Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/364

ON PLATO'S PHAEDO. 363 1. There is an old tradition that souls come back from Hades and live again (cp. Meno, 81). This Plato explains and vindicates by the doctrine that opposites come from opposites (OVK ao6ev r etc rwv evavriwv ra evavria). Mr. Archer-Hind (p. 73) says that Plato appeals to the uni- formity of nature and has seized on the principle of the con- servation of energy, and " has applied to spirit the axiom which previous philosophers laid down for matter". Is not this misleading language ? Plato knows nothing of " laws of nature" in the modern scientific sense: it is not a formula with which he works. He does not get the conservation of energy as a " natural law " and read it into " the spiritual world ". The conservation of energy, if we can use the phrase at all to express a conception of Plato's, is to him a necessity of thought, a logical law, not a law of nature. Omnia mutantur, nil intent and Ex niliilo nihil fit were axioms arrived at from the logical impossibility of thinking either an absolute beginning or an absolute ending, not established like what we call laws of nature by a combination of hypo- thesis and experiment. And these axioms appear in Plato in the form : "If generation were in a straight line only, and there were no compensation (el pr) del dvraTroBiSoirj, &c.) or circle in nature, no turn or return of elements into one another, then all things at last would have the same form and pass into the same state, and there would be no more generation of them " (72 A, B). We can easily see that this principle by itself does not prove the immortality of the soul in the sense in which the term is generally understood. It would be accepted by the Democritean atomist and would be more than satisfied by Aristotle's conception of nature attain- ing immortality in the species, though not in the individual (De Anim., ii. 4). Yet, of course, if from other sources we can get any arguments for the indestructibility of the indi- vidual soul, this principle of the movement from life to death and death to life will fit in with them. This argument may perhaps be compared with Fechner's idea not that the idea is peculiar to Fechner that as the life (of the embryo) before birth is to the life in the body as it now is, so is this present life to that after death. 1 Yet there is a most noteworthy Geddes. Archer-Hind. IV. Objection of Simmias, that the soul is a Har- mony, refuted (85, 86, 9195). Objection of Cebes, that the soul may outlast the body but not be immortal, refuted (86 88). V. The soul partakes in the idea of life, and therefore III. cannot perish (100 B 107 B). 1 G. T. Fechner, On the Life after Death (Engl. Transl. by Wernekke), ch. i.