Last, we have the divine Plato, who has said so many beautiful things
about the soul. In his dialogues he often spoke of the descent of
the soul into the body, so that we have the right to expect from him
something clearer. Unfortunately, he is not always sufficiently in
agreement with himself to enable one to follow his thought. In general,
he depreciates corporeal things; he deplores the dealings between the
soul and the body; insists[150] that the soul is chained down to it,
and that she is buried in it as in a tomb. He attaches much importance
to the maxim taught in the mysteries that the soul here below is as
in a prison.[151] What Plato calls the "cavern"[152] and Empedocles
calls the "grotto," means no doubt the sense-world.[153] To break her
chains, and to issue from the cavern, means the soul's[154] rising to
the intelligible world. In the Phaedrus,[155] Plato asserts that the
cause of the fall of the soul is the loss of her wings; that after
having once more ascended on high, she is brought back here below by
the periods;[156] that there are souls sent down into this world by
judgments, fates, conditions, and necessity; still, at the same time,
he finds fault with the "descent" of the soul into the body. But,
speaking of the universe in the Timaeus,[157] he praises the world, and
calls it a blissful divinity. He states that the demiurgic creator,
being good, gave it a soul to make it intelligent, because without the
soul, the universe could not have been as intelligent as it ought to
have been.[158] Consequently, the purpose of the introduction of the
universal Soul into the world, and similarly of each of our souls was
only to achieve the perfection of the world; for it was necessary for
the sense-world to contain animals equal in kind and numbers to those
contained in the intelligible world.