Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/198

 while he always listened sympathetically to those who said they had heard a voice, leads to a general surmise that the Dæmon may have been "not an apparition, but the perception of a voice or the interpretation of a word, which had occurred to him under extraordinary circumstances, just as in a dream there is no actual voice, but we have fancies and notions of words, and imagine that we can hear people speaking." Archidamas, who is narrating the dialogue and its events to Caphisias, here expounds his own views on the subject in the light of the foregoing explanation. He thinks that the voice, or the perception of a voice, which influenced Socrates, was the speech of a Dæmon, who, without the intermediation of audible sound, made this direct appeal to the mind of the pure and passionless sage; it was the influence of a superior intelligence and of a diviner soul, operating upon the soul of Socrates, whose calm and holy temper fitted him "to hear this spiritual speech which, though filling all the air around, is only heard by those whose souls are freed from passion, and its perturbing influence." Here we have the extreme religious view placed, as usual, in contrast with the sceptical rationalism of Galaxidorus, which has also been indirectly opposed by a narrative of the events, involving the hearing of a Dæmonic voice, connected with the death and burial of a Pythagorean philosopher, Lysis, from which it appears that the Pythagoreans believed that a few men only were under