Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/358

 ON PLATO'S PHAEDO. 357 no reference to this very obvious objection, that, if after death we are as little conscious of an identity with our present selves as we are now of any identity with a self before our birth, the immortality of the soul cannot matter to us. As Hume says : " The soul if immortal existed before birth : and if the former existence noways concerned us, neither will the latter " (Essay " On the Immortality of the Soul "). Yet the objection evidently was made in ancient times, because there is an attempted answer in a fragment of Aristotle's lost dialogue JEudemus, preserved to us by Proclus : " Aristotle," says Proclus, " tells us the reason why the soul coming hither from the other world forgets what she there has seen, but going hence remembers her experience here. Some who journey from health to sickness forget even their letters, but this happens to no one who passes from sickness to health. Now the life without the body, being the natural life of the soul, is like health, the life in the body like disease. AVhence it is that they who come from the other world forget what is there, but they who go thither remember what they experi- enced here " (Arist., 1480 b. 5, Fr. 35, Edit. Berol.). We can- not say how far Aristotle when he wrote the Eudemus may have seriously or half-seriously meant what he said. We cannot certainly decide, whether in his opinions about the soul he passed through an early ' Platonic ' stage (as Zeller thinks, Arist., p. 602), or whether he was writing a Platonic dialogue more or less as a literary exercise, or whether the dialogues, being (as Bernays thinks) merely "exoteric dis- courses," must not be taken as evidence of Aristotle's genuine philosophical views. We know of course from the f)e Anima that Aristotle held no doctrine of either individual or per- sonal immortality. But the passage quoted by Proclus may be taken as representing the answers which would have been made in a Platonic dialogue to an objector. It certainly agrees perfectly with the position of the Phaedo, according to which this life is a temporary imprisonment of the soul. 3. The idea of Metempsychosis or Transmigration has been more widely held than any other view about the destiny of the soul, and has even in modern times been regarded as that most capable of philosophical defence. Thus Hume says, in the Essay we have already quoted : " The Metem- psychosis is the only system of this kind that Philosophy can hearken to ". Hume may be writing ironically, maintaining the doctrine least acceptable to his enemies, the theologians, to be the most plausible. But no such suspicion attaches to disproved. He holds, however, as we shall see, that Plato's idealism pre- vents him maintaining even individual immortality.