Phaedo | Page 9

their sufferings cease: if not, they are borne unceasingly into
Tartarus and back again, until they at last obtain mercy. 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 speaking to him, and who will one day be
heard calling 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 burying, not 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.
With a sort of irony he remembers that a trifling religious duty is still

unfulfilled, just as above he desires before he departs to compose a few
verses in order to satisfy a scruple about a dream--unless, indeed, we
suppose him to mean, that he was now restored to health, and made the
customary offering to Asclepius in token of his recovery.
...
1. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has sunk deep into the
heart of the human race; and men are apt to rebel against any
examination of the nature or grounds 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 they are disposed to think that even fallacies will do no harm,
for they will die with them, and while they live they will gain by the
delusion. And when they consider the numberless bad arguments which
have been pressed into the service of theology, they say, like the
companions of Socrates, 'What argument can we ever trust again?' But
there is a better and higher spirit to be gathered from the Phaedo, as
well as from the other writings of Plato, which says that first principles
should be most constantly reviewed (Phaedo and Crat.), and that the
highest subjects demand of us the greatest accuracy (Republic); also
that we must not become misologists because arguments are apt to be
deceivers.
2. In former ages there was a customary rather than a reasoned belief in
the immortality of the soul. It was based on the authority of the Church,
on the necessity of such a belief to morality and the order of society, on
the evidence of an historical fact, and also on analogies and figures of
speech which filled up the void or gave an expression in words to a
cherished instinct. The mass of mankind went on their way busy with
the affairs of this life, hardly stopping to think about another. But in our
own day the question has been reopened, and it is doubtful whether the
belief which in the first ages of Christianity was the strongest motive of
action can survive the conflict with a scientific age in which the rules of
evidence are stricter and the mind has become more sensitive to
criticism. It has faded into the distance by a natural process as it was
removed further and further from the historical fact on which it has

been supposed to rest. Arguments derived from material things such as
the seed and the ear of corn or transitions in the life of animals from
one state of being to another (the chrysalis and the butterfly) are not 'in
pari materia' with arguments from the visible to the invisible, and are
therefore felt to be no longer applicable. The evidence to the historical
fact seems to be weaker than was once supposed: it is not consistent
with itself, and is based upon documents which are of unknown origin.
The immortality of man must be proved by other arguments than these
if it is again to become a living belief. We must ask ourselves afresh
why we still maintain it,