1849.] Proof from the Desire for Knowledge. 49 The composition is dramatic in its character, and the scene is laid in the prison of Socrates, where, condemned to drink the hemlock for having corrupted, as it was said, the Athenian youth by his philosophy -more especially by teaching them disrespect for the ancient divinities of their country, and persuading them to substitute new ones— he is waiting the return of the sacred galley, for the execution of his sentence. Under these afflictive circumstances, his friends and disciples gather around him to express their grief and their sympathy, and to offer whatever of consolation his situation may admit. To their surprise they find him calm and cheerful, exhibiting, in his manner and conversation, the same undisturbed serenity which they had been accustomed so much to admire in him, under the ordinary trials and vicissitudes of life. Instead of administering the aid and consolations which they have come to offer, they are soon seated in the attitude of disciples, drinking in, as usual, the lessons of wisdom that proceed from the lips of their great teacher. On the morning of the last day, after the approach of the sacred vessel returning from Delos had been announced, perceiving that his bravery and firmness were still unshaken, they beg to be informed by what considerations he is able to maintain this equanimity, this lofty elevation of soul, so superior to the circumstances by which he is surrounded. In reply, he assures them, that his support comes from the belief that, on departing this life, he shall enter upon a far higher and more glorious existencea belief which not only takes away all dread and fear of death, but awakens within him the liveliest desire to lay aside the encumbrance of the body, and commence that endless progress in virtue and knowledge, for which he thought the soul was destined. Again, they desire to know the grounds of this belief, which is so consolatory to him, and which, if well founded, would not only enable them to meet death with like equanimity, but also serve to mitigate their grief under the irreparable loss they were about to sustain in his removal from them. He then proceeds to unfold, in a series of familiar discourses, the reasons which inspired his own mind with the delightful hope of immortality, and which, if duly considered, he thought could not fail to awaken a similar hope in theirs. He argues the great truth, 1. From the capacity and desire of the soul for knowledge beyond what, in the present life, is attainable. All our knowledge in this life is phenomenal. Of things, we know nothing, and can know nothing. We may note the changes which take place within us. We may observe the events which are occurring around us. We may learn the order of these changes and these events. We may ascertain their conditions, their relations, their connections. We may resolve the VOL. VI. No. 21. 5 particular into the general, and from the general we may deduce the particular. But we cannot trace the phenomena back to the causes in which they originate, the essences from which they are evolved. Now the human mind is not satisfied with this merely relative and finite knowledge. It seeks for something higher and nobler. It aspires to grasp the absolute and the infinite, to comprehend things in their essence as well as their attributes, to know events in their causes as well as in their connections and their order; in a word, to penetrate into the depths of being, and there, beneath the ever-varying appearances, to recognise and apprehend the unchanging realities upon which they depend. This, however, it can never do, so long as it remains shut in on all sides by the body, with no other inlets to knowledge than consciousness and the five senses. Nor is this all. In the acquisition of those kinds of knowledge which lie within the reach of our present faculties, we meet with various impediments and hindrances, arising from our connection with the body. A large part of our time and strength is necessarily employed in making provision for its constantly returning wants, so that we have but little of either left for the labors of investigation. Its weaknesses, diseases, and infirmities also frequently disqualify us for that high intellectual effort which is necessary for the discovery and apprehension of truth. Moreover, the various passions and desires growing out of our corporeal natures, exert such an influence upon the mind, so blind its perceptions, distort its views, and bias its judgments, that we can rarely place full confidence in its most cautious decisions. But if the soul was made for knowledge, as its desires and capacities plainly indicate, and if in this life, owing to the restraints, impediments and hindrances of the body, it is unable to arrive at it, then it must be destined to survive the body, and to have another and higher life, in which it shall be freed from the clogs and connections at present encumbering it. 2. From the law of contraries. nate in and produce one another. These, in nature, mutually termiSleep begets vigilance, and vigilance sleep. Rest prepares for labor, and labor for rest. Growth leads to decay, and decay to new growth. Beauty springs from ugliness, and ugliness from beauty. Right grows out of wrong, and wrong out of right. Heat terminates in cold, and cold in heat; light in darkness, and darkness in light; unity in plurality, and plurality in unity; simplicity in complexity, and complexity in simplicity; strength in weakness, and weakness in strength; health in sickness, and sickness in health. In like manner life, leading to and terminating in death, death must, in turn, lead to and terminate in life. But this new life 1849.] Reminiscences.-Simple nature of the Soul. 51 cannot come from the body that decays and is soon wholly resolved into the elements from which it was formed. It must come, then, from the soul; and the soul must therefore survive death, must be immortal. 3. From the reminiscences of a previous existence, which the soul brings with it, into the present life. Every one is conscious of many ideas which he has not received through the medium of the senses, which he has not arrived at by any process of the imagination or the reason, which he has not acquired in any manner whatever, but which are immediately and spontaneously suggested by the mind itself. Such are our notions of the relations of number and quantity, which, expressed in language, we call axioms. Such are our conceptions of the necessary relations existing between matter and space, property and substance, cause and effect, God and the universe. Such are our apprehensions of right and wrong, of ought and ought not, of truth and justice and duty. These and many other similar ideas, suggested directly by the reason, and not derived through the senses, were believed, by Plato, to be the reminiscences of a former life-parts of that knowledge which the soul had acquired previous to its entering the body, but of which it retained, after that event, only certain dim and shadowy recollections. Indeed, according to the teaching of the great philosopher, that process by which the mind arrives at the truths of arithmetic and geometry, or by which it, in any instance, enlarges and perfects its own knowledge, is only the recalling of forgotten ideas -the recovering of what it once possessed, but has since lost through its connection with the body. Now these forgotten truths, which the mind thus brings with it into the present life, show that it must have had an existence previous to the commencement of that life, and afford ground for the presumption that it will also continue to exist after that life shall have ended. 4. From the simple and indivisible nature of the soul. It is only things compounded, gross and palpable, things which address the senses, which can be seen and felt and handled, that undergo dissolution. Of this kind are the different bodies formed of matter. They are continually changing. They do not remain the same, either in form or substance, for any two successive moments. The particles of which they are composed are in constant motion-passing continually from one body to another, without being permanently connected with any-entering, each moment, into new combinations, which are no sooner formed than laid aside for others, destined in turn to give place to still others. Whatever has such a nature, whatever is composed of such elements, must necessarily be mutable, must necessarily undergo change, decay, dissolution. But that, on the contrary, which is immaterial and indivisible, which cannot be seen or felt or handled, which does not address any of the senses, and which makes itself known only to the reason, that must be unchangeable, indissoluble, eternal. Such are truth, and goodness, and beauty. Such are duration, extension, and number. And such, too, is the soul, which is alone capable of apprehending these ideas, and which, like them, must be always the same-incapable of change, exempt from all liability to decay, beyond the possibility of dissolution, immaterial, immutable, immortal. 5. From the essential vitality of the soul. The body is, by itself, dead. It derives all its life, all its activity, all its sensibility, from the spirit which pervades and animates it. When this is withdrawn, the vital phenomena immediately cease to be manifested, and the body, like any other portion of matter, yielding to the power of the elements, is soon resolved into its original atoms. The case is analogous to that of temperature, which is not an essential property of bodies, but depends upon the heat or caloric diffused through them. When this escapes, they lose all their warmth, and are no longer capable of awakening any of the sensations dependent upon that quality. But although the bodies have become thus changed from the escape of the heat which pervaded them, this latter principle remains unaltered. It is still heat, and, as such, retains all its calorific properties. Nor can it, by any possibility, lose these properties. They are inherent. They belong to it essentially, and must therefore continue to belong to it until changed in its nature by the same power that created it. Were caloric to become cold, from that moment it would cease to be caloric. So is it with the soul. Possessing a living nature, being itself life and the source of life to the body, it cannot die. As material substances become cold from the loss of caloric, so the body dies from the loss of the spirit. But the spirit still lives and must continue to live so long as it may please God to preserve it in being. Dependent for its living powers on no outward causes, it can lose them from no outward changes. It can lose them only by losing its existence. "Vital in all its parts, It can but by annihilating die." Such are the reasonings by which Socrates, the wisest of uninspired mortals, the pride and glory of his own age and the admiration of all succeeding time, in the absence of that brighter and purer light which Christianity sheds upon the destinies of the race, lifted up his own faith and that of his disciples to the sublime truth of the soul's immortality. 1849.] Great Advances made in Knowledge. 53 Though not amounting, in his own estimation, to an absolute proof of the doctrine, he thought them sufficient, not only to deprive death of all its terrors, but to awaken in the mind of a good man, when approaching that event, the calm and cheerful hope of a better life. Such did he, at that moment, look forward to. He trusted that he was about to exchange the society of mortals for that of the gods, and that the mysteries pertaining to his own being and the being of the universe around him, which in this life he had endeavored in vain to penetrate, would thenceforward be laid open to him. He also thought these arguments were sufficient to impose upon every one the duty of cultivating his own spiritual nature, and preparing his soul, by the adornment of every virtue, for the more glorious existence awaiting it. In the neglect of this, what was intended by the gods as the most precious of all their boons, might prove to be, in fact, far from a blessing. In reviewing the reasons which are thus presented as the ground of belief in a future life, it should be remembered that since the time of Socrates great advances have been made in knowledge of the real and actual in every department of nature. At that epoch there were able mathematicians, acute dialecticians, subtle metaphysicians, but there were none who had any just ideas of things really existing-of the properties of matter, of the constitution of vegetable and animal bodies, of the form, structure, and physical arrangements of our world, or of the magnitudes, distances, and motions of the innumerable other worlds with which ours is more or less intimately connected. In respect to all these branches of positive knowledge, the philosophers of that day were mere children. They had not yet entered the true path of inquiry. Of the real character of the things by which they were surrounded, and of the world in which they lived, they were almost totally ignorant. It is only by recollecting this general fact, that we are able to account for the strange confounding of mere attributes, and abstract conceptions even, with actual existences, which we so frequently observe in their reasonings. Could they have brought their ideas to the simple but sure test of experiment, as we are now able to bring so large a portion of ours, they would not have suffered these blemishes to mar the perfection and beauty of their processes. We may add, that in presenting the above arguments, we have endeavored to give each with whatever additional clearness or force it may have gained from the light thrown upon it by the present more advanced state of the sciences. Justice, not less to the author than to the argument, required that we should do this. The first and by far the most important consideration adduced in proof of the soul's immortality, is its inextinguishable desire and un |