6r (^ntntW Httiuetattg SItbrarg BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 DEC 1 1952 Cornell University Library BT 921.S49 The idea of immortality.The Gifford lect 3 1924 008 816 963 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924008816963 THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY Oxford University Press London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen New Tork » Toronto Meliourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY m)t Siffortr Hectutes DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH IN THE YEAR 1922 BY A. SETH PRINGLE-PATTISON LL.D., DC.L. ^ FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1922 J Y ArSiSI'^^ Printed in England TO THE EARL OF BALFOUR, K.G.,O.M. IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF THE OPPORTUNITY PROVIDED BY HIS FOUNDATION OF THE BALFOUR PHILOSOPHICAL LECTURESHIP NOW FORTY YEARS AGO AND OF THE LONG FRIENDSHIP THUS BEGUN PRE FACE These Lectures may be regarded as in some sense a sequel to those delivered on the Giflford Foundation in the University of Aberdeen and afterwards published as The Idea of God. The question with which they deal was touched upon there incidentally at several points, but more by waj;^ of implication than of direct argument. Perhaps these indications might have been taken as suffi- cient ; for a writer's conclusions on such a subject are the natural outcome of his general philosophical position, and specific argument about immortality has not been notably successful or profitable in the past. But the place and destiny of the finite individual became the subject of an animated discussion, starting from certain statements in The Idea of God, in a Symposium of the Aristotelian Society held in the summer of 1918. And when Principal Jacks conveyed to me in 1920 an invitation from the Hibbert Trustees to deliver a short course of lectures in Oxford, and intimated at the same time a strong desire that I should take Immortality as my subject, it seemed almost incumbent upon me to endeavour to meet the wish thus expressed. The six lectures delivered in Manchester • College in the Lent Term of 1921 have been refashioned and elaborated, with considerable additions, to form the present course. I have to thank the Hibbert Trustees for their courtesy in leaving me perfectly free to use the material of my Oxford lectures for this further purpose. It would have been impossible for me otherwise to accept their invitation, and the pleasure of lecturing in Oxford and of meeting students and teachers there is one which I would not willingly have missed. viii PREFACE To my former colleagues in the University of Edinburgh, who so unexpectedly appointed me Gifford Lecturer in my old University, I can but tender my grateful thanks for the spirit which prompted their action. As I had already held the corresponding Lectureship in the Univer- sity of Aberdeen, the offer took me completely by surprise. I considered that I had already enjoyed the opportunity which such a position confers. But the generous con- fidence which the invitation implied made it difficult, if not impossible, to refuse, and was in itself an incitement to further study and reflection. The present volume represents the first series of lec- tures, delivered during the academic year 1921-3. It does not claim for a moment to exhaust a subject to which the avenues of approach are so many and so varied; but the survey taken and the line of argument followed reach in the course of these ten lectures their natural conclusion. Hence it has seemed to me most appropriate to publish this series by itself, without waiting for the second, still to be delivered, in which I hope to discuss some other funda- mental religious ideas. In preparing the lectures for the press I have been much indebted to my brother, Professor James Seth, to Mr. H. F. Hallett, my former Assistant, now Lecturer in the University of Leeds, and, not least, to Mr. J. B. Capper, my oldest friend. I take this opportunity of thanking them for the care they have bestowed upon the proofs and for many valuable suggestions which have often enabled me to clarify the argument and to improve its form. Edinburgh, October 1922. CONTENTS LECTURE I PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF THE SOUL AND THE AFTER-LIFE PAGE The universality of the belief in some future life . . . . i The argument from universality not conclusive .... 2 The crudeness of its early expressions does not prove a belief to be false 4 Primitive idea of death as an unnatural intrusion .... 5 Body and soul in animistic philosophy 7 Ideas of the spirit-land 10 Theories of continuance v. theories of retribution ... 13 Development of the belief dependent on its ethical and religious significance 14 LECTURE II THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS: A PARALLEL DEVELOPMENT Non-ethical character of the Hebrew Sheol 15 The individual and the nation 17 Belief in personal immortality late in appearance and based on experience of communion with God 18 The Homeric Hades 20 The sepulchral reliefs and inscriptions of classical Greece . . 22 The cult of Dionysus and the mystical identification of the worshipper with the god 23 Orphic doctrine of the origin and destiny of the soul ... 25 Orphic influence on later religious thought and practice . . 28 LECTURE III PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY IN PLATO Theprimacy of the soul throughout the Platonic Dialogues . 33 Its pre-existence and heavenly origin 35 The world of Ideas or Forms 38 The ' eternal ' or ' divine ' life of reason 39 X CONTENTS How much of the soul survives the death of the body ? Specific arguments for immortality ' All knowledge is recollection ' . . . . The argument though philosophically valuable fails individual pre-existence Function of the Myth in Plato's teaching The disinterestedness and self-sufficingness of virtue Practical character of religious truth The mystic and ascetic element in the Phaedo Serenity of Plato's general outlook to prove PAGE 44 46 48 51 54 57 59 60 LECTURE IV MIND AND BODY The contrast between Plato and Aristotle 62 Aristotle's start from the biological facts 63 The soul as the ' entelechy ' or ' fulfilment ' of the body . . 65 The distinction between the ' Active ' and the ' Passive ' Reason 66 The Scholastic doctrine of ' the rational soul ' .... 69 The soul as an immaterial or spiritual substance .... 72 Its unity and simplicity the guarantee of its immortahty . . 73 The futility of such soul-substances in the explanation of our conscious life 75 Lotze's critical revision of the traditional conception of substance 77 The soul conceived as a unitary being in which physical move- ments by their impact produce effects 82 LECTURE V MIND AND BODY (continued) Resultant theories of the relation of mind and body : (i) Crude Materialism 83 (2) Epiphenomenalism or conscious automatism .... 84 (3) Psycho-physical Parallelism 86 The underlying presupposition of all such theories is their conception of the body as a pure machine .... 88 The living body as the embodied soul 91 The organism an analogue of the kind of unity characteristic of the self-conscious being 92 False ideal of the unchanging unit .... -93 Hume's criticism of such a self unanswerable .... 96 William James's view of the passing thought as the only thinker 98 CONTENTS xi PAGE The systematic unity of the mind 99 AH conscious experience presupposes an individual subject . loi Resultant conception of the spiritual self .... 104 LECTURE VI REINCARNATION AND KARMA Transmigration in primitive thought 106 The doctrine of Karma as a vindication of cosmic justice . . 109 Illusory character of the identity between the successive individuals 113 The theory not based on the real facts of moral causation . .117 An ethical postulate, not a scientific law 1 18 Misconceptions of the real nature of the theory .... 121 Dr. McTaggart's ' metaphysical argument ' forpre-existence and immortality 123 The assumption of a fixed number of souls 127 LECTURE VII ETERNAL LIFE Conflict of human sentiment with regard to a future life . . 131 Horror of the endless progress 133 Eternal life as a present experience 135 Modes of its reaUzation : intellectual, aesthetic, and religious . 136 Eternal life in New Testament usage 139 Jesus and St. Paul 141 The Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles .... 144 The Buddhist Nirvana 145 LECTURE VIII ETERNAL LIFE AND PERSONAL IMMORTALITY Is ' eternal life ' in the present offered in place of a further life after death ? 148 History of Spinoza's views on immortality 149 Professor Bosanquet's attitude : ' moralism v. religion ' . . 153 The significance of spiritual growth 155 Absolutism and the individual 156 Absorption in the object : the higher and the lower mysticism . 159 The idea of reabsorption based on physical analogies . . . 162 Some believers in a future fife still contemplate reabsorption as a final consummation 164 xii CONTENTS LECTURE IX SOME ARGUMENTS REVIEWED PAGE The meaning of the ' substantiality ' of the soul again considered i68 Butler's argument from the moral government of the world . 171 Retributive punishment 173 Kant and Sidgvvick on the correlation of virtue and happiness . 176 The discrepancy between individual and social good . . . 178 Is belief in immortality an indispensable condition of moral conduct and of religious faith ? 181 Tennyson and Epictetus contrasted 184 The Stoic and the Christian mood 186 LECTURE X CONCLUSIONS The fundamental argument is from the divine perfection . . 190 The argument from desire insecure so long as desire remains selfish 192 The objectivity of our ideals 193 Immortality neither a natural possession nor a talismanic gift . 195 ' Those who in their lifetime were never alive ' . . . . 197 Hume's negative conclusion depends on his arbitrary restriction of the meaning of ' reason' 198 The idea of universal restoration 202 Two contrasted attitudes towards death and the after-life . . 206 LECTURE I PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF THE SOUL AND THE AFTER-LIFE. The universality of a belief is no sufficient guarantee of its truth. Yet there is undeniably something very impres- sive in the unanimity with which man, from the first dim beginnings of his planetary history, has refused to see in death the end of his being and activities. 'The grassy barrows' scattered over our moors and uplands bear eloquent, if pathetic and often gruesome, testimony to the undoubting faith of those who laid their dead there. In a still remoter past, the cave-men of the Palaeolithic age, more than 20,000 years ago, laid their dead reverently to rest with the same belief in a further life. Explorations in France, in the caves of the Dordogne, within the last twenty j'ears, have brought to light a number of instances of such ceremonial interment, exhibiting the excavated grave, the carefully disposed skeleton with offerings of food and implements laid beside the body for use in the life beyond.^ It was the same ancient hunters, of a somewhat later period, who have left us on the walls or roofs of their cave-dwellings, or carved on the bone and ivory of their implements, studies of animals singly or in groups, so convincing in their reality and so masterly in their technique, that critics entitled to judge have declared, these paintings in the caves of France and Spain to be superior in artistic sense and execution to all but the best modern pictures of similar subjects. Thus, from the ' SoUas, Ancient Hunters, p. l8i. 2562 B 2 PRIMITIVE TDEAS lect. beginning, in these two ways— by the perception of beauty evinced in his artistic mastery of line and colour on the one hand, and, on the other, by his outlook be- yond this visible scene — man, that strange animal, seems to be lifted above his kindred in ways which it is easier to appreciate than to explain. His life is in another dimension than theirs. The sense of immortality, Words- worth remarks in his ' Essay on Epitaphs ', if not a co-existent and twin-birth with Reason, is among the earliest of her offspring. - And indeed the very custom of reverent burial, unknown to any other species, and the feelings which prompt us ' to look upon the dust of man with awe'^ may quite properly be regarded as an index of the endowment which, despite man's animal ancestry and his gradual emergence from a brutish state, puts, in Locke's words, ' a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes',^ and makes him an historical being and a creature capable of religion. Nevertheless, as I said at the outset, the universality of a belief cannot be regarded as a sufficient guarantee of its truth, and the argument from the consensus gentium has always suffered from the difficulty of defining in what the consensus consists. Hence, when the argument is put forward in support of the existence of God—perhaps its most common application — we find ourselves confronted by recurring debates between eminent authorities as to the existence or non-existence of 'tribes of atheists', races, that is to say, entirely without the conception of God and destitute of any properly religious ideas. Travellers and missionaries report in a positive or nega- tive sense according to the preconceived ideas they attach to the terms. It is easy enough to estabHsh the absence of religious ideas, if we identify religion with a clear Theistic belief in the moral government of the world, or ' Wordsworth, Excursion, Bk. V. ^ Essay, Bk. II. ii. lo. I THE CONSENSUS GENTIUM 3 draw some arbitrary distinction between 'superstition' and 'religion'. The immense extension of anthropo- logical research within the last half-century, introducing us, as never before, into the workings of the primitive mind, has at least put an end to such profitless disputes. But, on the other hand, the complicated irrationality and absurdity of the beliefs which it reveals as the basis of the earliest rites and practices which can be termed religious, easily suggest the conclusion that whatever springs from such a root must be infected with similar de- lusions and can bear little relation to the nature of things. However religion may be transformed in the course of its history, the circumstances of its origin and the nature of its earliest associations and accompaniments seem to many minds to make it incurably suspect. Yet Sir James Frazer, who, more perhaps than any other man, has flooded us with records of the irrationalities and immorali- ties of primitive cults and beliefs, can write thus in the Preface to Psyche's Task : ' Man is a very curious animal, and the more we know of his habits, the more curious does he appear. He may be the most rational of the beasts, but certainly he is the most absurd. . . . Yet the odd thing is that in spite of, and perhaps in virtue of, his absurdities man moves steadily upwards. . . . From false premises he often arrives at sound conclusions; from a chimerical theory he deduces a salutary practice.' The book in question, he says, is intended to illustrate ' a few of the ways in which folly mysteriously deviates into wisdom, and good comes out of evil. If the colours are dark they are yet illuminated by a ray of consolation and hope.' Such a passage is, in effect, an acknowledgement, in a quarter from which one might hardly have expected it, of what philosophers have called the unconscious reason operative in human history, guiding men to issues beyond the scope of their immediate purpose or the B 2 4 PRIMITIVE IDEAS lect. compass of their conscious reflection. It is the salutary warning, Respice finem, await the issue. It is a radical fallacy in philosophical method to seek to ' explain ' any phenomenon, and to rob it of its significance, by identifying it with its first crude beginning, the first gross and fantastic ceremonies in which historical research can detect its presence. It is only in the light of what it grows to, that we can interpret the germ. Historical beginnings are interesting or important only in virtue of their continuity with the later and more adequate expres- sions of the principle which they dimly exemplify. This warning is very necessary in connexion with the belief in immortality. ' Among savage races ', says Sir James Frazer, 'a life after death is not a matter of speculation and conjecture, of hope and fear; it is a practical certainty which the individual as little dreams of doubting as he doubts the reality of his conscious existence. He assumes it without inquiry and acts upon it without hesitation, as if it were one of the best ascer- tained truths within the limits of human experience.'^ But few would , now endorse Lessing's view that ' the first and oldest opinion is, in matters of speculation, always the most probable, because common sense imme- diately hit upon it'.^ Rather do the primitive illusions and superstitions in which- the idea of the soul and its separate existence first took shape seem to many minds to invalidate all later forms of the same idea. No con- clusion, however, could be more fallacious. The roots of a belief may be deeper than the associations which suggested it or the flimsy arguments at first advanced in its support. These are soon discarded or forgotten, but the progress of thought consists in penetrating to the true ^ Belief in Immortality, p. 468. ^ Note to the tract, Dass mehr als ftinf Sinne fiir den Menschen sein kbnnen. I MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH 5 grounds on which the belief rests, and, in the process, recasting the belief itself. What, then, is the actual nature of the primitive beUef in an after-life which we find so universally diffused? Its main features have been made familiar to us by the anthropologists: Many savage tribes, it has been shown, not only believe in a life after death : they believe in the natural immortality of man in his present state of existence. The unconscious logic of their belief appears to be that whatever lives will go on living indefinitely, unless brought to a violent end by the blow of an enemy or the even more dangerous arts of the sorcerer. Knowing nothing of the physical conditions of life— the organic cycle of growth and decay which links birth and death together as equally natural incidents in a single process — they look upon death as a wholly unnatural intrusion. They have not framed the conception of what we call a ' natural ' death. At the lowest stage they do not even recognize disease as a cause of death, or at least they treat it, not as a natural visita- tion, but as due to witchcraft. For them every death is therefore a violent death, an interference with the course of nature. ' No great man ', says an observer of the Melanesian natives, 'would like to be told that he was ill by natural weakness or decay ' : ^ it would be an affront to his dignity. It is consonant with this view of natural or inherent immortality that, at a certain stage of culture, we find a variety of myths current to explain the origin of death — that is to say, how death got a footing in the world at all. Some of these stories connect themselves with the phe- nomenon of the waxing and the waning moon. In the happier 'long ago', it is sometimes said, death was un- known or rather it was a short sleep. Men died on the last day of the waning moon and came to life again three ^ Quoted by Frazer, op. cit., p. 55. 6 PRIMITIVE IDEAS lect. days after, on the first appearance of the new moon, as if they had awakened from a refreshing slumber. But an evil spirit somehow contrived that when men slept the sleep of death they should wake no more. Another type of story is based on the biological fact that certain animals, such as serpents and lizards, periodically shed their skins, and appear therefore to the savage observer to enjoy a natural immortality. If man could only cast his old skin once a year — the reasoning proceeds — he too would renew his life perennially like the serpent. And this was the destiny originally intended for the human race by a beneficent creator. It was his will that man should live, and that the serpents, whom he hated, should die. But his message conveying the secret of immortality was perverted by the stupidity or malice of the messenger to whom it was entrusted ; and that is why all creatures are now subject to death, except the serpent, who, when he is old, casts his skin and so lives for ever. The feather- brained messenger who turns the message upside down, or the messenger who lingers to refresh himself by the way, and so allows himself to be forestalled by his fellow who delivers the message in a precisely contrary sense, is a frequent figure in these stories.^ For another type of such explanatory tales we need not go farther than the Hebrew story Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe. But, to whatever cause the liability to die may be attributed, the fact of death inevitably comes to be regarded as part of the ordinance of nature. The primi- tive belief in the persistence of life is not affected, however, by this acquiescence. This is rendered possible by the ' Cf. Frazer, op. cit., Lecture III, Myths of the Origin of Death. I ANIMISTIC PHILOSOPHY 7 ' animism ' which is a prevailing characteristic of primitive thought. Although he is far from being able to conceive an immaterial or purely spiritual being, primitive man is still farther from being a materialist in the philosophical meaning of the term— in the sense, namely, of explaining everything that happens as the result of purely physical causes and laws. On the contrary, the distinction between body and soul is the first product* of his reflection and forms the starting-point of all his explanations of natural phenomena. To us, with our modern scientific ideas, it seems supremely irrational to attribute natural events to the personal agency of a swarming multitude of spirits or ghosts; but for the savage such a theory is really an effort to rationalize, to give a causal explanation of the pell-mell of occurrences which constitutes his daily experience. It is the earliest system of natural philosophy. And there is nothing surprising in the fact that man took his first idea of cause from the only form of agency with which he was directly acquainted, his own acts of will. Familiar sequences do not ordinarily arouse attention : they do not seem to call for explanation. To that extent something like the reign of law in the modern scientific sense is no doubt tacitly presupposed, within certain limits, even in the most rudimentary savage con- ception of the world and the course of events. But every- thing out of the way that happens to him, ' every stumble over a stone,' as Tylor says, ' every odd sound or feeling, every time he loses his way in the woods', is attributed to the agency of friendly, or more frequently unfriendly, spirits.^ ; The notion of soul or ghost or spirit was thus first framed by primitive man as an explanation of certain features of his experience ; and there is no reason to ' Anthropology, p. 356. Cf. D'Alviella's article on Animism in Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. 8 PRIMITIVE IDEAS lect. question the importance attached by anthropologists to the phenomena of sleep and dreams in this connexion. In sleep the body lies like a log without sense or motion ; the principle of life and movement appears to be absent. On awaking, the man recalls the dreams he has had in the interval ; he has travelled great distances and met people known to him whom he has not seen for many a day, friends who have gone to some other district or who perhaps are dead. As the body has remained all the time motionless in the same place — a fact to which others can testify — his natural conclusion is that these expeditions have been undertaken by a second self or double, which can leave the body and return to it again. All men and animals have such doubles or souls, which behave in the same way ; and when figures appear to him in dreams in his own home-surroundings, our primitive dreamer con- cludes that the souls of distant or dead friends have actually come to visit him while he slept. And inasmuch as the figures seen in dreams, whether of the living or of the dead, appear in the garb and accoutrements familiar to our waking experience, the savage unhesitatingly endows even inanimate things with similar phantasmal souls. So, in Hamlet, ' the majesty of buried Denmark ' wears ' the very armour he had on, when he the ambitious Norway combated '. To primitive philosophy the armour possesses the same kind of reality as the ghost it encloses. And this accords with the burial customs of savages and barbarians. The garments and ornaments, the weapons and implements, that are laid in the tomb or burnt upon the funeral pyre are not themselves supposed to be carried by the dead into the life beyond. Their bodies are buried or burnt like his ; it is their shadow-souls which the phantom wears or wields in the spirit-land.^ The savage ' The fact that the buried implements have often been deliberately broken points to the same conclusion. I BODY AND SOUL 9 philosophy is on this point quite consistent. The same thing apphes to the food provided for the dead : it is not actually but spiritually partaken of. A Jesuit Father, writing in the seventeenth century, tells us that the missionaries in Cochin China, who tried to convince the natives of the irrationality of their practice of providing sumptuous banquets several times a year for the dead, were met by ridicule of their ignorance. Translating the philosophical distinctions of the natives into his own scholastic terminology, the Father concludes hopefully that 'it may be judged from the distinctions they make between the accidents and the substance of the food they prepare for the dead, that it will not be very difficult to prove to them the mystery of the Eucharist '.^ The pi^mitive idea of the soul makes it thus ' an ethereal image of the body '.^ The resemblance is supposed to be complete, wounds and mutilations of the body being repro- duced in its shadowy counterpart. ' The Australian who has slain his enemy will cut off the right thumb of the corpse, so that, although the spirit will become a hostile ghost, it cannot throw with its mutilated hand the shadowy spear, and may be safely left to wander, malignant but harmless.'* The soul is ethereal, tenuous or filmy in consistence, and possesses the power of flashing quickly from place to place ; but many customs, such as that In the case of the Romans, the third great nation mentioned above, it sufficed also during many centuries of their national existence. It is a significant fact, curious to realize, that there is no singular of the word ' Manes '. ' The spirit of a dead Roman ', says Dr. Warde Fowler, ' was not thought of as definitely individualized ; it joined the whole mass of the Manes in some dimly conceived abode beneath the earth. It is only in the third century B. C. that we first meet with memorial tombstones to individuals, like those of the Scipios, and not till the end of the Republican period that we find the words ' Di Manes ' representing in any sense the spirit of the individual departed.' {Religious Experience of the Roman People, p. 341.) i8 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS lect. deepened under the chastening experiences of the Exile, and just in proportion to the intensity with which the exiles clung to Jahveh was the greatness of their sense of loss in being cut off at death from his presence. At the same time, through the teaching of the Prophets, the Jewish religion became transformed into a pure Mono- theism : the god in whose righteousness Israel had trusted was now recognized by them as the God of the whole earth, using the nations of the world for his own purposes. All local limitations being thus removed, it became impos- sible to believe that even death could sever the bond that united Jahveh and his faithful worshipper. The dawning of this new confidence may be traced in a few of the Psalms, and there are glimpses of it in the agonized wrest- lings of Job. ' The fool and the brutish person perish ', writes one of the Psalmists, ' they are appointed as a flock for Sheol. But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol : for he shall receive me.' ^ And in the 73rd Psalm a still fuller note is struck. The writer has been wrestling, he tells us, with the problem of the insolent prosperity of the wicked, and it had gone near to undermine his faith in a righteous God. ' Verily [he had been inclined to say], verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning.' But he rises above his doubt, and above the very idea of material reward ; and the fresh ex- perience of the divine fello^yship, after his temporary doubt and estrangement, inspires an outburst of confident hope : ' Nevertheless, I am continually with thee : thou hast holden me by my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth : but God is the strength of, my heart, and my portion for ever.' No- * Ps. xlix. 10, 14, IS ; Cf. also Pss. xvi and xvii. II DAWN OF A MORE VITAL BELIEF 19 where in the Old Testament do we find a clear and definite doctrine of immortality. If we think we do in certain passages, it is because we read our own ideas into the language. All that we find is scattered anticipations, vati- cinations of the heart, as in this Psalm and a few others. But the importance of these isolated passages is that they indicate the path along which a fuller and more assured belief was eventually reached. They are all inspired by the idea of God as the supreme reality, and the possibility of communion with Him. In his own experience of com- munion with God, the author of the 73rd Psalm intimates, he has already tasted eternal life. He has been in touch with that from which nothing hereafter can separate him, so that with God his future is secure. It is the nature of his present experience which is the ground of his 'for ever'. Through union with that which is eternal he is himself lifted out of the flux of time.^ We may find in the sequel that this is the only fruitful way of approaching the question of immortahty. It has at least a remarkable parallel in the religious thought of Greece. Amid an extraordinary divergence in the form and the accompaniments of its manifestation, the first religiously based belief in immortality is reached there along a similar path. The Greek Hades in its main features closely resembles the Hebrew Sheol. It is ' Baron von Hiigel has stated the point admirably in his recently published Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion : ' The soul, qua religious, has no interest in just simple unending existence, of no matter what kind or of a merely natural kind. The specifically religious desire of Immortality begins, not with Immortality, but with God. The religious soul does not seek, find, or assume its own Immortality; and thereupon seek, find, or assume God. But it seeks, finds, experiences, and loves God ; and because of God, and of this, its very real though still imperfect intercourse with God ... it finds, rather than seeks. Immortality of a certain kind. The very slow growth of the belief in Immortality among the Jews . . . was entirely thus — not from Immortality of no matter what kind to God, but from God to a special kind of Immortality ' (p. 197). >. C 2 20 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS lect. also the common abode of the departed without regard to moral distinctions. According to the official religious tradition of Greece, a few great criminals, those, namely, who had been guilty of offences against the Olympians, are punished in Tartarus, while a few heroes who were personally related to the gods, by descent or marriage, such as Achilles, .Menelaus, Heracles, and others, were translated bodily to the Islands of the Blest in the western sea. But the rest of mankind, heroic or unheroic, good and bad, trod the same path to the gloomy realms of Hades and Persephone. The soul here also is the ghostly double of the living man ; but, as among the Jews, it is no longer conceived as retaining the faculties which would enable it to carry on in ghostly fashion the functions of the present life. The ' strengthless heads of the dead ', as Homer calls them, are witless and feeble things. They have no consciousness or will in the ordinary sense of the word; for these have their seat in the body — in the midriff and the heart — and they perish with the body. Tiresias, in Odysseus's Descent to Hades, is the only exception : ' To him Persephone hath given judgement, even in death, that he alone should have understanding, but the other souls sweep shadow- like around.' They flock together, ' hke bats ' we are told, with a strange twittering or gibbering noise, incapable either of bliss or woe. The mother of Odysseus gazes vacantly on her own son. Consciousness returns to the phantoms only when they have drunk the sacrificial blood. Among both the Greeks and the Hebrews, this view of the soul's existence after death appears to be the result of closer psychological reflection on the nature of mental processes and their connexion with bodily functions. The Hebrews arrived at a triple distinction between body, soul, and spirit. Man as we know him in life and action is ' a living soul ', and his soul-life is the result of his com- II THE HOMERIC HADES 21 posite nature as body and spirit, the body being animated by the divine breath, as it is in the Creation story. That being so, the soul or life is extinguished by the separation of body and spirit at death ; and the natural consequence is that drawn by the author of Ecclesiastes : ' the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit [the impersonal breath] returns unto God who gave it.' But the tradition of the primitive ghost-soul was too strong to permit this conclusion to be drawn by popular thought ; and accord- ingly we have the strictly inconsistent conception of ' dead souls ', phantoms peopling Sheol but devoid of anything that could be called life or consciousness. In Homer the terminology is different, but the result is the same. The Psyche in the Homeric poems has nothing to do with the conscious life while it is in the body, that being con- nected, as we have seen, with certain bodily organs and functions. It is, one might say, a superfluity in the Homeric psychology of the living man, and maintains itself simply as a relic or 'survival' of the primitive ghostly double. We hear nothing about it till the moment of its leaving the body, when it appears to be identified with the expiring breath, the ' ghost ' which is given up.^ In the case both of Sheol and of. Hades, therefore, the so-called existence of the shades is more a form of words than a reality. It contains no element of value that men should look forward to it. The well-known words which the poet puts into the mouth of Achilles indicate suffi- ciently the Greek attitude towards this after-life ; ^ and, as for the Hebrews, we have seen the horror of revulsion which it breeds in the mind of Job. Along this line, ' Cf. Professor Burnet's British Academy paper. The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, p. 14. "^ 'Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death, O great Odysseus. Rather would I live on ground as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that be departed.' Od. xi. 48S-91. 22 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS lect. therefore, there could be no advance towards a religious doctrine of immortality. The effect of the official faith in Greece was to make the idea of a future life entirely inoperative. As far as possible men put it out of their thoughts, resigning themselves deliberately, either in a mood of quasi-religious submission or in the lighter spirit of a carpe diem philosophy, to the narrow compass of the human lot, and endeavouring to snatch what satisfac- tion they could from the brighter aspects of the present life. This temper ot mind is reflected in the sepulchral reliefs and inscriptions of classical Greece. The passage in Goethe's Italienische Reise is well known, in which he describes the impression made upon him by those he saw at Verona. ' Here is no knight in harness, on his knees, awaiting a joyful resurrection. The artist has, with more or less skill, presented to us only the persons themselves, and so made their existence lasting and perpetual. They fold not their hands, gaze not into heaven ; they are on earth, what they were and what they are. They stand side by side, take interest in one another, love one another ; and that is what is in the stone, even though somewhat unskilfully, yet most pleasingly depicted.' So, after all that has been brought to light since Goethe's day. Dr. Farnell tells us that, apart from the tomb reliefs connected with actual hero-worship, ' the other grave scenes are usually reticent concerning the faith of the living. The greatest of all this class of monuments, the Attic grave-reliefs of the fifth and fourth centuries, . . . do not attempt, or scarcely at all attempt, to show the life of the after-world, but rather scenes of the grace and loving-kindness of the earthly family life.' Similarly, ' until the middle of the fifth century was passed, the writing on the graves is entirely silent concerning a post- humous existence. The dead person speaks only of this II GREEK SEPULCHRAL RELIEFS 23 life, his city, his family, clan or children, and often of his own achievement, with pride or with love.,. . . The yield of grave-epitaphs from the fourth and third centuries b.c. is still comparatively scanty, and still fewer are those that convey any ardent hopes or positive conviction concerning the future world. . . . The greater number by far of those that express any eschatologic theory or hope at all belong to the later periods of Paganism.'^ But although this was the natural result of the official faith, the more primitive practices connected with the tendance of the dead persisted widely in ancient Greece,*^ and kept alive a simpler spirit of natural piety. The desire for a real existence beyond the grave had not been quenched. Few surroundings might seem less promising for the growth of a deeper sense of the future life than the mad- ness into which the Maenads worked themselves, dancing in wild procession through the mountains at midnight, in strange garb, with blazing pine-torches, shrill music, and strange cries, till their frenzy culminated in tearing a living victim limb from limb and partaking of the warm flesh and blood. Yet this Phrygio-Thracian cult of Dionysus, which swept over Greece in post-Homeric times, inspired Euripides with the magnificent lyrics of the Bacchae and gave us one of Sophocles's finest odes ; and there is general agreement among scholars and anthropologists that just in this wild ' enthusiasm ' or possession by the god, this 'ecstasy' in which the individual seems to pass out of himself and feel himself one with the god whose rites he is celebrating, lay the germ of a new con- ception of the soul and its destiny.^./ ' Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality, pp. 394-9. ^ For example, the family meals offered to the dead, at which the departed was regarded either as the host or as an invited guest. So also the Athenian All Souls' Day, which terminated the festival of the Anthe- steria. Cf. Farnell, op. cit., chap, xii, 'The Cult of Ancestors', pp. 345,. 352- 24 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS lect. The fundamental principle of the Olympian religion, as we may call the popular faith of Greece, was the gulf fixed between gods and men, between the 'immortals', as the former are currently designated, and mortal men. ' Mortal things befit a mortal,' says Pindar ; ' mortal thou art, cherish only mortal aspirations.' So again, ' Strive not thou to become a god.' ' It behoveth to seek from the gods things meet for mortals, knowing the things at our feet and to what lot we are born. Desire not, thou soul of mine, life of the immortals, but drink thy fill of what thou hast and what thou canst.' Such passages give the keynote of the old Greek ethics and rehgion, rooted as they are in ' willing resignation to the limitation of human capacity and of human claims to happiness and power, all as essentially different frorq the life and lot of the world of the gods'.^ The attempt on the part of mortals to overpass these limits is the offence which most surely calls down upon itself the vengeance of the gods. But in the orgiastic.worship of which we have been speaking all this is changed. The underlying idea, the whole aim of the ritual, is the identification of the worshipper with the god ; and this is achieved in the moments of divine madness or ecstasy in which he seems literally 'out of himself, a partaker for the time of the eternal being of the god whose history is mystically rehearsed in the ritual. Reflection on this ecstatic mystical experience suggests a very different view of the relation of soul and body from that of hitherto current belief. That which is capable of union with the god must be itself of divine origin, and may be expected to pass after death to its native sphere. This is the central idea of the Orphic religious brotherhoods, whose mysteries became such a powerful factor in Greek life and thought in the sixth century b.c. ' Rohde, Psyche, ii. 2. II DIONYSUS AND ORPHEUS 25 The figure of Orpheus himself is enveloped m myth and legend, but the main fact of his connexion with the worship of Dionysus seems placed beyond reasonable doubt by the legend of his tragic death at the hands of the Thracian Maenads, however we may interpret the details of the story.^ Certain it is that Orphism adopts what we have found to be the fundamental idea of the Dionysiac enthusiasts, and draws conclusions from it which have profoundly influenced subsequent philosophy and religion. And the point I set out to emphasize was that here, as in the case of the Hebrews, when the idea of immortality in any living sense emerges, it is based on a unique experience. The Dionysiac setting seems remote enough from our ordinary conceptions of religious emotion, but it was at all events, for the participant, a supreme experience in which he felt his whole being as it were merged and consummated. The hope of im- mortahty accordingly did not mean for him simply a desire for the continuance of his ordinary day-to-day life and its activities, but rather the leaving of these behind for a fruition unimaginable save for the actual experience in question. The blessed life hereafter is the consequence or continuation of a communion with the god which the worshipper has already enjoyed. Central in Orphic religion, along with the belief in the essential divinity of the soul, is the idea of impurity, guilt or sin, as the explanation of its present state. The con- sciousness of sin, it has been remarked, is, on the whole, ' Miss Harrison, who treats him as an historical character, suggests that it may be a record of the resistance he met with from the original votaries of Dionysus in his efforts to soften and humanize their savage ritual. Others regard Orpheus here as a double of Dionysus himself, and Dr. Farnell concludes that the manner of his death may be taken as an example of the form of ritual so familiar to us in the Golden Bough, the kill- ing of the priest who temporarily incarnates the god (Ctdts of the Greek States, V. 106). 26 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS LEcXi singularly absent from the public religion of Greece.. ' In the Iliad or the Odyssey sin is always objectively regarded, being identified with the spirit of insolence or pride that seeks to transgress the golden law of modera- tion and encroach upon the rights of others, be it our fellow-creatures or the gods. It is an error of the intellect rather than of the will, for it springs from intellectual blindness or infatuation ; and the ultimate responsibility is usually laid at the door of the gods. In the Orphic religion, on the other hand, the subjective aspect of sin becomes more prominent. It is on account of defilement contracted in our pre-natal state that we are exiled from the society of Heaven; and the soul, while present in the body, is fully conscious of this fact. There is no attempt to shift the responsibility elsewhere; the guilt is our own and we must expiate it. " I have faced the penalty for deeds unjust," so speaks the soul when she has finished her pilgrimage, "and now I am come as a suppliant to noble Persephone, beseeching her to be gracious and to send me into the abodes of the pious ".' ^ The appeal of Orphic religion may be said to depend entirely on this sense of sin or impurity. Orphism taught a Fall of the soul from its first estate, and the whole object of the Mysteries and of the rules of hfe there laid down was to point out the way of salvation or release {\va-Ls). Aiovvaos Xva-ios was the helper invoked, and those who availed themselves of the proffered aid, and faithfully observed the system of purifications enjoined, were assured of final deliverance from the clogs of mortality and re- admission to the divine life from which they had fallen. It is to Orphism that we owe the play upon words familiar to us in Plato, a-mfia = a-fj/ia. The body is the tomb or prison-house of the soul: what we call life here is really the death of the soul, and the true life of the soul ' Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, p. in. n ORPHIC RELIGION 27 will be realized only when it is finally delivered from what St. Paul calls ' the body of this death '. Many of the Orphic precepts or rules, as they have filtered through to us, doubtless had in view merely ceremonial impurity or pollution. The taboo on eggs and beans, for example, was due to the fact that these formed part of the usual offerings to the chthonian deities, the gods and spirits of the underworld.^ But the spirit of Orphic religion passed beyond such ritual observances : the daioTTjs, the holiness or purity after which it strove, included ethical purity and the religious direction of the life as a whole. Deliverance will not come at the end of the present life : it is not so easy to escape from the cycle of births and deaths to which the soul is condemned by the impurity which clings to it. This inherited and acquired impurity must be expiated in successive incarnations, but deliverance is in the end attainable by the faithful soul. The golden tablets recently found in tombs in the south of Italy and in Crete are of singular interest as containing a clear expression of the cardinal doctrine of Orphic faith — the divine origin of the soul. Like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, they provide believers with careful instruc- tions as to the route of the soul through the under- world, the dangers to be avoided, and the formula in which they must address Persephone and her servants.^ ' On your left ', we read for example, ' you will find a stream, and near it is a white poplar. Go not near that stream : but you will find another, cool waters flowing from the lake of memory, and by it are guards. Say to them, " I am a child of earth and of starry Heaven, but my race is of Heaven alone. Ye know this well yourselves." . . . And, thus addressed, of themselves they will give thee to ' Rohde, Psyche, ii. 12. ^ A full account of these tablets will be found in Miss Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 28 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS lect. drink from the holy well-spring.' The avowal of origin constitutes the claim to drink of the cleansing water and is doubtless a fragment of some Orphic liturgy. In other tablets the soul presents itself before Persephone with a similar claim, and also as one who has been initiated into the Mysteries and has duly performed all their ritual of purification : ' Out of the pure I come, pure Queen of them below, . . . For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race. ... I have flown out of the sorrowful weary wheel I have paid the penalty of deeds unrighteous, and now 1 come a suppliant to holy Persephone, that of her grace she receive me to the seats of the hallowed.' And the answer comes : ' Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be god instead of mortal.'^ The influence of Orphic ideas of the origin and destiny of the soul appears in the poems of Pindar, in the first half of the fifth century b. c, as well as in the verses of the philosopher Empedocles. So far as the poetic machinery of Pindar's Odes is concerned, he draws entirely on the traditional legends of the gods and heroes. The poetry is splendid, but the theology and the moralizing are archaic and conventional, as in the passages which I have already quoted. But certain verses, which strike perhaps a more personal note, are obviously inspired by the Orphic faith. One fragment, for example, gives us the divine origin of the soul : ' While the body ol all men is subject to over-mastering death, an image of life remaineth alive, for it alone cometh from the gods ' ; - and in another, well known from Plato's quotation of it, he teaches the expiation of sin in the underworld and the return of the purified soul to a fresh term of earthly life.^ ' On ' Apulian ' vases, also found in Italy, there are representations of the dead in the company of gods and heroes. ' Fragment 131. ' Fragment 133, quoted by Plato in the Meno, 81. II ORPHIC IDEAS IN PINDAR 29 Still more explicitly, in a beautiful passage in the second Olympian Ode, he states the Orphic doctrine, which we find also in Plato, of a threefold probation, after which those who have kept their souls pure pass to the Islands of the Blest. ' Immediately after death the lawless spirits suffer punish- ment, and the sins committed in this realm of Zeus are judged by one who passeth sentence stern and inevitable ; while upon the good the sun shines evermore through equal nights and equal days, and they receive the boon of a life of lightened toil, not vexing the soil with the strength of their hands, no, nor the waters of the sea, to gain a scanty livelihood, but, in the presence of the honoured gods, all who were wont to rejoice in keeping their oaths share a life that knoweth no tears, while the others endure labour that none can look upon. And whosoever, while dwelling in either world, have thrice been courageous in keeping their souls pure from all deeds of wrong, pass by the highway of Zeus unto the tower of Kronos, where the ocean breezes blow around the Islands of the Blest, and golden flowers are blazing, some on the shore from radiant trees, while others the water feedeth ; and with garlands thereof they entwine their hands and their brows.' When the life immediately following the present is thus conceived as an intermediate state of reward or punishment, it is obvious that we have passed beyond primitive theories of mere continuance ; and accord- ingly the grey shadow-world of the old Greek Hades, where good and bad were indiscriminately gathered, divides at once of itself into two contrasted realms, the one a place of calm repose or pleasant recreation, the other a grim and terrible region of purgatorial pain. It is, in fact, the familiar contrast of heaven and hell ; only that in both cases we have to do with an intermediate state — the interval between one earth-life and another — not with a final state of bliss or woe. But the glowing images in which a poet like Pindar depicts 30 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS lect. the temporary Paradise are hardly to be distinguished from those in which he clothes the final consummation when the thrice-tested soul returns to its heavenly home.^ Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the more the Orphics elaborated the terrors of the other world, the more they opened the door to superstitious practices by which the ordinary man, without any thought of changing his life, without any true ethical purpose at all, sought to buy absolution for his sins and thereby evade their con- sequences. Plato, in a scathing passage of the Republic, describes the disreputable practices which Orphic doctrine was invoked to cover in his own day by 'quacks and soothsayers who flock to the rich man's doors and try to persuade him they have a power at command which they procure from heaven, and which enables them by sacrifices and incantations ... to make amends for any crime committed either by the individual himself or by his ancestors, and that, should he desire to do a mischief to any one, it can be done at a trifling expense, whether the object of his hostility be a just or an unjust man ; for they profess that by certain invocations and spells they can prevail upon the gods to do their bidding. . . . And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus, and Orpheus — which form their ritual — persuading not individuals merely, but whole cities also, that men may be absolved and purified from crimes, both while they are still alive and even after their decease, by means of certain sacrifices and pleasurable amusements which they call Mysteries : which deliver us from the torments of the other world, while the neglect of them is punished by an awful doom.' ^ But to identify the spirit of Orphism with the abuses of these unscrupulous practitioners in a later age would be no less unjust than to identify Christian doctrine with the promises of the mediaeval ' Cf. the beautiful Fragments 129, 130. ^ ^^^^^^/^-^^ 364-5. " II PLATONIC REFERENCES 31 pardoners and indulgence-sellers ; and it is matter of common knowledge how much Plato's own views of the origin and destiny of the soul owed to Orphic teaching, and how much of the imagery in which he bodied them forth was borrowed from Orphic sources. Nor does he .attempt for a moment to disguise these affinities. On. the contrary, on each occasion on which he introduces his doctrine of the Soul, he refers to the ' ancient ' or ' secret ' source of the idea.^ We have respectful tributes from other sources to the widespread influence of the Orphic teaching and its eleva- ting tendency. Orphic societies were established in Magna Graecia in the course of the sixth century, and must have spread to Attica and the western Greek world during the fifth and fourth centuries. In an oration delivered in the Athenian law-courts in the fourth century, Demosthenes (or some other leading orator) refers in reverential terms to Orpheus ' who has instituted for us the most holy mysteries and who declares that justice is seated by the throne of God watching all the actions of mankind '.^ These Bacchic- Orphic societies continued to be numerous and influential down to the last years of paganism under the Roman empire. Plutarch, at the close of the first century a. d., was himself one of the initiated. In a letter of consolation to his wife on the loss of their infant daughter, he consoles her with the hope of a future life, which as members of a Dionysiac brotherhood they had both been taught to cherish, and with the Orphic view that the soul of their dear one, having dwelt in her body for so short a period, had had less chance of contracting the stains of our mortality, and would therefore depart purer to a higher existence.^ The ' So, for example, in the Phaedo, 63 and 70, and at greater length in the Meno, 81, where the doctrine is introduced for the first time. ' Farnell, Greek Hero Ctdts and Ideas of Immortality, p. 387. ' Farnell, op. cit., p. 388. 32 THE HEBREWS AND THE GREEKS lect.ii general scope of the Orphic teaching, and the important place it holds in religious history, could not be better summed up than in the sentences with which Dr. Farnell concludes his latest, volume on Greek religion : ' It familiarized the world with the conception of the divine element in the human soul, with the kinship be- tween man and God. It quickened this sense by means of a mystic sacrament whereby man's life was tran- scendentally fused with God's. It raised the religious emotion to a pitch of ecstasy and rapture far above the Hellenic scale. It strongly marked the antagonism be- tween flesh and spirit and preached with insistence the doctrine of purit}^, a doctrine mainly ritualistic but contain- ing also the spiritual idea of the purity of the soul from the taint of sin. It divorced religion from the State, making it the pre-eminent concern of the individual soul and the brotherhood. Finally, its chief aim and scope was other- worldliness, its mission was the preaching of salvation, of an eschatology based on dogmas of posthumous retri- bution, purgatory and of a succession of lives through which the soul is tried ; and it promised immortal bliss obtainable through purity and the mysterious magic of a sacrament. Alien in origin, alien to the earlier spirit of Hellenism, and always working in the shadow — for none of the later influential schools of philosophy adopted it — it must be reckoned as one of the forces that prepared the way for the inauguration of a new era and a new faith.' LECTURE III PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY IN PLATO The Orphic conception of the origin and destiny of the soul ^ passes into the full light of philosophical discussion in the Platonic Dialogues ; and Plato's name is so irrevocably associated with the doctrine of immortality in philosophical and literary tradition, that we shall not easily find a better way of winding ourselves into the heart of the subject than by a consideration of his method of handling the question and the nature of his results. The first point to note in Plato is the emphatic primacy, as I may call it, attributed to the Psyche or soul in the dialogues, from the Apology onwards to the Laws. We have seen how, in Homeric and primitive thought generally, the Psyche appears as a shadowy double of ' The pre-existence of the soul and the doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation were also fundamental tenets of the religious brotherhood founded by Pythagoras in the south of Italy at the end of the sixth century, and were associated there also with the pursuit of purity by a variety of ascetic practices and ceremonial observances. The inspira- tion of Pythagoras may have been derived, as Professor Burnet thinks (Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato, p. 40), not from Dionysus and the Orphics, but from the religion of the Delian Apollo, which goes back to ' Aegean ' or ' Minoan ' times. Dr. Farnell, on the other hand, treats Pythagoras as ' the most powerful champion and apostle of Orphism ', and the Pythagorean clubs and secret societies as the ' militant order ' of the Orphic faith (Outline History of Greek Religion, pp. 83, 89). But the rela- tions between the two movements (if there were two distinct movements) are now obscured for us by the lapse of time. In the sequel, at all events, the Pythagorean brotherhood was no doubt open to Orphic influences operating in the same region, and the terms Orphic and Pythagorean came to be used almost synonymously. But the later Pythagoreans, it is to be noted, when they became a scientific school in the course of the fifth century, dropped altogether the religious and mystical side of their founder's teaching. 34 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. the bod}^ of which nothing is heard during the course of life. Now by Socrates and Plato the soul is recognized from the outset as a man's real self, the self at work in all his ordinary knowledge and actions.^ Hence to ' care for his soul', becomes man's chief concern. This was the message of Socrates to his fellow citizens, as he describes it in the Apology : ' I spend my whole time in going about persuading you all to give your best and chiefest care to the perfection of your souls, and not till you have done that, to that of your bodies or your wealth.' And if we turn to the Laws, Plato's last message to the world, we find the burden almost in so many words the same: ' Of all the things which a man has, next to the gods, his soul is the most divine and most truly his own . . . and in our opinion he ought to honour her as second only to the gods. . . . We must believe the legislator when he tells us that the soul is in all respects superior to the body, and that, even in life, whaf makes each one of us to be what we are is only the soul.' And in the context Plato deliberately inverts the traditional conception of the soul as the shadowy image of the bodily self ; it is the body, on the contrary, that is the eidolon or shadow of the soul. ' Therefore, when we are dead, the bodies of the dead are rightly said to be our shades or images; for the true and immortal being of each one of us, which is called the soul, goes on her way to other gods, that before them she may give an account.' ^ It is the same thought with which Socrates, at the close of the Phaedo, turns to reply to Crito's question, 'How shall we bury you?' ' "As you please," he answered ; " only you must catch me first and not let me escape you." And then he looked at us with a smile and said, "My friends, I cannot convince Crito that I am the Socrates who has been conversing with you and ' Cf. Burnet, The Socratic Doctnne of the Soul. " Laws, 959. Ill THE PRIMACY OF THE SOUL 35 arranging his arguments in order. He thinks that I am the body which he will presently see a corpse, and he asks how he is to bury me ".' ' If we ask ', says Jowett, ' what is that truth or principle which, towards the end of his life, seems to have absorbed Plato most, like the idea of good in the Republic, or of beauty in the Symposium, or of the unity of virtue in the Protagoras, we should answer, the priority of the soul to the body.' ^ It is almost as if, at the close of his long life, after all that splendid series of metaphysical efforts, he had fallen back on the primal simplicity of conviction with which he started. In the second place, we may note that the behef in the divinity of the soul of man and its consequent immor- tality always appears in Plato as a primary religious conviction, independent of the particular and often uncon- vincing arguments by which he supports it ; and, as we have already seen, in all his set expositions of the doctrine, he avails himself freely of Orphic expressions and imagery, which he himself warns us not to take too literally. The most brilhant account of the pre-existence and heavenly origin of the soul is given in the Phaedrus.^ ' The soul ', he begins, ' is immortal, because its very idea and essence is the self-moved or self-moving, that which is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides. A body which is moved from without is soulless, but that which is moved from within has a soul.' The movements of the heavenly bodies are due, he supposes, to indwelling souls or spirits, and hence their motions are eternal, as contrasted with those of inanimate things set in motion by other things, which have a beginning and an end. Besides these heavenly spirits, ' visible gods ', there are the souls destined to be the souls of mortal beings ' no longer so pure as before'. But nous or reason is an ingredient ' Dialogues of Plato, vol. v, p. 120 (2nd ed.). ^ Phaedrus, 245. D 2 36 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. in the constitution of all ; and therefore they enjoy origin- ally a bodiless existence in the heavenly region, admitted to the vision of eternal truth, beauty, and goodness — that heaven above the heavens which he celebrates in the Phaedrus} the virorld of pure Ideas or Forms, of which our world of time is the broken reflection. For the same reason — because of their rational nature — the souls all pass at first into the human form. Their second incarnation depends on the kind of life they have led in their first earthly period of probation, and each subsequent incarnation is similarly determined by the use made of the preceding life. But as to how these bodiless souls come to be im- prisoned in the body at all, we hardly get from Plato a consistent account. In the Phaedrus he explains it by carrying over into the pre-natal state (in the figure of a charioteer with two unequally yoked steeds) his well- known threefold division of the psychical life into the rational or ruling part, the spirited or courageous element (consisting of the more generous emotions, which are the natural allies of reason) and the lower element of desire and appetite. It is through yielding to this lower element that the soul ' loses her feathers ', her wings droop, and she sinks to earth.^ But this threefold division of mental func- tion is obviously (and necessarily) based upon observation andanalysisof our actual embodied life; and Plato elsewhere frankly attributes the disturbing influence of the appetites to the connexion of soul with body. Hence it is illegiti- mate to presuppose such influence before the union of the two. In this respect Plato's account of the Fall can hardly be considered more successful than other attempts to explain the origin of evil by translating a metaphysical or moral necessity into the narrative of an event which hap- pened once upon a time. Plato seems to have realized this himself, for elsewhere he states things differently. In the ' Phaedrus, 247. 2 246. Ill PLATO'S ESCHATOLOGY 37 Timaeus he represents soul and body as everywhere united throughout the created universe; and of human souls in particular he says, ' they were implanted in bodies by necessity '} The details of Plato's account of the future destiny of the soul, in which he gives a wide range to his imagina- tion, differ considerably in different dialogues. The features which occur in one form or another in all the narratives are the judgement after death, the intermediate state of rewards and purificatory punishments, and the return of the souls to earth in a human or animal form determined by the way in which they have conducted themselves in their previous incarnations. Those who appear to be incurable from the enormity of their sins are hurled down to Tartarus, whence they never come forth again. Those, on the other hand, who have been pre- eminent for hoHness in their lives and 'who have suffi- ciently purified themselves with philosophy ' are set free from the body altogether and ascend to the heavenly sphere from whence they came. But this is hardly to be accomplished in a single life. The soul of a philosopher, guileless and true, or the soul of a lover who is not without philosophy may attain deliverance at the end of 3,000 years, if thrice in succession they have chosen their lives aright ; but, for the majority, a cycle of 10,000 years must be com- pleted before, by the repeated experience of good and evil, they learn eventually to choose the good.^ Such, in outline, is Plato's eschatology, presented by him always in mythical form, not, therefore, as a demonstrated or exact philosophical conclusion, but as bodying forth certain important ethical and religious ideas. But we must not forget that Plato's theory of the soul formed part of, or at least had to be adjusted to, a very ' Timaeus, 42. ^ Phaedrus, 248-9. Cf. Pindar, as quoted above, p. 29. 38 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. definite and characteristic metaphysical theory of reahty. This metaphysical theory was the outcome of more than a century's speculation on Being and Becoming. In the doctrine of the Ideas or Forms Plato reached (for the first time in the history of thought) the conception of a mode of being which was eternal, not in the sense of persisting changelessly through time — like the motionless being of Parmenides, the 'mindless unmoving fixture' which he derides in the Sophisf^ — but in the sense of absolute time- lessness. Truths and ideas are not like things, which exist in space and persist through time ; they are eternal in the sense that they have no relation to time at all. The essential function of reason or thought, Plato argued, was the formation of general notions, ' proceeding from many particulars of sense to one conception of reason'.^ That, according to the Socratic teaching, was the path to defini- tion, and to true knowledge of the nature of the things. For the object of such knowledge is not a subjective abstraction in the mind of the knower. True knowledge implies a real object. The conception reveals to us, so to speak, the law of being of the things in question, their nature, the constitution which makes them what they are. This is surely an object, real in another and, Plato adds, in a higher sense than the particular sensible objects in which the * law ' or ' nature ' works. The objects of sense- perception are involved in a perpetual flux and they cannot, in strictness, be known as objects at all, save in so far as they exemplify some universal nature ; whereas reason discloses to us a world of reahty lifted out of the space-and-time element altogether. Up till Plato's day, however abstractly philosophers might describe what they took to be the ultimate reality, they had always conceived it in spatial and material terms. To whatever subsequent criticisms, therefore, Plato's theory may be ' Sophist, 249. 2 phaedrus, 249. Ill BEING AND BECOMING 39 open, it was undoubtedly an important philosophical advance to grasp the sense in which reality may be predicated of these bodiless essences— as he expresses it in his impassioned chant in the Phaedrus, ' the colourless and formless and intangible essence and only reality, visible to the mind alone who is lord of the soul.' Plato's philosophy is dominated by the contrast between this eternal world of intelligible reality and the quasi-real world of yej/eo-is or Becoming, with which we have to do in sense-perception and in the everyday conduct of our lives. The status of the soul is, in a manner, intermediate be- tween the two : it has relations to both worlds. As what we should call a concrete existent, it belongs to the world of ykviiTis or time; but in virtue of its rational nature, its ' kinship ' is with the Ideas.^ That is the condition of its coming to know them, and such knowledge is ' the proper food of every soul '} This kinship is in truth the divine Eros which inspires the philosophical quest of absolute beauty, perfect knowledge, and true virtue. It is the home-sickness ■ of the soul for its native country. But to say that the soul is akin to the Ideas is not to say that it is itself an Idea. Hence Plato intimates plainly enough that, although souls are immortal and indestructible in time, they are not ' eternal ' in the sense in which that is true of the Ideas.^ Yet, by feeding on her proper food, the soul may, as it were, appropriate this absolute content and make the true, the beautiful, and the good the habitual element in which she lives, becoming thus partaker of their eternal nature. ' He whose heart has been set on the love of learning and of true wisdom, and has chiefly exercised this part of himself, that man must without fail have thoughts that are immortal and divine, if he lay hold on truth : and so far as ' Phaedo, 79. "^ Phaedrus, 247. ' Laws, 904. 40 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. it lies in human nature to possess immortality [in this higher sense], he lacks nothing thereof.' ^ It is the same note which is struck in the famous passage towards the close of Aristotle's Ethics " where he exhorts us to put on the immortal as far as in us lies {k(f>' Saov hSix^rai dOava- TL^eLv). 'If, then, reason be divine, compared with man, the Hfe which consists in the exercise of reason will also be divine in comparison with human life. Nevertheless, instead of listening to those who advise us, as being men, to think human thoughts, as being mortal to think mortal things, it behoves us rather, as far as in us lies, to aim at immortality, to do everything to live in the exercise of the highest of our faculties. For, though it be but a small part ot us, yet in power and in value it far surpasses all the rest, and indeed this part would even seem to constitute our true self, since it is the sovereign and the better part.' Neither Plato nor Aristotle is thinking in these passages of a future state. What both have directly in view is an eternal or death- less life which can be lived by us here and now, the life of thought which makes us spectators of all time and all existence ('which apprehends things noble and divine', in Aristotle's words), and to which we can raise ourselves, at intervals at any rate, out of the flux of time with its passing interests and distractions. The realization of such a 'divine' life is regarded by both thinkers, it will be observed, as open only to ' philo- sophers ' ; and although that term has a larger sense in Plato and Aristotle than its English equivalent,^ it in- evitably excludes the mass of mankind. For them, Plato ' Timaetis, 90. = Nic. Eth., Bk. X, c. 7. '^ Cf. Plato's account of the characteristics of the true philosopher, Republic, Bk. VI. In the Phaedrus, 248, ' the philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature' are grouped together as 'those who have seen most of truth ', and distinguished from those who have seen truth in the second degree, represented by a righteous king or lordly warrior, and from the remaining seven grades of insight. Ill THE ETERNAL LIFE OF REASON 41 teaches, 'true opinion' and the customary virtue which is built on that foundation, must necessarily suffice : it is the function of a well-constituted state to promote the growth of such true opinions and the practices to which they naturally tend. So far as the practical result is concerned, Plato freely confesses that 'true opinion may be as good a guide to correct action as wisdom '} But the gulf between the two may be measured by the difference of status assigned to the ruling class in the Republic, the different scientific and philosophic education which they alone enjoy, and its final fruit in the vision of the Idea of the Good. The outlook of the other classes seems to be limited to 'their station and its duties'. And simi- larly, for Aristotle, the ' moral ' virtues,, as he calls them, those 'which are displayed in our relations towards one another ', are ' emphatically human affairs '.^ For Plato, it will be remembered, the same distinction operates as regards the blessed or divine life in the future. 'Those who have practised the popular and social virtues . . . which come from habit and practice without philosophy or reason, are happiest in the round of transmigration ; for it is probable that they return into a mild and social nature hke their own, such as that of bees or wasps or ants, or, it may be, into bodies of men, and that from them are made worthy citizens. But none except the philo- sopher or the lover of knowledge, who is wholly pure when he goes hence, is permitted to go to the race of the gods.' ^ Now, if it is only in virtue of his ' philosophy or reason' that the philosopher attains this blessed im- mortality, as distinguished from the survival which is the lot of every soul, the question readily suggests itself, how much of the philosopher does Plato suppose to survive bodily death and to enter upon this immortality: for the being or nature of any individual philosopher > Meno, 97. ' Ntc. Eth., Bk. X, c. 8. » Phaedo, 82. 42 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. includes a good deal more than his purely rational activities. The question brings us back to Plato's psychology— to his threefold division of the ' parts ', faculties, or functions of the soul — which was merely touched upon above in passing. The pre-existence of individual souls in a state of innocence and their subsequent Fall, as narrated in the Phaedrus myth, could not be made consistent, we saw, except by attributing to the as yet unfallen soul inclina- tions or desires which are themselves intelligible only as the result of its union with the body. As already indicated, Plato himself seems to have become aware of this difficulty ; and in other and (most of them certainly) later writings, he represents only the rational soul, or part of the soul, as pre-existent and divine in its origin. Thus, in the mythical account of the creation in the Timaeus, he distinguishes between ' the immortal principle ' of the soul, which comes from God, and ' a soul of another nature which was mortal, constructed within the body, subject to terrible and irre- sistible affections — first of all pleasure, the greatest incite- ment of evil; then pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two foolish counsellors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily deceived by sense without reason and by all-daring love '. These, ' mingled together according to necessary laws ', went to the making of man. The divine principle was located m the head, with the neck placed as an isthmus and boundary between it and the mortal soul. The nobler part of the mortal soul, ' which is endowed with courage and passion ', was settled round the heart, ' in order that it might be within hearing of the reason and might join with it in controlling and restraining the desires when they are no longer willing of their own accord to obey the word of command issuing from the citadel '. The baser part of the mortal soiil, ' which desires meats and drinks and all things whereof it has need owing Ill HOW MUCH OF THE SOUL SURVIVES? 43 to the nature of the body ', was placed below the midriff, 'all this region being contrived as a sort of manger for the food of the body ; and there the desires were bound down, like a wild animal which was chained up with man, and must be reared with him if a mortal race was to be at all '} Thus God, he says later in the same work, ' gave the sovereign part of the human soul to be the divinity of each'; through its presence 'we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth ' ; it is this which ' raises us from earth to our kindred which is in heaven '.^ In the Republic, the figure of the man, the lion, and the motley many-headed monster, combined in the external semblance of the man, repeats the same threefold division and the identification of the man — 'the inward man' — with the rational part.^ And again, later on, he describes the soul, as we at present see it, as being in a state like the sea-god Glaucus, marred by the action of the waves, encrusted with shellfish and sea-weed and stones. So the soul has been ' marred by its association with the body and by other evils ' ; but ' if we wish to understand its real nature ', ' we ought to fix our attention on one part of it exclusively, on its love of wisdom'.* But if the rational soul alone, or the rational element in the soul, is heaven-descended, it may well seem to follow that that alone will survive the death of the body. Such, as is well known, was the consequence which Aristotle drew in his famous, if enigmatic, doctrine of the Active Reason. For Aristotle the self-consciousness of the individual, as dependent upon memory and its bodily conditions, lapses at death ; nothing survives save the impersonal Reason which temporarily made the organism its vehicle. Whether this is the logical con- ' Timaeus, 69, 70. 2 Ibid., 90. For the two Orphic phrases cf. supra, pp. 27-8. 3 Republic, 588. ■* Ibid., 611. 44 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. elusion of the Platonic line of thought, it is not necessary at this point to determine. Plato certainly did not draw it ; he was too deeply committed by the antecedents of his thought and by his whole temperament to an opposite view. The specific arguments which Plato adduces to prove the immortality of the soul are, for the most part, singularly unconvincing. In one or two instances he has struck out ideas which reappear frequently in later thinkers ; but at other times the argumentation impresses a modern reader as frankly fantastic. So it is, for example, with the first argument in the Phaedo^, that everything which has an opposite (e. g. greater and less, just and unjust, sleeping and waking) is generated only from its opposite. A sleep- ing man awakes, and a waking man goes to sleep : the two states alternate. Hence, as life and death are opposites, Plato argues, they are similarly generated the one from the other; what dies must have been alive, and what is alive must have been dead. In other words, the souls of the dead must exist somewhere, whence they return again into life. If it were not for this rhythmical process, all things would ultimately be reduced to the same state — in which case, ' everything would at last be dead and nothing alive '. Such an argument would never have suggested itself to Plato, had he not previously accepted 'the ancient belief to which he refers in the context, and had he not accepted also the idea, which goes with it, and which he explicitly states in the Republic -, of a limited supply of souls. So far as the argument goes, it would be possible to prove on the same principles a per- petual alternation between drunk and sober. Of a similar verbal character is the more extended argument which is treated as finally conclusive towards the close of the same dialogue, namely, that as an Idea ' 70-2. 2 611. HI SPECIFIC ARGUMENTS 45 remains eternally the same with itself and can never pass into its opposite (the idea of the even can never be- come the idea of the odd, ' whiteness ' can never become ' blackness '), so the soul, which is the principle of life, can never die. Now life is certainly not death, and nothing can be alive and dead at the same time. In that sense, ' a dead soul' — a dead hfe — is a contradiction in terms. But such an argument from the eternal self-identity of Ideas or concepts is very far from proving that a thing which is white cannot become black, or that a living being may not die. Take, again, the argument used in the Republic'^ to prove the indestructibility of the soul : ' nothing can be destroyed except by its own proper and specific " evil ".' The eyes, for example, are liable to the evil of ophthalmia, the entire body to disease, timber to rot, copper and iron to rust. The specific ' evil ' of the soul is wickedness, and therefore, if the soul is destructible at all, it must die of wickedness. But the truth is (Plato goes on to say) that, so far from being fatal to the wicked individual, wickedness kills other people if it can, but seems often to endow its possessor with peculiar vitality. If, then, the soul cannot be killed by its own depravity, nothing else can destroy it. Once more the argument is little better than a play upon words. The metaphor of virtue as the health, and vice as the disease or incurable cancer, of the soul, is used by Plato with fine effect in the Gorgias and throughout his ethical teaching. But to transfer it, as is done here, in a literal sense to the world of generation - or becoming, of birth and death, of physical cause and effect, we cannot help feeling to be, as I have said, little better than a play upon words. The argument in the Phaedrus (which has already come under our notice) ^ for the priority and eternity of the soul as the self-moved cause of all movement in the universe is, according to Plato's own statement, an argument about soul ' 608-11. ' p. 35 supra. 46 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY i.ect. as such, ' the soul divine and human '. It has its root no doubt, at the animistic level, in the contrast between the living being and inanimate things. The former appears to possess an internal principle of movement : it moves about of its own accord, whereas things move only when they suffer an impact from living beings or from other things in motion. But at such a level the distinction can have no bearing on the question of immortality. As it stands in Plato and Aristotle, with a primary reference to the move- ments of the heavenly bodies, the argument would require to be transformed out of recognition to make it reconcil- able with modern physical conceptions. If sufficiently transformed, it might possibly be identified with the car- dinal thesis of every idealist or spiritual philosophy, Mens agitat molem ; Causae efftcienfes pendent a finalibus. But, however transformed, its reference would be to the cosmos as a whole and the divine informing Spirit of which the cosmos is taken to be the manifestation. What may be true in that reference has no necessary application to individual finite souls. Nor can the pre-existence of individual souls— which is always treated by Plato as the essential condition of their survival — be said to be proved, or even made probable, by the famous argument that all knowledge is recollection of what we knew in a pre-natal state. The ordinary man, on first hearing of this Platonic doctrine, is prone to think ot memories of individual happenings in a previous life, such as legend attributed to Pythagoras, or such as Kipling uses so brilliantly in the tale which he calls ' The Finest Story in the World '. But the facts on which Plato builds are quite different, and attention to his real argument has at once a sobering effect. It is the characteristics of necessary truth, as exemplified in mathematical reasoning, which impress him, and which he sets out to explain. Mathematical truths, as soon as we realize them, are seen Ill 'ALL KNOWLEDGE IS RECOLLECTION' 47 to be necessary, and we seem to have known them always. Each step in the demonstration has the same self-evidence; and so Socrates is represented, in the Meno, as ' eliciting ' from a slave-boy, by a series of appropriate questions, a geometrical theorem of which the boy had no previous conscious knowledge, not having been taught geometry. Yet, as ' the answers were all given out of his own head ', the steps by which the demonstration is gradually built up seem comparable to a process of 'recovering' or 'recol- lecting' knowledge which he has somehow always pos- sessed. ' If the truths only required to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him,' Socrates concludes, 'the soul must have always possessed this knowledge. And if the truth of all things (for there seems no limit to this process of recovery) always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal.' ^ In the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and the Symposium the argument for pre-existence is presented in a form more familiar to us in poetic tradition — with explicit reference, namely, to the theory of Ideas. It is the Ideas which are supposed to be recalled to mind by the sight of the earthly objects in which they are reflected : When on some gilded cloud, or flower. My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity.^ The theme both of the Phaedrus and of the Symposium is, how the soul using sight, ' the noblest of the senses ', is led back from the beauties of earth to the heavenly or abso- lute Beauty— Beauty in itself, or the Idea of Beauty— by participation in which these earthly beauties are what they . are; beautiful certainly, but at their fairest only images seen darkly of that perfect and everlasting Beauty. 'Any beautiful thing ', he had said in the Phaedo,^ ' is only made ' Meno, 85, 86. " Vaughan, ' The Retreat '. ' 100. 48 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. beautiful by the presence or communication {vapovaia or Koivmi'ia), or whatever you please to call it, of absolute Beauty. I do not wish to insist on the nature ot the communication (on how the communication or parti- cipation is effected), but what I am sure of is that it is Beauty (to koKov) through which all beautiful things are beautiful [on t5 koXZ vavTo, rk KaXa yiyverai KaXd).' In the two other dialogues mentioned, this doctrine of the Ideas is presupposed rather than scientifically expounded ; it is applied with mystical fervour as an instrument of ethical and religious regeneration. In the Phaedo, which is earlier, there is a short exposition at a more prosaic level, which enables us to understand better the hne of thought along which Plato was led to the theory. His examples are abstract mathematical conceptions, such as equality. We pronounce two objects to be equal (in size or height or some other quality). They do in fact appear to us to be equal, and roughly, or for practical purposes, they are so. Yet they only approximate to what we mean by perfect equality ; they are aiming at it, Plato says, but they do not actually realize it. The objects suggest the idea of equality, he goes on to say, but they do not give us the idea, for it is not contained in the sensible facts as we perceive them. The idea is rather the standard by which we judge the facts. ' We must, therefore,' he concludes, 'have had know- ledge of equality before we first saw [so-called] equal things, and perceived that they all strive to be like equality and come short of it.' ^ Such knowledge is independent ot all sense-experience ; we must have received it, therefore, before we were born. And the same holds, he adds, ot 'all that we call real', as distinguished from the appear- ances of sense. There can be no doubt that Plato is here working out a very important philosophical distinction, and he is ^ Phaedo, 75. Ill THE UNITY OF THE SOUL 49 profoundly right in the stress he lays on the ideal con- cepts of reason and the impossibility of deriving them from passively apprehended data of sense. Concepts are not passively given, they are actively constructed, and on the power to frame them depends the possibility of science. But it is one thing to emphasize the presence and func- tion of reason in experience, and quite another to explain that activity by supposing its products to be given to the individual mind in a prenatal existence. The capacity to frame an abstract idea, and thereby to carry- the process of idealization beyond the limits of actual sense-experience, is a qualitative distinction of human intelligence as such, but this capacity has no direct bearing on the duration of the individual human mind, whether as regards pre- existence or a future life. In his argument from the unity of the soul — the only one remaining to be mentioned— Plato's thought is more on the lines of subsequent discussion. The idea of the simplicity or unity of the soul, as contrasted with the multiplex and composite character of the body, has been, down to the time of Kant, if not later, one of the chief philosophical arguments for immortality. It is stated by Plato in the Phaedo (78-81), where he bases it on the affinity of the soul to the Ideas. In virtue of that kinship, the soul may be supposed, he argues, to be characterized by the same unchangeable self-identity as belongs (we have already seen) to every Idea as such. The reference to the abstract self-identity of the Ideas gives the argument a different setting from that given to it later in the ortho- dox tradition of the schools; but the inference from unity or simplicity to indestructibility is common to both, and the contrast in this respect between the unity or simplicity of the soul and the multiplicity of the body is similarly emphasized. Plato mentions the argu- ment again, towards the close of the Republic ; but he has 50 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. not elaborated it farther. As it has played such a consi- derable part in the subsequent discussion of the subject, it will be more to our purpose to examine it at a later stage in its modern form. The doctrine of transmigration or rebirth which is so prominent in Plato's scheme of things, and which is still so widespread a form of religious belief, we shall also have to consider more fully later on its merits. What we may call Plato's strictly philosophical or scientific arguments all turn, as we have seen, on the rela- tion of the soul to the Ideas ; that is to say, they are essen- tially arguments drawn from the nature of knowledge. Some of these arguments- we found to be vitiated by verbal fallacies. In others, where he may be thought to achieve some measure of success, it must be admitted, as Jowett has remarked, that ' in proportion as he succeeds, the indi- vidual seems to disappear in a more general notion of the soul ; the contemplation of ideas " under the form of eternity " takes the place of past and future states of exis- tence '} The same thing happens with modern arguments based on the constitution or necessary conditions of know- ledge ; it inevitably happens in any purely epistemological argument. We are left with the abstract unity of conscious- ness in" general, which is realized indifferently in each individual thinker but contains nothing to distinguish individuals one from another or from a so-called absolute or universal consciousness. With Plato, this result may be said to follow necessarily from his conception of philosophy or dialectic as concerned solely with the eternal or un- changing, while the world of time or becoming constitutes the sphere of opinion or probability. Philosophy, so far as it is scientific or exact — so far as it is knowledge — is for him an exposition of the eternal nature or structure of reality. It is confined to a statement of universal principles or ' Intro(}uction to the Phaedo (Dialogues, i. 417). in EPISTEMOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS 51 necessary laws, and has nothing to say about individuals, as such, or the course of their history.^ The inherent logic of such a view might seem, therefore, to lead to some such doctrine as AristotleV theory of the Active Reason, or to his idea of God as the pure -Thinker, ' the eternal thinking upon thought'. Hence we find Hegel, whose philosophy is similarly based upon theory of know- ledge, and who takes the same view of philosophy as con- cerned solely with the universal and the eternal, making a determined effort to persuade us that all Plato's statements about immortality must be so construed. He will not have it that a philosopher of Plato's eminence could seriously have in view so commonplace a doctrine as individual survival. And as the Platonic speculations on the subject are all presented in mythical form, he would have us dismiss the myths altogether in forming an estimate of Plato's philo- sophical position, except where their statements can be shown (as, for example, in the case of the doctrine of Reminiscence) to be translatable into terms of pure reason. It is impossible, however, without doing violence to every canon of sound interpretation, to take Plato's manifold statements on this subject as referring to anything but the .question of individual destiny. And if the doctrine of im- mortality reappears so often, and is given such an important place, we cannot be justified in leaving it out of account merely because it is put forward in the course of a pro- fessedly mythical narrative. Plato's myths form too impor- tant a feature of his philosophical work to be set aside in this summary fashion. If his real position had been what Hegel would have us believe it was, why should he not have been content, as Aristotle was, to confine himself to a strictly scientific treatment ? Why did he so often, at a certain stage of his argument, deliberately turn from science to mythology? The Myth, it has long been ' Cf. Professor Webb, Divine Personality and Human Life, p. 256. E 2 52 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTAl^ITY lect. acknowledged, is an essential element of Plato's style, and his philosophy cannot be understood apart from it. The first step towards a proper understanding of the function of Plato's myths is to perceive that they are not employed merely as a rhetorical or poetical adornment of the discourse, nor yet as an allegory or parable which represents, in deliberately chosen and transparent symbols, a doctrine or body of truth which the author is expounding at the same time in conceptual or scientific form. Plato often uses allegory also (the allegory of the Cave in the Republic will occur to every one), but the Myth is on a larger scale, and is intended to be taken and enjoyed in the first instance as a story for its own sake. We do not think, step by step, of the meaning or moral as we go along : it is only the cumulative effect of the narrative as a whole that gives us a vision of the ethical or religious truth it is intended to convey. But this truth, as I have already indicated, is not something which Plato is him- self prepared to state in scientific form ; it is not anything which he would assert that he knows in that sense.^ The truth, we may say, is rather a vaticination, a prophetic utterance, a fundamental conviction, which he cannot jus- tify or even explain in detail, and which he clothes for that reason in the traditional imagery of the Mysteries. It follows from this that he allows himself complete free- dom or poetic licence in regard to the details of the story ; he ridicules the idea of these being taken for literal truth by any man of sense. But he is equally emphatic that in its general outhne ' either this or something like it is true '. That is what he says in the Phaedo ^ at the end of his story about ' the soul and her habitations ', and it is the principle which we must apply to all his myths, ' Cf. Zeller, Plato, p. i6l (English translation) : ' The Platonic myths almost always point to a gap in scientific knowledge.' 2 ii4n. in THE MYTH IN PLATO 53 if we are to interpret them intelligently. It is only the central idea of the tale which he is prepared to stand by — in this particular case, the idea of the continued existence of individual souls under a system of moral order and discipHne. I remarked, in speaking of Orphic religion, that in it we had passed beyond theories of mere continuance ; the doc- trine of a future life had become definitely associated with ideas of ' retribution ', or, as we might put it more broadly, with the idea of a moral government of the world. This idea constitutes, in fact, from henceforth the real significance of the doctrine ; and in the general mind the idea of a moral order or government of the world takes the form of a belief in the systematic distribution of rewards and punishments after death for the deeds done in the body. So expressed, the belief often assumes crude and question- able shapes ; and it has been frequently attacked as funda- mentally unethical in its presuppositions, and subversive of the very morality which it professes to vindicate. As Plato introduces the idea of rewards and punishments freely in all his eschatological myths, often using the imagery of religious tradition, it is of some importance that we should not misconceive his real position in this matter. We may begin by recalling the scornful mirth he makes in the Republic of the religious teachers who describe the righteous dead ' as reclining on couches at a banquet of the pious, and with garlands on their heads spending all eternity in wine-bibbing, the fullest reward of virtue being in their estimation an everlasting carousal'.^ It is the same note of indignant scorn with which Spinoza turns upon ' those who expect to be decorated by God ^yith high rewards for their virtue and their best actions, as for having endured the direst slavery— as if virtue and the service ot God were not in itself happiness and perfect freedom '.^ 1 Republic, 363. ^ Ethics, II. 49 Sch. ; cf. V. 41 Sch. 54 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. The disinterestedness and the self-sufficingness of virtue is the central text of Plato's ethics, to which he returns in dialogue after dialogue. Virtue is ' the health of the soul ', ' the right constitution ' or ordered harmony of our nature. It is, in short, the reahzation by man of his true nature, and only in realizing its own nature can any being achieve happiness. To inquire, therefore, whether virtue is ' ex- pedient', whether goodness is 'profitable', is to perpetrate an abuse of terms. As well ask, he says, whether it is better to be sick or to be well, to be a marred and useless soul or a soul that is capable and strong, whether it is better to subject the human and divine element in our nature to the animal or the animal to the divine. The metaphors are various, but the thesis is everywhere the same. Spinoza gave it immortal expression in the closing proposition of his Ethics : Beatitudo non est virtutis praemium sed ipsa virtus, which we may perhaps paraphrase : ' A blessed life is not the reward of goodness but the practice and enjoy- ment of goodness itself.' The reward which the good man looks for is nothing extrinsic, to be conferred upon him, but only, in Plato's phrase, to become like God as far as man may.' And, as goodness is its own reward, so the evil life carries its own penalty with it. ' The true penalty of wrongdoing ', he says in a well-known passage of the Theaetetus, ' is one that cannot be escaped. There are two patterns eternally set before men, the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched ; and, in their utter folly and infatuation, [the evil doers] do not see that they are growing like the one, and unlike the other, by reason of their evil deeds : and the penalty is that they lead a life answering to the pattern which they resemble.' ^ • The good hfe therefore stands unassailable in its own strength, and the belief in immortality is not based by Plato on the ordinary argument from the need for com- ' Republic, 613. 2 Theaetetus, 176. Ill REWARDS AND PENALTIES 55 pensation and retribution. He is in fact careful, at the close of the Republic, before he begins the story of Er, to call Glaucon's attention to the fact that such extrinsic sanctions as he there describes are being brought in, and can legitimately be brought in, only after the demonstration that righteousness is, as he has been arguing in the immediately preceding context, the health and highest good of the soul, just as wickedness is its proper disease, and that righteousness, therefore, is to be desired for itself alone. But it seems natural to him that, in the universe of a good God, the just man will be ' dear to the gods ' and the object of their special care, so that 'all things will work together for good to him in the end, either in this hfe or in another '. ' For unquestionably ' , he says, ' the gods can never neglect a man who determines to strive earnestly to become righteous, and by the practice of virtue to become as like God as man is permitted to do.'^ And it seemed to him also natural, in such a world, that, with a view to their eventual reformation, the wicked should suffer the penalties of their misdeeds which they had escaped on earth. Moral principles work themselves out there as here. The important point is the continuity of the future life with the present, and the conviction that the purpose of the whole is good. Plato's belief in im- mortality is ultimately grounded, therefore, in the central tenet of his theology, the belief that God is good, and that the End of the intelligent creature is likeness to God, so far as that is possible under human conditions. Hence the horizon of such a life cannot be limited by the grave. The good man goes to meet death confident that in the life beyond he will find himself in the same divine fellowship to which he has been admitted here. But Plato does not claim that even this supreme convic-, tion as to the nature of God and the divine government of ' Republic, 612-13. 56 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. the world is matter of necessary knowledge, like a logical or mathematical theorem, or that it can be explicitly ascertained to be true, as we establish the occurrence of a particular event or the existence of a particular object at a definite time and place. And that is why he frequently presents the Idea of God (as well as the doctrine of the Soul and its destiny) in a mythical form — not because it is not foundational for his whole system of belief, but because it is not science in the sense in which he uses the term. It is, as I have called it, a supreme conviction— faith or belief, as distinguished from demonstration or intuitive truth ; but it is a conviction or faith on which a man must be prepared to hazard all he has and is. His life must be ordered on the assumption of its truth. Similarly, the idea of immortality is presented in the Phaedo as a great hope, a glorious venture (77 iXirh /leydXr], kuXos 6 klvSwos). The two Ideas (of God and Immortality) are often interwoven in Plato's statements; and in both cases it is noteworthy that what he is concerned to insist upon is the practical lesson to be drawn from the belief for the conduct of life. That is characteristic of the whole position. The existence of God and the immortality of the Soul are not treated by Plato as part of a scientific theory of the unseen world, but primarily as regulative Ideas for the direction of our life here and now. We are to act throughout as if they were true. For Plato, it is not too much to say, the practical meaning of im- mortality is just the infinite importance of right action. The strong resemblance between Plato's attitude and Kant's doctrine of the Ideas of the Reason as regulative principles operative in all our knowledge is illuminatingly insisted on by Professor Stewart in his suggestive book, The Myths of Plato, and in this characteristic he finds the true explana- tion of Plato's preference for a mythical treatment of the doctrines in question. HI PLATO AND KANT 57 Undoubtedly the importance of any religious truth con- sists in its present application to the conduct of life : that is just what distinguishes a religious truth from a purely intellectual theorem. And in the case of the idea of immortality it is very instructive to note how uniformly Plato returns from the imaginative details of his myths, or even from the doctrine itself as a speculative truth, to the practical conclusions to be drawn from the belief. Thus in the Meno, where the doctrine is first introduced, Meno hails Socrates's conclusion. ' I feel somehow that I like what you are saying ', he remarks ; and we can see that it attracts him as an interesting and romantic specula- tion, of which he hears now for the first time and which he would like to follow out. But Socrates at once dis- courages such transcendent flights. He will not even put his own conclusion dogmatically : all that he will pin himself to is the practical application to the problem of knowledge and the quest of truth. 'Some things I have said of which 1 am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to inquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in search- ing after what we do not know — that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and in deed, to the utmost of my power.' Similarly, after the elaborate myth of the judge- ment after death, at the close of the Gorgias, he turns at once to the practical lesson : ' I, then, CaUicles, am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the Judge in that day. Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth and to live as well as I can, and when I die, to die as well as I can. . . . And I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than any other earthly conflict.' 'And', he concludes, 'of all that has been said, nothing 58 PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. remains unshaken but the saying that to do injustice is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things, as well in public as in private life.' If we. turn to the end of the myth in the Phaedo, it is the same : ' Wherefore, Simmias,' Socrates proceeds, ' seeing all these things, what ought we not to do, that we may obtain virtue and wisdom in this life ? Fair is the prize and the hope great. . . . Let a man be of good cheer who has arrayed his soul in her own proper jewels, temperance and justice and courage and nobility and truth ; thus adorned, she is ready to go on her journey to the world below when her time comes.' And once more, in the Republic, in the course of the story of Er, Socrates pauses to make the same application. Such a catena of passages might doubtless be extended almost indefinitely, but those which I have quoted are more than sufficient to illustrate my point. They constitute, I think, a striking testimony to the sobriety of Plato's per- sonal teaching on this great question. If we contrast these grave utterances with the playful references, quoted some time ago, to the souls of certain classes of men returning to earth as animals of a mild and social nature, as bees or ants, it is not difficult to distinguish the creed by which Plato lived from the popular religious ideas, familiar to his audience, which he uses, as it suits him, ' to point a moral or adorn a tale '. In taking leave of Plato for the present, this may be said in conclusion. Unconvincing as most, perhaps indeed all, of his arguments for immortality may seem to us, his personal conviction produces a profound impression and has had the most far-reaching historical influence. His formal arguments may appear to carry us no farther than the abstract eternity of thought, .but it was a conscious in -THE MYSTIC AND ASCETIC 59 and individual immortality in which Plato beheved. There are many sides to his genius. His philosophy of mathe- matical science is only now being appreciated at its full value. He was at the same time a social idealist on the grand scale, his two longest works being devoted to sketching the outlines of an ideal commonwealth. But there is also the mystic and ascetic, whose citizenship is in heaven, to whom the body is but the prison-house of the soul, and who defines philosophy as one long ' study of death and dying ', seeing that only ' after we are dead can we gain the wisdom which we desire'. The true philo- sopher is ' in every respect at enmity with the body and longs to possess his soul alone ' ; he ' longs to be released from the company of his enemy '. Till God releases him, his struggle is to ' live pure from the body, to have no com- munion or intercourse with it beyond what is absolutely necessary'. In St. Paul's phrase, he 'dies daily' to the body and its aifections, that he may attain true knowledge and true virtue. He anticipates the apostle's metaphor when he describes philosophy as 'the practice' (or 're- hearsal ') of dying and death. In fact the nearest parallel to the series of passages I have culled from the Phaedo ^ is to be found in St. Paul's impassioned call for deliver- ance * from the body of this death ', his ' desire to depart ', ' knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord'. 'We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can', Plato says again in the Theaetetus^, 'and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become Hke him is to .become holy and just and wise.' It is not wonder- ful that the Fathers of the Christian Church recognized in Plato a kindred inspiration. For myself, however, I should describe this ascetic or mystic flight from the body, and from the whole life we lead 1 64, 66-8. ^ 176, 6o PRE-EXISTENCE AND IMMORTALITY lect. here, as Orphic rather than strictly and in the highest sense Platonic. Plato was deeply influenced by the Orphic tradition, as I have insisted ; but still it represents only one phase of his many-sided genius, to some extent, perhaps, a phase which he lived through. The Orphic influence seems to culminate and to find most concentrated expres- sion in the Phaedo, from which the expressions I have just quoted are almost entirely drawn. In no other dialogue, if I remember rightly, is true knowledge said to be attainable only after death ; in no other is such despite done to the body as to pronounce it the irreconcilable enemy of the soul, all intercourse with which is to be scrupulously avoided, or such indiscriminate censure passed upon the senses as being not helps, but hindrances, in the quest of truth.^ The beauties of earth are treated elsewhere as an imperfect vehicle, but still a vehicle, of the eternal Beauty. They are the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, on which we mount to the final vision ; and, when we have won our way on high, there is no talk of throwing down the ladder by which we ascended. The philosopher is bidden elsewhere ^ to use ' sight the noblest of the senses ' as a coadjutor in his task; and the present life, we are taught, can yield 'fair notions and fair practices '—' the beauty of laws and institutions and sciences'^ — which have their own intrinsic value. We must supplement one dialogue by another, therefore, if we are to gain a correct impression of Plato's spiritual outlook as a whole. By its historical setting and the marvellous beauty and ' ' The philosopher is to be set free as far as possible from the eye and the ear, and in short from the whole body, because intercourse with the body troubles the soul and hinders her from gaining truth and wisdom.' 66. ' In the Timaeus, 47, sight is celebrated as the main source of philosophy, inasmuch as it reveals to us ' the stars and the sun and the heavens', and has thereby given us 'the invention of number and the con- ception of time and the power of inquiring about the nature of the whole ". ' Symposium, 210, 211. Ill SERENITY OF FINAL OUTLOOK 6i restrained pathos of the closing scene, the Phaedo has naturally impressed itself more deeply on the memory of the world than any other of Plato's works. But there is a certain sense of strain in its other-worldliness — noticeable perhaps chiefly in the earlier pages — a certain exaggeration of language and sentiment, which is hardly in accord with the large serenity of outlook which remains with us as the dominant characteristic of Plato's temperament and genius. LECTURE IV MIND AND BODY The Orphic-Platonic doctrine of the Soul depends on ethical and religious considerations. In that sense it re- sembles a presupposition on Plato's part, rather than the result of his own psychological analysis or of any inde- pendent scientific investigation into the actual relation of soul and body. There is in fact, according to this doctrine, no real relation between them ; they are treated as two separate and independent entities. The pre-existent soul ' cometh from afar ' to be the tenant of a particular body, and any soul may inhabit any body.^ The belief in the transmigration of a human soul (i.e. of a soul that had been united with a human body) into the body of one of the lower animals places this beyond doubt. But, even if we limit the idea of transmigration to the passage of human souls into other human bodies, the soul is in each case only the temporary inmate or tenant of the particular body. Soul and body belong to two different worlds; and, although the soul is no doubt conceived as conditioned for the time by the nature of its dwelling-house (being dependent on so many avenues of sensation for its knowledge, and so forth), and also as liable to contamination from the desires which have their seat in the body, it is still in its intrinsic nature a creature of another sphere. This dual- ism is fundamental in Plato's theory, and from him it passed into the orthodox Christian tradition. Plato, as we 1 Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, i. 3, 407 b : ' Most theories concerning the soul attach the soul to, and enclose it in a body, without further determining why this happens . . . just as if it were possible for any soul taken at random, according to the Pythagorean stories, to pass into any body.' IV PLATO AND ARISTOTLE CONTRASTED 63 have seen, reverses the primitive animistic conception of the soul as the shadowy double of the body, insisting that the soul is the true self, to which we owe our best care and tendance; but he preserves and accentuates the original animistic dualism. And the same holds true of the Chris- tian tradition. Man is a composite being, whose two constituents are brought together, and, as it were, tied together without possessing any organic or inherent rela- tion to one another. But a dualism of this kind seems to be due, I repeat, to the religious preconception of the separate existence of the soul. It is not naturally sug- gested by dispassionate reflection on the experience open to our observation. Approaching the question with a purely scientific interest, and starting from the biological facts, Aristotle was led to a very different view of the soul and its relation to the body. Naturalistic as it sounds, and naturalistically as it has in the main been understood, it comes, I believe, much nearer to a true theory of the known facts. Instead of starting, as Plato seems to do, with the un- defined idea of the soul, as the term is used in religion and ethics, Aristotle starts with the living organism, and treats conscious experience as the final form or expression of the biological facts. Keeping in view the wide original mean- ing of the Greek term, he defines the Psyche comprehen- sively as the principle of life — the principle in virtue of which living beings perform the characteristic functions which distinguish them from non-living things. He is thus led naturally to distinguish different levels of psychical function. The fundamental function, presupposed in all the rest, is the assimilation of nutriment, and the growth and decay of the organism connected therewith. To this nutritive or vegetative soul are added, in an ascending scale, the sensitive soul, as seen in animals— involving sensation or sense-perception with spontaneous motion in 64 MIND AND BODY lect. space — and, finally, the rational soul, the function of reason or intelligence, found only in man. Each of these succes- sive stages appears as a development from the one pre- ceding, the higher functions having the less highly developed as their basis. With sense-perception go the feelings of pleasure and pain and appetition or desire, which determine the animal's movements, also ^avraata or imagination, the faculty of retaining images of past impressions. This passive retention of associated images which automatically recall one another is the stuff of memory. The data of sense-perception and of this auto- matic memory furnish the material for the higher func- tions of active recollection, of judgement and reason, as exemplified in human life. Sensations, images, and the associations which arise between them at the sentient level are transformed by thought into the knowledge of a world of objects. For Aristotle, as for Plato, the essen- tial function of reason is the framing of the concept or, as Aristotle puts it, the apprehension of the universal. On this power of abstraction all reasoning depends : it alone gives the possibility of science. Aristotle did not separate the intelligible world from the sensible, as Plato's language makes us think Plato is doing ; but he insists, as strongly as his master, on this thought-world, ' visible to the mind alone which is the lord of the soul '. For Aristofle, as it has been well put, ' the world of abstractions and ideals is not a world of prototypes of which the actually existing things are a kind of reflection or distortion, but is a con- ceptual world, sublimated from the world of sense and experience, not existing in itself apart from things, but existing for the mind in things.' ^ Aristotle's technical definition of the soul, as implied in these various functions, depends on the fundamental dis- tinction between matter and form, or the potential and the ^ p. H. Wicksteed, Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy, p. li. IV THE 'FULFILMENT' OF THE BODY 65 actual, a distinction which determines his whole philosophy. These are the two aspects of every concrete being. In this case the living being, or, as Aristotle phrases it, ' the natural body possessing or sharing in life ', is the concrete unit under investigation, and body and soul are the two correlative terms by which we explain or formulate the characteristic mode of its existence. We may not identify the living being with the body, because the natural body is only the potentiality of life. The soul is the actualiza- tion of that potentiality, or, according to the other anti- thesis, the body is to be looked at simply as the material, the condition or set of conditions, for the expression of the soul or form. The soul is, therefore, technically defined by Aristotle as the Entelechy, the realization or actualization of that life which the organized body possesses in poten- tiality. The soul is the ' fulfilment ' ^ of the body, the end for which the body exists. If we are to apply the predi- cates unity and reality, it is to the Soul as Entelechy, Aristotle says, that they are peculiarly applicable.^ Body and soul are thus not two separate entities ; still less can any soul inhabit every body. Each soul is the soul of such and such a body, and each body the seed-plot of such and such a soul. And, according to Aristotle's dominant mood and his usual form of statement, the idea of a disembodied or discarnate soul seems almost a contra- diction in terms. For matter and form are, as we began by saying, simply two aspects of the one concrete being (the man, in this case) which alone really exists. If we take the word in its largest sense, the soul for Aristotle is the functioning of the body, and he himself gives the analogy of an axe. Cutting is the proper function, or, as it were, the soul of the axe ; but we never imagine ' cutting- ' Cf. Wicksteed, op. cit., p. 428, 'goal-fulfilment.' ^ To yap tv (cai to uyai fVel jrXtoi/apfSy Xkyirai, tA Kvpias rj lvT(\ix^ia iariv. De Anima, II. i. 412 b. 66 MIND AND BODY lect. ness ' as an entity existing by itself in independence of tiie steel. ' In the same way/ he adds, ' if the eye were a living being, seeing would be its soul' As seeing is to the eye, ' so is sensation as a whole to the whole sentient body as such *. But just at this point Aristotle's statements cease to be entirely consistent. While maintaining the essential cor- relativity and inseparability of body and soul throughout the lower ranges of soul-experience, he makes the faculty of reason, at least in its highest reaches, an exception to this principle. ' It is not difficult to see ', he says, ' that the soul, or certain parts of it, if it is by nature divisible, cannot be separated from the' body. There is no reason, however, why some parts may not be separable, if they are not the realization or actuality of any body whatever. Moreover, it is not clear whether the soul may not be the actuality of the body in the same fashion as a sailor is of his ship.' Such is the unexpected conclusion of the chapter on which the account I have given of his theory is based. The last sentence, if taken seriously, would subvert the whole position he has laid down, reintro- ducing, as it does, the idea, ostensibly discarded, of the soul as the inhabitant of the body, the manipulator of the machine, But Aristotle follows out the line of thought which these sentences suggest only in regard to Nous— that is to say, the rational soul. It is at this point that he introduces his much-discussed distinction between the Active and the Passive Reason. 'The human soul is potentially intelligent', he tells us; it has the capacity of rational knowledge. But, in order that this potentiality or capacity be made actual, there is needed the operation of an active principle. And this intelligence — Nous in this sense— is separable and impassive and unmixed, being in its essential nature an activity.' ^ ' De Anivta, Bk. 1 1 1. 5 . The whole passage in which Aristotle states his IV THE 'ACTIVE REASON' 67 The precise meaning of Aristotle's doctrine has been the crux of his commentators from his own day till the present. From the language in which he describes its unintermitted thinking, its eternity and its separateness, Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 a. d.) identified the Active Reason with the perpetual divine activity (described by Aristotle as the eternal thinking upon thought, the unmoved source of all movement in the universe) by whose operation upon the receptive soul of the individual — the sensitive and imaginative faculties which constitute, as it were, the material of reason — knowledge is actually, but intermit- tently, realized in this or that individual man. But the extreme transcendence or aloofness of Aristotle's God makes it difficult to believe that such an identification can have been in his mind. Avicenna and Averroes, the Arabian commentators so well known to students of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, identified the Active Reason not with God but with the guiding intelligence of the lunar point and draws his conclusions is so short that it may be given in full : ' But since, as in the whole of nature, to something which serves as matter for each kind (and this is potentially all the members of the kind) there corresponds something else which is the cause or agent, because it makes them all (to oItiov koI jroiijrocdi', ra jroieiv natrra), the two being related as art' to its material — these differences must necessarily be found in the soul. So to the one intellect, which answers to this description because it becomes all things, corresponds the other because it makes all things, just as light, in a manner, converts colours which are potential into actual colours. And this intellect is separable and impassive and unmixed, being in its essential nature an activity. For that which acts is always superior (rt^Karfpoc) to that which is acted upon, and constitutes the cause {apx^) of the matter. Now actual knowledge is identical with the thing known, but potential knowledge is prior in time in the individual, though not in the universe at large. The active intellect does not think at one time and at another time not think. Onfy in separation from matter is it what it really is, and this [its essential nature] is alone immortal and eternal. But we do not remember, because the reason of which we are speaking (tovto) is impassive, while the intellect which can be affected (6 Be iradriTtKos vovs) is perishable, and without the former (tovtov) does not think at all.' F2 68 MIND AND BODY lect. heaven— that is to say, the lowest of those planetary spirits in which both Plato and Aristotle believed. Averroes, introducing a further distinction between the passive or passible intellect, which is part of the individual soul, and the Potential Intellect/ which is realized in the individual through the operation of the Active Reason, declared the Potential Intellect also to be ' separate ', and to be, in fact, single or identical in all men. Such a doctrine seems to abolish human personality altogether, so far as intellect or rational thought is concerned. But, as we are safe in saying that Aristotle had not formulated for himself the conclusions drawn from his statements, either by Alexander or by the Arabians, we need not enter further into the controversy here. It is sufficient to note that Aristotle's doctrine of Reason as an extraneous factor operative in the human consciousness, instead of prompting a belief in individual immortality, leads him personally to a directly opposite conclusion. He speaks of the Active Reason, in another of his books,^ as coming from without {dvpaOev), 'from out of doors', into the human organism, and as beifig ' alone divine ', phrases almost Orphic in their sug- gestion. But his actual position is plainly stated in a passage towards the beginning of the De Anima (I. 4), where he asserts more loosely of Nous in general what he afterwards restricts to the Active Reason. Nous, he says, ' would seem to be developed in us as a self-existent sub- stance {ova-ia tis ovcra) and to be imperishable. . . . But reasoning {to SiavoeTa-Oai), love, and hatred are not attributes of the thinking faculty {to voeTv) but of its individual pos- sessor, in so far as he possesses it. Hence, when this possessor perishes, there is neither memory nor love: for these never belonged to the thinking faculty, but ' Aquinas calls the Passive the Material, and the Potential the Passible, Intellect. ° Z>e Generatione Anmalitmi, Bk. II. 3. 736b. IV THE 'RATIONAL SOUL' 69 to the composite whole which has perished, while vovs is doubtless (tarms) a thing more divine and is impassive (dTraOis).' But, however abruptly and unexpectedly it makes its appearance in the context of Aristotle's psychology, this conception of the function of reason, as supervening upon the animal organism and its processes, fitted admirably into the framework of Christian dogmatic. The patristic and scholastic doctrine of the rational soul, as specially created by God and infused into the organism, either at the moment of conception or at a given point in the em- bryonic history of the foetus, is, so far as the words go, largely a reproduction of Aristotle's statement, although the sense they were intended to convey was in important respects different, and involved a diametrically opposite conclusion. The question with the schoolmen is not, as with Aristotle, of an impersonal function of thought, but of an individual substance 'produced from nothing by the creative act of God ' ^ and introduced into the bodily organism. According to scholastic orthodoxy, the soul is not derived, like the body, from its parents.. It is ' intrinsi- cally independent' of the body, according to one of the phrases used, although ' extririsically dependent', in the sense that it enters into relations with the body, and that certain of its activities are correlated with brain states and in that sense dependent on the instrumentahty of the organism. But it neither grows nor decays with the body. At most we can say that it gradually unfolds its native ' capacities, as the development of the brain and nervous system furnishes opportunity. The body is to be regarded throughout as an instrument or means of communi- cation. Stated thus, however, the theory is on the way to prove too much ; and, according to the scholastic habit, so many ' M. Maher, Psychology, p. 573 (Stonyhurst Philosophical Series). 70 MIND AND BODY lect. qualifications are interwoven as we proceed, that a great deal of what seems to be asserted is really withdrawn. For we cannot help pressing the question, how much is actually created and imported into the organic conditions. No one, I think, will assert that he himself, as he now exists, was created ready-made at the moment suggested. The ready-made creation of a soul or self in that sense is a transparent absurdity. It makes the whole process of experience superfluous. A self-conscious being can only make itself. If, then, we press our question, the special creation of a rational soul to meet the given cir- cumstances comes practically to mean no more than that the human embryo in question is born with the poten- tiality of reason, and that this particular body is the means appointed for its realization. The coming into being of the rational soul, or, to put it otherwise, of a self-conscious spirit, is justly regarded as the 'main miracle' of the universe; it has the appearance of being the goal of a divine purpose. The origination and development of such spirits may appropriately, therefore, be spoken of as a creation ; for it is the emergence of something new, something which cannot be explained or understood from the conditions out of which it arises, if we think of these conditions as they appear in themselves, apart from the result in which they fulfil and transcend themselves. The " soul is regarded by Aristotle as the entelechy or fulfilment, the complete account, of the living body ; but, if you think of the body as so much space-occupying matter and no more, it appears to have no relation at all to the living experience which is its ultimate expression. This is characteristic of the process of creative evolution everywhere. The soul, it has sometimes been said, weaves itself a body. From the point of view I am at present emphasizing, we might rather say the body grows itself a soul. The two modes of statement are not ultimately inconsistent with one another, IV THE BODY GROWS ITSELF A SOUL 71 although both are obviously metaphorical. To put the position more prosaically, the organism in commerce with the environment is the medium in which the soul comes into being; and because the organism is a natural body derived from the parents, there are represented in its spiritual product all the influences summarized under the head of heredity. We require, I think, to follow out Aristotle's conception of the relation of soul and body consistently to the end, applying it, that is to say, to the rational soul no less than to the lower levels of soul-life. Evolutionary process is the fundamental and distinctive conception in Aristotle's philo- sophy, yet at certain critical points he unexpectedly drops the clue that has served him so far. In the present instance, the larger scope of modern science may enable us to be truer to Aristotle's principle than he was himself. Professor Ward, who certainly will not be suspected of materialistic leanings, remarks that 'but for certain physio- logical errors into which he fell, Aristotle would doubtless have found the connexion between the organism and the soul as intellectual, more direct, and more definite than he supposed ' : ' through sensation, phantasy, memory, we advance to recollection, conception, intellection'.* In spite of the decisive significance which attaches to the emer- gence of the conceptual reason — a significance which I have repeatedly emphasized ^ — there is no occasion to contest the conclusion suggested by the scientific his- tory of the globe and of the race, that man attained this faculty by infinitely gradual steps. The qualitative differ- ence between two planes of mind may be profound, and its consequences infinite ; yet in the historical process we seem to pass almost insensibly from the one to the other, just as, in traversing a mountain-pass, we may often be ' Psychological Principles, p. 5. ' Cf. Idea of God, p. 100 et seq. 72 MIND AND BODY lect. some way down the farther slope before the welcome trickle of a stream assures us that we have already crossed the watershed. As for the churchly doctrine of a rational soul implanted in each individual organism, by all means let us think of the individual life-history, no less than of the cosmic development, as a divinely directed process, to which, in view of its issue, no fitter word than creation can be applied. But do not let us imagine a divine figure standing by to inject a bit of supernatural stuff into the bodily mixture at the appropriate moment. The soul is no insulated supernatural being, infused into certain ex- traneous material conditions, but should be recognized as the natural, though not the less divinely ordained, outcome of these conditions themselves. The idea of the soul as intrinsically independent of the body and only brought into relation with it, takes philo- sophical form in the assertion of the substantiality of the soul. Substance means here ' id quod per se stat ', a con- cretely existent thing as distinguished from qualities or attributes which are conceived as existing in alio, i.e. as the attributes or activities of some real being. And the definition of the soul as an immaterial or spiritual sub- stance is intended precisely to exclude the possibility of regarding the mental phenomena as attributes or activities of the body. The fundamental argument for the definition is based on the fact that a subject of mental experience is universally assumed and expressed in our ordinary lan- guage. Mere sensations or ideas are abstractions of the psychologist : in actual fact they always appear as elements of what we may call a personal life. We shall presently have to consider with some care exactly how much the unity of consciousness (as it is somewhat ambiguously called) amounts to, and how far it carries us. But the traditional definition of the soul as substance undoubtedly betrays us easily into a thinly disguised materialism. The IV THE SUBSTANTIAL SOUL 73 original and natural application of the term 'substance' being, in point of fact, to material bodies possessing mass and other properties, it is difficult to rid ourselves of spatial and material associations. Consequently, although the soul is expressly called by philosophers an ' immaterial substance ', it continues to be thought of on the analogy of a physical thing. The ordinary idea of such a thing implies an ultimate core of reality which remains unchanged throughout the changes of its more superficial states or qualities ; and the soul- thing or soul-substance is similarly conceived as a perfectly simple and absolutely self-identical somewhat, which per- sists unchanged throughout the flux of our mental expe- rience. It is something to which these experiences are attached or referred — something which supports them, so to speak, in existence. Conceiving the soul thus as a change- less unit, the scholastic metaphysicians and their successors proceeded to argue from its unity and simplicity to its indiscerptibility or indestructibility, and to demonstrate, in short, its necessary immortality. If the essential charac- teristic of the soul is the simplicity of the hypothetical atom — atom being understood in the traditional sense of an ultimate and indivisible particle — then, clearly, it is proof against all the forces of destruction which dissolve other things into their elements. It cannot be decomposed, for it is not a compositum. The argument is, in a sense, purely verbal. It is but defining the soul as a unitary simple being, and the thing is done. But in point of fact the soul is neither one, nor simple, in the sense required ; and, if it were, its existence, however endless, would be absolutely without value. If we ask what was the origin of the belief and what were the motives which gave rise to it, there can be little doubt that the substantial soul represents a survival of the primi- tive animistic idea of a ghostly double which leaves the body