not, we may take up the other side, and argue with them. 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 still in
the same position, 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, as I may
be allowed to say, 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 is still 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, like Simmias, must employ a figure; and I shall ask you to
consider whether the figure is to the point. The parallel which I will
suppose is that of an old weaver, who dies, and after his death somebody
says: He is not dead, he must be alive; and he appeals to the coat which
he himself wove and wore, and which is still whole and undecayed. And
then he proceeds to ask of someone 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
observe, is not the truth; everyone sees that he who talks thus is
talking nonsense. For the truth is that this weaver, having worn and
woven many such coats, though he outlived several of them, was himself
outlived by the last; but this is surely very far from proving that a
man is slighter and weaker than a coat. Now the relation of the body to
the soul may be expressed in a similar figure; for you may say with
reason that the soul is lasting, and the body weak and short-lived in
comparison. And every soul may be said to wear out many bodies,
especially in the course of a long life. For if while the man is alive
the body deliquesces and decays, and yet the soul always weaves her
garment anew and repairs the waste, then of course, when the soul
perishes, she must have on her last garment, and this only will survive
her; but then again when the soul is dead the body will at last show its
native weakness, and soon pass into decay. And therefore this is an
argument on which I would rather not rely as proving that the soul
exists after death. For suppose that we grant even more than you affirm
as within the range of possibility, and besides acknowledging that the
soul existed before birth admit also that after death the souls of some
are existing still, and will exist, 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 -- for all this, we may be still inclined to
think that she will weary in the labors 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 this be true, then I say that he who is confident in death
has but a foolish confidence, unless he is able to prove that the soul
is altogether immortal and imperishable. But if he is not able to prove
this, 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 them say this. 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 not good judges, or there were no real grounds of
belief.
Ech. There I feel with you -- indeed 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 dies not with him.
Tell me, I beg, how did Socrates proceed? Did he appear to share the
unpleasant feeling which you mention? or did he receive the interruption
calmly and give a sufficient answer? Tell us, as exactly as you can,
what passed.
Phaed. Often, Echecrates, as I have admired Socrates, I never admired
him more than at that moment. 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 regarded the words of the young men, and
then his quick sense of the wound which had been inflicted by the
argument, and his ready application of the healing art. He might be
compared to a general rallying his defeated and broken army, urging them
to follow him and return to the field of argument.
Ech. How was that?
Phaed. 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. Now
he had a way of playing with my hair, and then he smoothed my head, and
pressed the hair upon my neck, and 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 cannot
be brought to life again by us, you and I will both shave our locks; and
if I were you, and could not maintain 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 said, not as Heracles summoning Iolaus, but as
Iolaus might summon Heracles.
That will be all the same, he said. But first let us take care that we
avoid a danger.
And what is that? I said.
The danger of becoming misologists, he replied, which is one of the very
worst things that can happen to us. 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 from the too great confidence of inexperience; you trust a man
and think him altogether true and good 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
within the circle of his most trusted friends, as he deems them, 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. I dare say that you must have
observed this.
Yes, I said.
And is not this discreditable? The reason is that a man, having to deal
with other men, has no knowledge of them; for if he had knowledge he
would have known 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.
How 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 a 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 of
evil, the first in evil would be found to be very few?
Yes, that is very likely, I said.
Yes, that is very likely, he replied; not that in this respect arguments
are like 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 very melancholy too, if there be such a
thing as truth or certainty or power of knowing at all, 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 forever
afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose the truth and knowledge
of existence.
Yes, indeed, I said; that is very melancholy.
Let us, then, in the first place, he said, be careful of admitting into
our souls the notion that there is no truth or health or soundness in
any arguments at all; but let us rather say that there is as yet no
health in us, and that we must quit ourselves like men and do our best
to gain health -- you and all other men with a view to the whole of your
future life, and I myself with a view to 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. For 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 only 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 this. 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 save my
friends from lamentations, and my ignorance will not last, 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, being in the form of harmony,
although a fairer and diviner thing than the body, 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 only, and inferred from this
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 unshaken.
Simmias agreed, and added that he himself could hardly imagine the
possibility of his ever thinking differently about that.
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 the harmony.
No, Socrates, that is impossible.
But do you not see that you are saying this 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 a sort of
thing 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 when harmony is the
theme of discourse.
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, then,
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 I know too well that these arguments
