in size, this is not because Phaedo is
+Phaedo, but because Phaedo has greatness relatively to Simmias, who is
+comparatively smaller?
+
+That is true.
+
+And therefore Simmias is said to be great, and is also said to be small,
+because he is in a mean between them, exceeding the smallness of the one
+by his greatness, and allowing the greatness of the other to exceed his
+smallness. He added, laughing, I am speaking like a book, but I believe
+that what I am saying is true.
+
+Simmias assented.
+
+I speak as I do because I want you to agree with me in thinking, not
+only that absolute greatness will never be great and also small, but
+that greatness in us or in the concrete will never admit the small or
+admit of being exceeded: instead of this, one of two things will happen,
+either the greater will fly or retire before the opposite, which is the
+less, or at the approach of the less has already ceased to exist; but
+will not, if allowing or admitting of smallness, be changed by that;
+even as I, having received and admitted smallness when compared with
+Simmias, remain just as I was, and am the same small person. And as the
+idea of greatness cannot condescend ever to be or become small, in like
+manner the smallness in us cannot be or become great; nor can any other
+opposite which remains the same ever be or become its own opposite, but
+either passes away or perishes in the change.
+
+That, replied Cebes, is quite my notion.
+
+Hereupon one of the company, though I do not exactly remember which of
+them, said: In heaven's name, is not this the direct contrary of what
+was admitted before--that out of the greater came the less and out of
+the less the greater, and that opposites were simply generated from
+opposites; but now this principle seems to be utterly denied.
+
+Socrates inclined his head to the speaker and listened. I like your
+courage, he said, in reminding us of this. But you do not observe that
+there is a difference in the two cases. For then we were speaking of
+opposites in the concrete, and now of the essential opposite which, as
+is affirmed, neither in us nor in nature can ever be at variance with
+itself: then, my friend, we were speaking of things in which opposites
+are inherent and which are called after them, but now about the
+opposites which are inherent in them and which give their name to them;
+and these essential opposites will never, as we maintain, admit of
+generation into or out of one another. At the same time, turning to
+Cebes, he said: Are you at all disconcerted, Cebes, at our friend's
+objection?
+
+No, I do not feel so, said Cebes; and yet I cannot deny that I am often
+disturbed by objections.
+
+Then we are agreed after all, said Socrates, that the opposite will
+never in any case be opposed to itself?
+
+To that we are quite agreed, he replied.
+
+Yet once more let me ask you to consider the question from another point
+of view, and see whether you agree with me:--There is a thing which you
+term heat, and another thing which you term cold?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But are they the same as fire and snow?
+
+Most assuredly not.
+
+Heat is a thing different from fire, and cold is not the same with snow?
+
+Yes.
+
+And yet you will surely admit, that when snow, as was before said, is
+under the influence of heat, they will not remain snow and heat; but at
+the advance of the heat, the snow will either retire or perish?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And the fire too at the advance of the cold will either retire or
+perish; and when the fire is under the influence of the cold, they will
+not remain as before, fire and cold.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+And in some cases the name of the idea is not only attached to the idea
+in an eternal connection, but anything else which, not being the idea,
+exists only in the form of the idea, may also lay claim to it. I will
+try to make this clearer by an example:--The odd number is always called
+by the name of odd?
+
+Very true.
+
+But is this the only thing which is called odd? Are there not other
+things which have their own name, and yet are called odd, because,
+although not the same as oddness, they are never without oddness?--that
+is what I mean to ask--whether numbers such as the number three are not
+of the class of odd. And there are many other examples: would you not
+say, for example, that three may be called by its proper name, and also
+be called odd, which is not the same with three? and this may be said
+not only of three but also of five, and of every alternate number--each
+of them without being oddness is odd, and in the same way two and
+four, and the other series of alternate numbers, has every number even,
+without being evenness. Do you agree?
+
+Of course.
+
+Then now mark the point at which I am aiming:--not only do essential
+opposites exclude one another, but also concrete things, which, although
+not in themselves opposed, contain opposites; these, I say, likewise
+reject the idea which is opposed to that which is contained in them,
+and when it approaches them they either perish or withdraw. For example;
+Will not the number three endure annihilation or anything sooner than be
+converted into an even number, while remaining three?
+
+Very true, said Cebes.
+
+And yet, he said, the number two is certainly not opposed to the number
+three?
+
+It is not.
+
+Then not only do opposite ideas repel the advance of one another, but
+also there are other natures which repel the approach of opposites.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Suppose, he said, that we endeavour, if possible, to determine what
+these are.
+
+By all means.
+
+Are they not, Cebes, such as compel the things of which they have
+possession, not only to take their own form, but also the form of some
+opposite?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean, as I was just now saying, and as I am sure that you know, that
+those things which are possessed by the number three must not only be
+three in number, but must also be odd.
+
+Quite true.
+
+And on this oddness, of which the number three has the impress, the
+opposite idea will never intrude?
+
+No.
+
+And this impress was given by the odd principle?
+
+Yes.
+
+And to the odd is opposed the even?
+
+True.
+
+Then the idea of the even number will never arrive at three?
+
+No.
+
+Then three has no part in the even?
+
+None.
+
+Then the triad or number three is uneven?
+
+Very true.
+
+To return then to my distinction of natures which are not opposed, and
+yet do not admit opposites--as, in the instance given, three, although
+not opposed to the even, does not any the more admit of the even, but
+always brings the opposite into play on the other side; or as two does
+not receive the odd, or fire the cold--from these examples (and there
+are many more of them) perhaps you may be able to arrive at the general
+conclusion, that not only opposites will not receive opposites, but also
+that nothing which brings the opposite will admit the opposite of
+that which it brings, in that to which it is brought. And here let me
+recapitulate--for there is no harm in repetition. The number five will
+not admit the nature of the even, any more than ten, which is the
+double of five, will admit the nature of the odd. The double has another
+opposite, and is not strictly opposed to the odd, but nevertheless
+rejects the odd altogether. Nor again will parts in the ratio 3:2, nor
+any fraction in which there is a half, nor again in which there is a
+third, admit the notion of the whole, although they are not opposed to
+the whole: You will agree?
+
+Yes, he said, I entirely agree and go along with you in that.
+
+And now, he said, let us begin again; and do not you answer my question
+in the words in which I ask it: let me have not the old safe answer of
+which I spoke at first, but another equally safe, of which the truth
+will be inferred by you from what has been just said. I mean that if any
+one asks you 'what that is, of which the inherence makes the body
+hot,' you will reply not heat (this is what I call the safe and
+stupid answer), but fire, a far superior answer, which we are now in a
+condition to give. Or if any one asks you 'why a body is diseased,' you
+will not say from disease, but from fever; and instead of saying that
+oddness is the cause of odd numbers, you will say that the monad is the
+cause of them: and so of things in general, as I dare say that you will
+understand sufficiently without my adducing any further examples.
+
+Yes, he said, I quite understand you.
+
+Tell me, then, what is that of which the inherence will render the body
+alive?
+
+The soul, he replied.
+
+And is this always the case?
+
+Yes, he said, of course.
+
+Then whatever the soul possesses, to that she comes bearing life?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+And is there any opposite to life?
+
+There is, he said.
+
+And what is that?
+
+Death.
+
+Then the soul, as has been acknowledged, will never receive the opposite
+of what she brings.
+
+Impossible, replied Cebes.
+
+And now, he said, what did we just now call that principle which repels
+the even?
+
+The odd.
+
+And that principle which repels the musical, or the just?
+
+The unmusical, he said, and the unjust.
+
+And what do we call the principle which does not admit of death?
+
+The immortal, he said.
+
+And does the soul admit of death?
+
+No.
+
+Then the soul is immortal?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And may we say that this has been proven?
+
+Yes, abundantly proven, Socrates, he replied.
+
+Supposing that the odd were imperishable, must not three be
+imperishable?
+
+Of course.
+
+And if that which is cold were imperishable, when the warm principle
+came attacking the snow, must not the snow have retired whole and
+unmelted--for it could never have perished, nor could it have remained
+and admitted the heat?
+
+True, he said.
+
+Again, if the uncooling or warm principle were imperishable, the fire
+when assailed by cold would not have perished or have been extinguished,
+but would have gone away unaffected?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And the same may be said of the immortal: if the immortal is also
+imperishable, the soul when attacked by death cannot perish; for the
+preceding argument shows that the soul will not admit of death, or ever
+be dead, any more than three or the odd number will admit of the even,
+or fire or the heat in the fire, of the cold. Yet a person may say: 'But
+although the odd will not become even at the approach of the even, why
+may not the odd perish and the even take the place of the odd?' Now to
+him who makes this objection, we cannot answer that the odd principle is
+imperishable; for this has not been acknowledged, but if this had been
+acknowledged, there would have been no difficulty in contending that
+at the approach of the even the odd principle and the number three took
+their departure; and the same argument would have held good of fire and
+heat and any other thing.
+
+Very true.
+
+And the same may be said of the immortal: if the immortal is also
+imperishable, then the soul will be imperishable as well as immortal;
+but if not, some other proof of her imperishableness will have to be
+given.
+
+No other proof is needed, he said; for if the immortal, being eternal,
+is liable to perish, then nothing is imperishable.
+
+Yes, replied Socrates, and yet all men will agree that God, and the
+essential form of life, and the immortal in general, will never perish.
+
+Yes, all men, he said--that is true; and what is more, gods, if I am not
+mistaken, as well as men.
+
+Seeing then that the immortal is indestructible, must not the soul, if
+she is immortal, be also imperishable?
+
+Most certainly.
+
+Then when death attacks a man, the mortal portion of him may be supposed
+to die, but the immortal retires at the approach of death and is
+preserved safe and sound?
+
+True.
+
+Then, Cebes, beyond question, the soul is immortal and imperishable, and
+our souls will truly exist in another world!
+
+I am convinced, Socrates, said Cebes, and have nothing more to object;
+but if my friend Simmias, or any one else, has any further objection to
+make, he had better speak out, and not keep silence, since I do not know
+to what other season he can defer the discussion, if there is anything
+which he wants to say or to have said.
+
+But I have nothing more to say, replied Simmias; nor can I see any
+reason for doubt after what has been said. But I still feel and cannot
+help feeling uncertain in my own mind, when I think of the greatness of
+the subject and the feebleness of man.
+
+Yes, Simmias, replied Socrates, that is well said: and I may add that
+first principles, even if they appear certain, should be carefully
+considered; and when they are satisfactorily ascertained, then, with a
+sort of hesitating confidence in human reason, you may, I think, follow
+the course of the argument; and if that be plain and clear, there will
+be no need for any further enquiry.
+
+Very true.
+
+But then, O my friends, he said, if the soul is really immortal, what
+care should be taken of her, not only in respect of the portion of time
+which is called life, but of eternity! And the danger of neglecting her
+from this point of view does indeed appear to be awful. If death had
+only been the end of all, the wicked would have had a good bargain in
+dying, for they would have been happily quit not only of their body, but
+of their own evil together with their souls. But now, inasmuch as the
+soul is manifestly immortal, there is no release or salvation from evil
+except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom. For the soul
+when on her progress to the world below takes nothing with her but
+nurture and education; and these are said greatly to benefit or greatly
+to injure the departed, at the very beginning of his journey thither.
+
+For after death, as they say, the genius of each individual, to whom
+he belonged in life, leads him to a certain place in which the dead are
+gathered together, whence after judgment has been given they pass into
+the world below, following the guide, who is appointed to conduct them
+from this world to the other: and when they have there received their
+due and remained their time, another guide brings them back again after
+many revolutions of ages. Now this way to the other world is not, as
+Aeschylus says in the Telephus, a single and straight path--if that were
+so no guide would be needed, for no one could miss it; but there are
+many partings of the road, and windings, as I infer from the rites and
+sacrifices which are offered to the gods below in places where three
+ways meet on earth. The wise and orderly soul follows in the straight
+path and is conscious of her surroundings; but the soul which desires
+the body, and which, as I was relating before, has long been fluttering
+about the lifeless frame and the world of sight, is after many struggles
+and many sufferings hardly and with violence carried away by her
+attendant genius, and when she arrives at the place where the other
+souls are gathered, if she be impure and have done impure deeds, whether
+foul murders or other crimes which are the brothers of these, and the
+works of brothers in crime--from that soul every one flees and turns
+away; no one will be her companion, no one her guide, but alone she
+wanders in extremity of evil until certain times are fulfilled, and
+when they are fulfilled, she is borne irresistibly to her own fitting
+habitation; as every pure and just soul which has passed through life in
+the company and under the guidance of the gods has also her own proper
+home.
+
+Now the earth has divers wonderful regions, and is indeed in nature
+and extent very unlike the notions of geographers, as I believe on the
+authority of one who shall be nameless.
+
+What do you mean, Socrates? said Simmias. I have myself heard many
+descriptions of the earth, but I do not know, and I should very much
+like to know, in which of these you put faith.
+
+And I, Simmias, replied Socrates, if I had the art of Glaucus would tell
+you; although I know not that the art of Glaucus could prove the truth
+of my tale, which I myself should never be able to prove, and even if
+I could, I fear, Simmias, that my life would come to an end before the
+argument was completed. I may describe to you, however, the form and
+regions of the earth according to my conception of them.
+
+That, said Simmias, will be enough.
+
+Well, then, he said, my conviction is, that the earth is a round body
+in the centre of the heavens, and therefore has no need of air or any
+similar force to be a support, but is kept there and hindered from
+falling or inclining any way by the equability of the surrounding heaven
+and by her own equipoise. For that which, being in equipoise, is in the
+centre of that which is equably diffused, will not incline any way in
+any degree, but will always remain in the same state and not deviate.
+And this is my first notion.
+
+Which is surely a correct one, said Simmias.
+
+Also I believe that the earth is very vast, and that we who dwell in
+the region extending from the river Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles
+inhabit a small portion only about the sea, like ants or frogs about a
+marsh, and that there are other inhabitants of many other like places;
+for everywhere on the face of the earth there are hollows of various
+forms and sizes, into which the water and the mist and the lower
+air collect. But the true earth is pure and situated in the pure
+heaven--there are the stars also; and it is the heaven which is commonly
+spoken of by us as the ether, and of which our own earth is the sediment
+gathering in the hollows beneath. But we who live in these hollows are
+deceived into the notion that we are dwelling above on the surface of
+the earth; which is just as if a creature who was at the bottom of the
+sea were to fancy that he was on the surface of the water, and that the
+sea was the heaven through which he saw the sun and the other stars,
+he having never come to the surface by reason of his feebleness and
+sluggishness, and having never lifted up his head and seen, nor ever
+heard from one who had seen, how much purer and fairer the world above
+is than his own. And such is exactly our case: for we are dwelling in a
+hollow of the earth, and fancy that we are on the surface; and the air
+we call the heaven, in which we imagine that the stars move. But the
+fact is, that owing to our feebleness and sluggishness we are prevented
+from reaching the surface of the air: for if any man could arrive at the
+exterior limit, or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then
+like a fish who puts his head out of the water and sees this world, he
+would see a world beyond; and, if the nature of man could sustain the
+sight, he would acknowledge that this other world was the place of the
+true heaven and the true light and the true earth. For our earth, and
+the stones, and the entire region which surrounds us, are spoilt and
+corroded, as in the sea all things are corroded by the brine, neither
+is there any noble or perfect growth, but caverns only, and sand, and an
+endless slough of mud: and even the shore is not to be compared to the
+fairer sights of this world. And still less is this our world to be
+compared with the other. Of that upper earth which is under the heaven,
+I can tell you a charming tale, Simmias, which is well worth hearing.
+
+And we, Socrates, replied Simmias, shall be charmed to listen to you.
+
+The tale, my friend, he said, is as follows:--In the first place, the
+earth, when looked at from above, is in appearance streaked like one of
+those balls which have leather coverings in twelve pieces, and is decked
+with various colours, of which the colours used by painters on earth are
+in a manner samples. But there the whole earth is made up of them,
+and they are brighter far and clearer than ours; there is a purple of
+wonderful lustre, also the radiance of gold, and the white which is in
+the earth is whiter than any chalk or snow. Of these and other colours
+the earth is made up, and they are more in number and fairer than the
+eye of man has ever seen; the very hollows (of which I was speaking)
+filled with air and water have a colour of their own, and are seen like
+light gleaming amid the diversity of the other colours, so that the
+whole presents a single and continuous appearance of variety in unity.
+And in this fair region everything that grows--trees, and flowers, and
+fruits--are in a like degree fairer than any here; and there are hills,
+having stones in them in a like degree smoother, and more transparent,
+and fairer in colour than our highly-valued emeralds and sardonyxes and
+jaspers, and other gems, which are but minute fragments of them: for
+there all the stones are like our precious stones, and fairer still
+(compare Republic). The reason is, that they are pure, and not, like
+our precious stones, infected or corroded by the corrupt briny elements
+which coagulate among us, and which breed foulness and disease both in
+earth and stones, as well as in animals and plants. They are the jewels
+of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like,
+and they are set in the light of day and are large and abundant and in
+all places, making the earth a sight to gladden the beholder's eye.
+And there are animals and men, some in a middle region, others dwelling
+about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air
+flows round, near the continent: and in a word, the air is used by them
+as the water and the sea are by us, and the ether is to them what the
+air is to us. Moreover, the temperament of their seasons is such that
+they have no disease, and live much longer than we do, and have
+sight and hearing and smell, and all the other senses, in far greater
+perfection, in the same proportion that air is purer than water or the
+ether than air. Also they have temples and sacred places in which the
+gods really dwell, and they hear their voices and receive their answers,
+and are conscious of them and hold converse with them, and they see the
+sun, moon, and stars as they truly are, and their other blessedness is
+of a piece with this.
+
+Such is the nature of the whole earth, and of the things which are
+around the earth; and there are divers regions in the hollows on the
+face of the globe everywhere, some of them deeper and more extended than
+that which we inhabit, others deeper but with a narrower opening
+than ours, and some are shallower and also wider. All have numerous
+perforations, and there are passages broad and narrow in the interior of
+the earth, connecting them with one another; and there flows out of and
+into them, as into basins, a vast tide of water, and huge subterranean
+streams of perennial rivers, and springs hot and cold, and a great fire,
+and great rivers of fire, and streams of liquid mud, thin or thick (like
+the rivers of mud in Sicily, and the lava streams which follow them),
+and the regions about which they happen to flow are filled up with them.
+And there is a swinging or see-saw in the interior of the earth which
+moves all this up and down, and is due to the following cause:--There is
+a chasm which is the vastest of them all, and pierces right through the
+whole earth; this is that chasm which Homer describes in the words,--
+
+     'Far off, where is the inmost depth beneath the earth;'
+
+and which he in other places, and many other poets, have called
+Tartarus. And the see-saw is caused by the streams flowing into and out
+of this chasm, and they each have the nature of the soil through which
+they flow. And the reason why the streams are always flowing in and out,
+is that the watery element has no bed or bottom, but is swinging and
+surging up and down, and the surrounding wind and air do the same; they
+follow the water up and down, hither and thither, over the earth--just
+as in the act of respiration the air is always in process of inhalation
+and exhalation;--and the wind swinging with the water in and out
+produces fearful and irresistible blasts: when the waters retire with
+a rush into the lower parts of the earth, as they are called, they flow
+through the earth in those regions, and fill them up like water raised
+by a pump, and then when they leave those regions and rush back hither,
+they again fill the hollows here, and when these are filled, flow
+through subterranean channels and find their way to their several
+places, forming seas, and lakes, and rivers, and springs. Thence they
+again enter the earth, some of them making a long circuit into many
+lands, others going to a few places and not so distant; and again fall
+into Tartarus, some at a point a good deal lower than that at which they
+rose, and others not much lower, but all in some degree lower than the
+point from which they came. And some burst forth again on the opposite
+side, and some on the same side, and some wind round the earth with one
+or many folds like the coils of a serpent, and descend as far as they
+can, but always return and fall into the chasm. The rivers flowing in
+either direction can descend only to the centre and no further, for
+opposite to the rivers is a precipice.
+
+Now these rivers are many, and mighty, and diverse, and there are four
+principal ones, of which the greatest and outermost is that called
+Oceanus, which flows round the earth in a circle; and in the opposite
+direction flows Acheron, which passes under the earth through desert
+places into the Acherusian lake: this is the lake to the shores of
+which the souls of the many go when they are dead, and after waiting an
+appointed time, which is to some a longer and to some a shorter time,
+they are sent back to be born again as animals. The third river passes
+out between the two, and near the place of outlet pours into a vast
+region of fire, and forms a lake larger than the Mediterranean Sea,
+boiling with water and mud; and proceeding muddy and turbid, and winding
+about the earth, comes, among other places, to the extremities of the
+Acherusian Lake, but mingles not with the waters of the lake, and after
+making many coils about the earth plunges into Tartarus at a deeper
+level. This is that Pyriphlegethon, as the stream is called, which
+throws up jets of fire in different parts of the earth. The fourth river
+goes out on the opposite side, and falls first of all into a wild and
+savage region, which is all of a dark-blue colour, like lapis lazuli;
+and this is that river which is called the Stygian river, and falls into
+and forms the Lake Styx, and after falling into the lake and receiving
+strange powers in the waters, passes under the earth, winding round
+in the opposite direction, and comes near the Acherusian lake from the
+opposite side to Pyriphlegethon. And the water of this river too mingles
+with no other, but flows round in a circle and falls into Tartarus over
+against Pyriphlegethon; and the name of the river, as the poets say, is
+Cocytus.
+
+Such is the nature of the other world; and when the dead arrive at the
+place to which the genius of each severally guides them, first of all,
+they have sentence passed upon them, as they have lived well and piously
+or not. And those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill, go to
+the river Acheron, and embarking in any vessels which they may find, are
+carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of
+their evil deeds, and having suffered the penalty of the wrongs which
+they have done to others, they are absolved, and receive the rewards of
+their good deeds, each of them according to his deserts. But those who
+appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes--who
+have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and
+violent, or the like--such are hurled into Tartarus which is their
+suitable destiny, and they never come out. Those again who have
+committed crimes, which, although great, are not irremediable--who in
+a moment of anger, for example, have done violence to a father or a
+mother, and have repented for the remainder of their lives, or, who
+have taken the life of another under the like extenuating
+circumstances--these are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which they
+are compelled to undergo for a year, but at the end of the year the
+wave casts them forth--mere homicides by way of Cocytus, parricides and
+matricides by Pyriphlegethon--and they are borne to the Acherusian lake,
+and there they lift up their voices and call upon the victims whom they
+have slain or wronged, to have pity on them, and to be kind to them,
+and let them come out into the lake. And if they prevail, then they come
+forth and cease from their troubles; but if not, they are carried back
+again into Tartarus and from thence into the rivers unceasingly, until
+they obtain mercy from those whom they have wronged: for that is the
+sentence inflicted upon them by their judges. Those too who have been
+pre-eminent for holiness of life are released from this earthly prison,
+and go to their pure home which is above, and dwell in the purer earth;
+and of these, such as have duly purified themselves with philosophy live
+henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer still which
+may not be described, and of which the time would fail me to tell.
+
+Wherefore, Simmias, seeing all these things, what ought not we to do
+that we may obtain virtue and wisdom in this life? Fair is the prize,
+and the hope great!
+
+A man of sense ought not to say, nor will I be very confident, that the
+description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly
+true. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal,
+he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of
+the kind is true. The venture is a glorious one, and he ought to comfort
+himself with words like these, which is the reason why I lengthen out
+the tale. Wherefore, I say, let a man be of good cheer about his soul,
+who having cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to
+him and working harm rather than good, has sought after the pleasures of
+knowledge; and has arrayed the soul, not in some foreign attire, but
+in her own proper jewels, temperance, and justice, and courage, and
+nobility, and truth--in these adorned she is ready to go on her journey
+to the world below, when her hour comes. You, Simmias and Cebes, and all
+other men, will depart at some time or other. Me already, as the tragic
+poet would say, the voice of fate calls. Soon I must drink the poison;
+and I think that I had better repair to the bath first, in order that
+the women may not have the trouble of washing my body after I am dead.
+
+When he had done speaking, Crito said: And have you any commands for us,
+Socrates--anything to say about your children, or any other matter in
+which we can serve you?
+
+Nothing particular, Crito, he replied: only, as I have always told
+you, take care of yourselves; that is a service which you may be ever
+rendering to me and mine and to all of us, whether you promise to do so
+or not. But if you have no thought for yourselves, and care not to walk
+according to the rule which I have prescribed for you, not now for the
+first time, however much you may profess or promise at the moment, it
+will be of no avail.
+
+We will do our best, said Crito: And in what way shall we bury you?
+
+In any way that you like; but you must get hold of me, and take care
+that I do not run away from you. Then he turned to us, and added with a
+smile:--I cannot make Crito believe that I am the same Socrates who have
+been talking and conducting the argument; he fancies that I am the other
+Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead body--and he asks, How shall he
+bury me? And though I have spoken many words in the endeavour to show
+that when I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys
+of the blessed,--these words of mine, with which I was comforting you
+and myself, have had, as I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore
+I want you to be surety for me to him now, as at the trial he was surety
+to the judges for me: but let the promise be of another sort; for he
+was surety for me to the judges that I would remain, and you must be my
+surety to him that I shall not remain, but go away and depart; and then
+he will suffer less at my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body
+being burned or buried. I would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or
+say at the burial, Thus we lay out Socrates, or, Thus we follow him to
+the grave or bury him; for false words are not only evil in themselves,
+but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer, then, my dear
+Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that
+whatever is usual, and what you think best.
+
+When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into a chamber to
+bathe; Crito followed him and told us to wait. So we remained behind,
+talking and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the
+greatness of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being
+bereaved, and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans.
+When he had taken the bath his children were brought to him--(he had two
+young sons and an elder one); and the women of his family also came,
+and he talked to them and gave them a few directions in the presence of
+Crito; then he dismissed them and returned to us.
+
+Now the hour of sunset was near, for a good deal of time had passed
+while he was within. When he came out, he sat down with us again after
+his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer, who was the servant of
+the Eleven, entered and stood by him, saying:--To you, Socrates, whom
+I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of all who ever came to
+this place, I will not impute the angry feelings of other men, who rage
+and swear at me, when, in obedience to the authorities, I bid them drink
+the poison--indeed, I am sure that you will not be angry with me; for
+others, as you are aware, and not I, are to blame. And so fare you well,
+and try to bear lightly what must needs be--you know my errand. Then
+bursting into tears he turned away and went out.
+
+Socrates looked at him and said: I return your good wishes, and will do
+as you bid. Then turning to us, he said, How charming the man is: since
+I have been in prison he has always been coming to see me, and at times
+he would talk to me, and was as good to me as could be, and now see how
+generously he sorrows on my account. We must do as he says, Crito; and
+therefore let the cup be brought, if the poison is prepared: if not, let
+the attendant prepare some.
+
+Yet, said Crito, the sun is still upon the hill-tops, and I know that
+many a one has taken the draught late, and after the announcement has
+been made to him, he has eaten and drunk, and enjoyed the society of his
+beloved; do not hurry--there is time enough.
+
+Socrates said: Yes, Crito, and they of whom you speak are right in so
+acting, for they think that they will be gainers by the delay; but I am
+right in not following their example, for I do not think that I should
+gain anything by drinking the poison a little later; I should only be
+ridiculous in my own eyes for sparing and saving a life which is already
+forfeit. Please then to do as I say, and not to refuse me.
+
+Crito made a sign to the servant, who was standing by; and he went out,
+and having been absent for some time, returned with the jailer
+carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said: You, my good friend, who
+are experienced in these matters, shall give me directions how I am to
+proceed. The man answered: You have only to walk about until your legs
+are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act. At the same
+time he handed the cup to Socrates, who in the easiest and gentlest
+manner, without the least fear or change of colour or feature, looking
+at the man with all his eyes, Echecrates, as his manner was, took the
+cup and said: What do you say about making a libation out of this cup
+to any god? May I, or not? The man answered: We only prepare, Socrates,
+just so much as we deem enough. I understand, he said: but I may
+and must ask the gods to prosper my journey from this to the other
+world--even so--and so be it according to my prayer. Then raising the
+cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison.
+And hitherto most of us had been able to control our sorrow; but now
+when we saw him drinking, and saw too that he had finished the draught,
+we could no longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were
+flowing fast; so that I covered my face and wept, not for him, but at
+the thought of my own calamity in having to part from such a friend. Nor
+was I the first; for Crito, when he found himself unable to restrain his
+tears, had got up, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who
+had been weeping all the time, broke out in a loud and passionate cry
+which made cowards of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness: What
+is this strange outcry? he said. I sent away the women mainly in order
+that they might not misbehave in this way, for I have been told that
+a man should die in peace. Be quiet, then, and have patience. When we
+heard his words we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he walked
+about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he lay on his
+back, according to the directions, and the man who gave him the poison
+now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a while he pressed
+his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel; and he said, No; and then
+his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and showed us that he was cold and
+stiff. And he felt them himself, and said: When the poison reaches the
+heart, that will be the end. He was beginning to grow cold about the
+groin, when he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up,
+and said--they were his last words--he said: Crito, I owe a cock to
+Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? The debt shall be
+paid, said Crito; is there anything else? There was no answer to
+this question; but in a minute or two a movement was heard, and the
+attendants uncovered him; his eyes were set, and Crito closed his eyes
+and mouth.
+
+Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may
+truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the
+wisest and justest and best.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Phaedo, by Plato
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