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 said to be the text of Platonism. Perhaps, he says in the Gorgias, Euripides was right, and our life here is after all a death, and our body is the tomb or prison of the soul. And in the same spirit in which Socrates bids Crito not to be too careful about his burial, Plato prohibits in his "Laws" expensive funerals—"for the beloved one whom his relative thinks he is laying in the earth has but gone away to complete his destiny." The soul, he reiterates, really makes each of us to be what he is, and the body is only its image and shadow, and after death all that is divine in us goes on its way to other gods. Man himself is nothing more than a puppet or plaything of the gods, acting his part on the stage of life with more or less success, and "with some little share of reality."

His view of human nature, and of man's limited powers of knowledge, is best illustrated in his own famous allegory of the Cave, in the seventh book of the "Republic."

"Imagine," says Socrates, "a number of men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entire length of the cavern in which they have been confined from their childhood, with their necks and legs so shackled that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forward, because their chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them, and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners, with a low wall built along it, like