Phaedo
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