[Sidenote: There are few very bad or very good men; (although bad
arguments may be more numerous than bad men); the main point is that he
who has been often deceived by either is apt to lose faith in them.]
And is not the feeling discreditable? Is it not obvious
that such an one having to deal with other men, was clearly
without any experience of human nature; for experience
would have taught him the true state of the case, that few are
the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in 90
the interval between them.
What do you mean? I said.
I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and
very small—that nothing is more uncommon than a very
large or very small man; and this applies generally to all
extremes, whether of great and small, or swift and slow, or
fair and foul, or black and white: and whether the instances
you select be men or dogs or anything else, few are the
extremes, but many are in the mean between them. Did you
never observe this?
Yes, I said, I have.
And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition
in evil, the worst would be found to be very few?
Yes, that is very likely, I said.
Yes, that is very likely, he replied; although in this
respect arguments are unlike men—there I was led on by
you to say more than I had intended; but the point of comparison
was, that when a simple man who has no skill in
dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards
imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then
another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and
great disputers, as you know, come to think at last that they
have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive
the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments,
or indeed, of all things, which, like the currents in the
Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ebb and
flow.
[Sidenote: _Avoid scepticism._]
That is quite true, I said.
Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and how melancholy, if there be
such a thing as truth or certainty or possibility of knowledge—that
a man should have lighted upon some argument or
other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be
false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of
wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to
transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general: and
for ever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose
truth and the knowledge of realities.
Yes, indeed, I said; that is very melancholy.
[Sidenote: Socrates, who is soon to die, has too much at stake on the
argument to be a fair judge. Simmias and Cebes must help him to consider
the matter impartially.]
Let us then, in the first place, he said, be careful of allowing
or of admitting into our souls the notion that there is no
health or soundness in any arguments at all. Rather say that
we have not yet attained to soundness in ourselves, and that
we must struggle manfully and do our best to gain health of
mind—you and all other men having regard to the whole of
your future life, and I myself in the prospect of death. For
at this moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of 91
a philosopher; like the vulgar, I am only a partisan. Now
the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing
about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince
his hearers of his own assertions. And the difference
between him and me at the present moment is merely this—that
whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he
says is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to
convince my hearers is a secondary matter with me. And
do but see how much I gain by the argument. For if what I
say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of the truth; but
if there be nothing after death, still, during the short time
that remains, I shall not distress my friends with lamentations,
and my ignorance will not last, but will die with me,
and therefore no harm will be done. This is the state of
mind, Simmias and Cebes, in which I approach the argument.
And I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of
Socrates: agree with me, if I seem to you to be speaking the
truth; or if not, withstand me might and main, that I may
not deceive you as well as myself in my enthusiasm, and like
the bee, leave my sting in you before I die.
[Sidenote: _Simmias and Cebes reassured and answered._]
[Sidenote: Simmias and Cebes are inclined to fear that the soul
may perish before the body, but they still hold to the doctrine of
reminiscence.]
And now let us proceed, he said. And first of all let me
be sure that I have in my mind what you were saying.
Simmias, if I remember rightly, has fears and misgivings
whether the soul, although a fairer and diviner thing than
the body, being as she is in the form of harmony, may not
perish first. On the other hand, Cebes appeared to grant
that the soul was more lasting than the body, but he said that
no one could know whether the soul, after having worn out
many bodies, might not perish herself and leave her last
body behind her; and that this is death, which is the
destruction not of the body but of the soul, for in the body
the work of destruction is ever going on. Are not these,
Simmias and Cebes, the points which we have to consider?
They both agreed to this statement of them.
He proceeded: And did you deny the force of the whole
preceding argument, or of a part only?
Of a part only, they replied.
And what did you think, he said, of that part of the
argument in which we said that knowledge was recollection,
and hence inferred that the soul must have previously
existed somewhere else before she was enclosed in the 92
body?
Cebes said that he had been wonderfully impressed by that
part of the argument, and that his conviction remained
absolutely unshaken. Simmias agreed, and added that he
himself could hardly imagine the possibility of his ever
thinking differently.
[Sidenote: The elements of harmony are prior to harmony, but the body is
not prior to the soul.]
But, rejoined Socrates, you will have to think differently,
my Theban friend, if you still maintain that harmony is a
compound, and that the soul is a harmony which is made out
of strings set in the frame of the body; for you will surely
never allow yourself to say that a harmony is prior to the
elements which compose it.
[Sidenote: _Harmony not prior to the elements of harmony._]
Never, Socrates.
But do you not see that this is what you imply when you
say that the soul existed before she took the form and body
of man, and was made up of elements which as yet had no
existence? For harmony is not like the soul, as you
suppose; but first the lyre, and the strings, and the sounds
exist in a state of discord, and then harmony is made last of
all, and perishes first. And how can such a notion of the
soul as this agree with the other?
Not at all, replied Simmias.
And yet, he said, there surely ought to be harmony in a
discourse of which harmony is the theme?
There ought, replied Simmias.
But there is no harmony, he said, in the two propositions
that knowledge is recollection, and that the soul is a harmony.
Which of them will you retain?
[Sidenote: Simmias acknowledges that his argument does not harmonize with
the proposition that knowledge is recollection.]
I think, he replied, that I have a much stronger faith,
Socrates, in the first of the two, which has been fully
demonstrated to me, than in the latter, which has not been
demonstrated at all, but rests only on probable and plausible
grounds; and is therefore believed by the many. I know
too well that these arguments from probabilities are impostors,
and unless great caution is observed in the use of
them, they are apt to be deceptive—in geometry, and in
other things too. But the doctrine of knowledge and recollection
has been proven to me on trustworthy grounds: and
the proof was that the soul must have existed before she
came into the body, because to her belongs the essence of
which the very name implies existence. Having, as I am
convinced, rightly accepted this conclusion, and on sufficient
grounds, I must, as I suppose, cease to argue or allow others
to argue that the soul is a harmony.
Let me put the matter, Simmias, he said, in another point
of view: Do you imagine that a harmony or any other 93
composition can be in a state other than that of the elements,
out of which it is compounded?
Certainly not.
Or do or suffer anything other than they do or suffer?
He agreed.
Then a harmony does not, properly speaking, lead the
parts or elements which make up the harmony, but only
follows them.
[Sidenote: _Harmony is an effect, not a cause._]
He assented.
For harmony cannot possibly have any motion, or sound,
or other quality which is opposed to its parts.
That would be impossible, he replied.
And does not the nature of every harmony depend upon
the manner in which the elements are harmonized?