Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/368

ON PLATO'S PHAEDO. 367 ' soul ' ; the adoption of ' spirit ' rather than ' reason ' for the highest element in the soul indicating the abandonment of Greek intellectualism and the preference of the ethical and emotional to the intellectual. But the Christian psychology allowed the old Animism to spring up again, and our word ' spirit ' hovers between the meanings of the German ' Gfeist' and the English 'ghost'. Plato, then, does think of the soul as being that which is most real and permanent in a man, but he does not express this by making the soul a 'substance'. The category of substance, being applicable properly only to what we per- ceive in time and space, is an inadequate conception for soul, as Kant showed in fact, though he writes as if it were in a way a misfortune that we could not prove the soul to be a substance in relation to its experiences in the same sense in which in a physical body we distinguish the substance from the properties. 1 Self-conscious subject is a higher and better conception for soul ; and if the soul is called a substance, it can only be this that is meant. Lotze applies the term ' substance ' to the soul, but explains himself as only mean- ing by substance " everything which possesses the power of producing and experiencing effects, in so far as it possesses that power ". Again he says : " The fact of the unity of con- sciousness is eo ipso at once the fact of the existence of a sub- stance" (Melaphysic, pp. 426, 427, Engl. Transl.). Thus Lotze does not maintain that the soul is a substance, in the sense in which Kant denies that we can know it to be a substance, and according to which alone Teichmiiller seems to think the soul's immortality can be logically held, but only in a sense with which there is nothing in Plato to conflict. Plato, as we have already said, has not this conception of self-con- sciousness to work with ; but he considers the essential element in the soul to be its knowing rather than its merely existing. And so (if we are to yield to the inevitable tempta- tion of interpreting him in terms of modern controversies) if he is not yet Kantian, he is at least free from the meta- physical assumption against whose validity Kant argued. The argument which Socrates directs against the objection of Simmias that the soul is the Harmony of the body, and as such cannot outlast the destruction of the body, has been 1 Kant argued that identity of self-consciousness need not imply identity of substance. Thus the same movement is transmitted through a series of elastic balls ; the substances change, the movement is the same. And so conceivably the self-same consciousness might be transmitted through a series of substances. (Note on " Third Paralogism of Transcendental Psy- chology " in first edition.)