Then, my good friend, it will never do for us to
say that the soul is a harmony; for we should, it seems,
agree neither with Homer, the
divine poet, nor with ourselves.That is true, said he.Very
well, said Socrates, Harmonia, the Theban goddess, has, it seems,
been moderately gracious to us; but how, Cebes, and by what argument can we find
grace in the sight of Cadmus?I
think, said Cebes, you will find a way. At any rate, you conducted
this argument against harmony wonderfully and better than I expected. For when
Simmias was telling of his difficulty, I wondered if anyone could make head
against
his argument; so it seemed to me very
remarkable that it could not withstand the first attack of your argument. Now I
should not be surprised if the argument of Cadmus met with the same
fate.My friend, said
Socrates, do not be boastful, lest some evil eye put to rout the argument
that is to come. That, however, is in the hands of God. Let us, in Homeric
fashion, charge the foe and test the worth of what you say. Now the sum total of
what you seek is this: You demand a proof that our soul is indestructible
and immortal, if the philosopher, who is
confident in the face of death and who thinks that after death he will fare
better in the other world than if he had lived his life differently, is not to
find his confidence senseless and foolish. And although we show that the soul is
strong and godlike and existed before we men were born as men, all this, you
say, may bear witness not to immortality, but only to the fact that the soul
lasts a long while, and existed somewhere an immeasurably long time before our
birth, and knew and did various things; yet it was none the more immortal for
all that,
but its very entrance into the
human body was the beginning of its dissolution, a disease, as it were; and it
lives in toil through this life and finally perishes in what we call death. Now
it makes no difference, you say, whether a soul enters into a body once or many
times, so far as the fear each of us feels is concerned; for anyone, unless he
is a fool, must fear, if he does not know and cannot prove that the soul is
immortal. That,
Cebes, is, I think, about
what you mean. And I restate it purposely that nothing may escape us and that
you may, if you wish, add or take away anything.And Cebes said, I do not at present wish to take
anything away or to add anything. You have expressed my
meaning.Socrates paused for some time
and was absorbed in thought. Then he said: It is no small thing that you
seek; for the cause of generation and decay must be completely investigated.
Now I will
tell you my own experience in the matter, if you wish; then if anything I say
seems to you to be of any use, you can employ it for the solution of your
difficulty.Certainly,
said Cebes, I wish to hear your experiences.Listen then, and I will tell you. When I was young,
Cebes, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call
investigation of nature. I thought it was a glorious thing to know the causes of
everything, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it
exists;
and I was always unsettling myself
with such questions as these: Do heat and cold, by a sort of fermentation, bring
about the organization of animals, as some people say? Is it the blood, or air,
or fire by which we think? Or is it none of these, and does the brain furnish
the sensations of hearing and sight and smell, and do memory and opinion arise
from these, and does knowledge come from memory and opinion in a state of rest?
And again I tried to find out
how these
things perish, and I investigated the phenomena of heaven and earth until
finally I made up my mind that I was by nature totally unfitted for this kind of
investigation. And I will give you a sufficient proof of this. I was so
completely blinded by these studies that I lost the knowledge that I, and others
also, thought I had before; I forgot what I had formerly believed I knew about
many things and even about the cause of man’s growth. For I had thought
previously that it was plain to everyone that man grows through eating and
drinking; for when, from the food he
eats, flesh is added to his flesh and bones to his bones, and in the same way
the appropriate thing is added to each of his other parts, then the small bulk
becomes greater and the small man large. That is what I used to think. Doesn’t
that seem to you reasonable?Yes, said Cebes.Now listen
to this, too. I thought I was sure enough, when I saw a tall man standing by a
short one, that he was, say, taller by a head than the other,
and that one horse was larger by a head than another horse;
and, to mention still clearer things than those, I thought ten were more than
eight because two had been added to the eight, and I thought a two-cubit rule
was longer than a one-cubit rule because it exceeded it by half its
length.And now, said
Cebes, what do you think about them?