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 the year on the shores of the rivers, where they stand crying to their victims to let them come out, and if they prevail, then they are let out and their sufferings cease; if not, they are borne in a ceaseless whirl along the rivers of Tartarus. 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 heard calling to him, and will be heard calling by 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 not burying 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. The puzzle has been occasioned by the simplicity of his words, for there is no reason to suppose that they have any hidden meaning. With a sort of irony he remembers that a trifling religious duty is still unfulfilled, just as above (60 E) he is represented as desirous before he departs to make a few verses in order to satisfy a scruple about the meaning of a dream.

1. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has such a great interest for all mankind that they are apt to rebel against any examination of the nature 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 (91 B) they are disposed to think that even bad arguments will do no harm, for they will die with them, and while they live they will gain by the delusion. But there is a better and higher spirit to be gathered from the "Phædo," as well as from the other writings of Plato, which says that first principles should be most constantly reviewed (" Phæd." 107 B), and that the highest subjects demand of us the greatest accuracy.

2. 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 "Phædo" 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 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? 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 and others? or as an individual spirit informed with another body and retaining the impress of her former character? (Cp. "Gorgias," 524 B.C.) 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. Neither Plato nor any other philosopher has perfectly adjusted them, or been

perfectly consistent with himself in describing their relation to one another.

3. 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 forever, 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, seems to involve equal difficulties in the moral order 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 have a right to immortality. Reason does not allow us to suppose that we have any greater claims than others, and experience sometimes reveals to us unexpected flashes of the higher nature in those whom we had despised. Such are some of the distracting thoughts which press upon us when we attempt to assign any form to our conceptions of a future state.

4. 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 perhaps 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. The result seems to be that those who have thought most deeply on the immortality of the soul have been content to rest their belief 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, and our ideas of divine justice-also in a less degree on the impossibility of thinking otherwise of those whom we 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 the expression of the common sentiment of the human heart.

5. The "Phædo" of Plato may also be regarded as a dialectical approximation to the truth of immortality. 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," 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 colors of the painter, or in the descriptions of the poet or rhetorician.

6. 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. 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 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. 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 love or friend in the world below ("Phædo," 68) is 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 neces