Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/366

 ON PLATO'S PHAEDO. 365 criticism, viz., that the soul is the unity of self-consciousness. But in truth the conception of self-conscious subject is equally absent from Plato's psychology with the conception of thinking substance. Rather we should regard Plato as having taken the Pythagorean mathematical conception of Unity to explain the soul, using the Pythagorean conception as suggestion and starting-point for his theory of ideas. The soul which is invisible, he argues, is akin to (ovyycvifrj the unchanging and incomposite, the invisible world of ideas, not the changing and manifold world of sense. Thus the soul is- likely to be at least more permanent than the body and nearly or altogether indissoluble. There may be good ground for holding that the view of the soul as a substance conjoined with the body is very much due to the language of Plato's Phaedo, as ordinarily understood and popularised through the medium of Stoicism, which tended more and more to assimilate or adopt Platonic phraseology. It is a view which gained currency especially among materialistic Christians like Tertullian, who regarded soul and body as two substances or things, both material, though the soul might be of finer matter, which could be joined together and separated, externally and as it were mechanically 1 a view which has naturally led to the ques- tion, Where is the soul? But Plato must not be made responsible for the crude dogmatism of unphilosophical writers who have been influenced directly or indirectly by his words. As we have seen, the soul's permanence of exis- tence is not by him made absolute (as in the metaphysical- substance-theory which Kant attacked) but is dependent on its affinity to the ideas, to the divine. This being so, as already suggested, it would be less erroneous to say that he thinks of the soul's existence as a necessary condition of knowledge, though he rather puts it in the reverse way. Indeed he sometimes speaks as if the philosopher, the man who knows, who reflects and lives in the true world of ideas, had a better chance of life apart from the body than the ordinary man whose soul is sunk amid the sensible and changing (Phaedo, 80 E-81 E). The true life of knowledge is not dependent upon material things, and the soul which lives- this true life can therefore exist independently of the body. Teichmuller (in his book Ueber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele) applies to every theory about the soul what in appearance is 1 Aristotle, De An. i., 3 fin., objects to the Pythagorean " tales " of trans- migration, that they make any soul fit any body. But the " tales " as Plato gives them always insist at least on some connexion in character between the soul and body.