Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/359

 358 D. G. RITCHIE : the famous passage in which Lessing at the close of his Erziehung dcs Menschengeschlechtes ( 93-100) says: " Why may not each individual man have been more than once present in this world? Is this hypothesis so ridiculous because it is the oldest ? . . . . It is well that I forget that I have already been here. The recollection of my previous condition would only let me make a bad use of my pre- sent. And what I must forget for the present, have I for- gotten for ever ? .... Is not all eternity mine ?" Plato's accounts in his different dialogues are certainly not easy to reconcile with each other even in important points. Thus (a) we may doubt how far, according to Plato, any human soul can ever exist without a body of some sort : per- haps the completely free existence is only an ideal, never quite attained, although approximated to by the philosopher. In the myth in the Phacdi-us (246 D) even the gods have a body. So in the Timaeus the created gods are compounded of body and soul. In the Laws however (x. 899 A) the in- corporeal existence of the soul (he is speaking especially of the soul of the gods) is put forward as an alternative. Again (b) in the Timaeus (41 D, ff.) it is said that the soul is neces- sarily implanted in bodily forms : whereas in the Phaedms (248) the descent into a body is spoken of as resulting from forgetfulness and vice, i.e., as being a punishment for sin. This difficulty may be put aside : it is only one form of the contradiction between the conception of Necessity and Free- dom which appears in all human thought, in all philosophies and in all theologies. Man falls by free-will, and yet the fall is regarded as necessary, (c) Zeller (Plato, Engl. Transl., p. 410, n. 55) has raised a difficulty about the migration of a human soul into lower animals. " How can man," he asks, " to whose nature the capability of forming concepts, accord- ing to Phaedrus 249 B, essentially belongs, become a beast ? " To this it might quite well be answered, within the limits of the Transmigration-doctrine, that Plato means that because man knows by universals, his soul must once, i.e., when " in heaven," have seen them : a soul which to begin with was a beast's, and so only a beast's, could not rise to be a man's. A soul may sink from among the gods to man, and then to beast, and rise again to be with the gods, only because at first it was with the gods. The rest of Zeller's objections may be met in a similar way. Thus, when he asks how can the life of the beast serve to purify the soul, the answer would be found in the conception of expiation by suffering. "When the soul came to choose again, it would have been taught the evil of the merely animal life. And even among beasts, as