56 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



sation recited, all the manners of the dialogue, the attitudes, and tones, 

 and gestures of the speaker must have been drawn from life ; and 

 every little circumstance speaks the language of a heart retracing its' 

 fondest recollections. 



immortality The argument discussed is suitable to the occasion, the Immortality 

 of the Soul, of the Soul. Upon this momentous subject, which should seem to 

 defy and to confound the powers of human reason unenlightened by 

 revelation, Socrates is represented as urging that the soul cannot be a 

 modification of the body, for the soul gives life to the mass which it 

 informs, it controls and regulates the functions of the perishable frame 

 with which it is connected. 



The conditions in which beings exist are but a succession of changes 

 and an alternation of extremes. Heat succeeds cold, and weakness 

 strength ; and the existence of one state infers the succession of its 

 opposite. Life, as it precedes, so it will probably succeed death ; and 

 a state of insensibility and inaction is merely to be looked upon as 

 a necessary state of transition to its opposite. But the human soul is 

 capable of contemplating the eternal relations of things, which exist 

 independently of those accidental combinations and mere casual phe- 

 nomena which are presented to the senses. The soul has powers of 

 meditating objects unconnected with time or space, and of a nature 

 imperishable ; and, it should therefore seem, must be itself as im- 

 perishable as the objects which it is its divine prerogative to be able 

 to contemplate. The general principles with which the mind is 

 fraught, arid which, so far from being acquired in this life by any 

 collection from particulars, are the tests which the mind from our 

 earliest infancy applies in the arrangement of particulars ; that inborn 

 and inherent knowledge, which study and investigation do not create, 

 but only develop, as they are strong arguments to show some pre- 

 existent state, so also are they to be considered as indelible attesta- 

 tions of the divine original of the mind. Upon the whole, the parti- 

 cles of the visible world undergo not any destruction, but merely 

 a transformation : the powers and faculties of the mind embrace those 

 universal essences which have a far higher nature than the accidents 

 of this visible world : they bear with them strong marks of a pre- 

 existent state, and are endowed with a divination and strange presen- 

 timent of some future state. 



What the condition of individuals may be in that future state must 

 be but matter of conjecture ; but the good will safely rely upon the 

 conviction, that in doing what is right they have done what is accept- 

 able to the Deity ; and, in the distribution of future conditions, it is 

 not to be apprehended that those will be reduced to a lower state 

 who have done all in their power to deserve a higher. But these 

 difficulties* can only be met by conjecture. 



Some of these arguments bear the cast of doctrines which are 

 prevalent in those writings of Plato which are acknowledged to be the 

 productions of a much later period in his life. And though * The 



