[78]
I used to be told that Pythagoras and his disciples,
—who were almost fellow-countrymen of ours, inasmuch as they were formerly called “Italian
philosophers,”—never doubted that our souls were
emanations of the Universal Divine Mind. Moreover, I had clearly set before me the arguments
touching the immortality of the soul, delivered on the
last day of his life by Socrates, whom the oracle of
Apollo had pronounced the wisest of men. Why
multiply words? That is my conviction, that is what
I believe—since such is the lightning-like rapidity of
[p. 91]
the soul, such its wonderful memory of things that
are past, such its ability to forecast the future, such
its mastery of many arts, sciences, and inventions,
that its nature, which encompasses all these things,
cannot be mortal; and since the soul is always
active and has no source of motion because it is
self-moving, its motion will have no end, because
it will never leave itself; and since in its nature the
soul is of one substance and has nothing whatever
mingled with it unlike or dissimilar to itself, it
cannot be divided, and if it cannot be divided it
cannot perish. And a strong argument that men's
knowledge of numerous things antedates their
birth is the fact that mere children, in studying
difficult subjects, so quickly lay hold upon innumerable things that they seem not to be then learning
them for the first time, but to be recalling and
remembering them. This, in substance, is Plato's
teaching.1
1 Cf. Plato, Phaedo 72 E-73 B, 78–80; Phaedrus 245 c.
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