Phaedo Phaedo. “It cannot.”

“Or rather, to speak exactly, Simmias, 94a no soul will have any wickedness at all, if the soul is a harmony; for if a harmony is entirely harmony, it could have no part in discord.”

“Certainly not.”

“Then the soul, being entirely soul, could have no part in wickedness.”

“How could it, if what we have said is right?”

“According to this argument, then, if all souls are by nature equally souls, all souls of all living creatures will be equally good.”

“So it seems, Socrates,” said he. 94b “And,” said Socrates, “do you think that this is true and that our reasoning would have come to this end, if the theory that the soul is a harmony were correct?”

“Not in the least,” he replied.

“Well,” said Socrates, “of all the parts that make up a man, do you think any is ruler except the soul, especially if it be a wise one?”

“No, I do not.”

“Does it yield to the feelings of the body or oppose them? I mean, when the body is hot and thirsty, does not the soul oppose it and draw it away from drinking, and from eating when it is hungry, and do we not see the soul opposing the body 94c in countless other ways?”

“Certainly.”

“Did we not agree in our previous discussion that it could never, if it be a harmony, give forth a sound at variance with the tensions and relaxations and vibrations and other conditions of the elements which compose it, but that it would follow them and never lead them?”

“Yes,” he replied, “we did, of course.”

“Well then, do we not now find that the soul acts in exactly the opposite way, leading those elements of which it is said to consist and opposing them 94d in almost everything through all our life, and tyrannizing over them in every way, sometimes inflicting harsh and painful punishments (those of gymnastics and medicine), and sometimes milder ones, sometimes threatening and sometimes admonishing, in short, speaking to the desires and passions and fears as if it were distinct from them and they from it, as Homer has shown in the Odyssey when he says of Odysseus:He smote his breast, and thus he chid his heart: Endure it, heart, you have born worse than this. ¹ 94e Do you suppose that, when he wrote those words, he thought of the soul as a harmony which would be led by the conditions of the body, and not rather as something fitted to lead and rule them, and itself a far more divine thing than a harmony?”

“By Zeus, Socrates, the latter, I think.”

Phaedo.

“Then, my good friend, it will never do for us to say that the soul is a harmony; for we should, it seems, 95a 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 95b 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 95c 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, 95d 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, 95e 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.”

Phaedo. “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; 96b 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 96c 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 96d 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, 96e 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?”

Phaedo.

“By Zeus,” said he, “I am far from thinking that I know the cause of any of these things, I who do not even dare to say, when one is added to one, whether the one to which the addition was made has become two, or the one which was added, or the one which was added and 97a the one to which it was added became two by the addition of each to the other. I think it is wonderful that when each of them was separate from the other, each was one and they were not then two, and when they were brought near each other this juxtaposition was the cause of their becoming two. And I cannot yet believe that if one is divided, the division causes it to become two; for this is the opposite of 97b the cause which produced two in the former case; for then two arose because one was brought near and added to another one, and now because one is removed and separated from other. And I no longer believe that I know by this method even how one is generated or, in a word, how anything is generated or is destroyed or exists, and I no longer admit this method, but have another confused way of my own.

Then one day I heard a man reading from a book, as he said, by Anaxagoras, 97c that it is the mind that arranges and causes all things. I was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to me to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things, and I thought, “If this is so, the mind in arranging things arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be. So if anyone wishes to find the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of a particular thing, he must find out what sort of existence, or passive state of any kind, or activity is best for it. And therefore in respect to 97d that particular thing, and other things too, a man need examine nothing but what is best and most excellent; for then he will necessarily know also what is inferior, since the science of both is the same.” As I considered these things I was delighted to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the cause of things quite to my mind, and I thought he would tell me whether the earth is flat or round, and when 97e he had told me that, would go on to explain the cause and the necessity of it, and would tell me the nature of the best and why it is best for the earth to be as it is; and if he said the earth was in the center, he would proceed to show that it is best for it to be in the center; and I had made up my mind that 98a if he made those things clear to me, I would no longer yearn for any other kind of cause.”