Page:Cicero - de senectute (on old age) - Peabody 1884.djvu/96

58 day of his life. Why should I say more? So have I convinced myself, so I feel, that since such is the rapid movement of souls, such their memory of the past and foresight of the future, so many are the arts, so profound the sciences, so numerous the inventions to which they have given birth, the nature which contains all these things cannot be mortal; that as the soul is always active, and has no prime cause of motion inasmuch as it puts itself in motion, so it can have no end of motion, because it can never abandon itself; moreover, that since the nature of the soul is uncompounded, and has in itself no admixture of aught that is unequal to or unlike itself, it is indivisible, and if so, is imperishable; and that there is strong reason for believing that men know a great deal before they are born in the ease with which boys learn difficult arts, and the rapidity with which they seize upon innumerable things, so that they seem not to be receiving them for the first time, but to be recalling and remembering them. This is the sum of what I have from Plato. XXII. In Xenophon's narrative, the elder Cyrus says in dying: "Do not imagine, my beloved sons, that when I go from you I shall be nowhere, or shall cease to be. For while I was with you, you did not see my soul; but you inferred its exist-