Phaedo | Page 6

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'