past. To Plato such facts as these afforded copious proofs of the prior
existence of the soul, and strong foundations for a faith in its future
life.

[Sidenote: The double immortality, past and future.]

Thus Plato's doctrine of the immortality of the soul implies a double
immortality; the past eternity, as well as that to come, falls within
its scope. In the national superstition of his time, the spiritual
principle seemed to arise without author or generator, finding its
chance residence in the tabernacle of the body, growing with its growth
and strengthening with its strength, acquiring for each period of life a
correspondence of form and of feature with its companion the body,
successively assuming the appearance of the infant, the youth, the
adult, the white-bearded patriarch. The shade who wandered in the
Stygian fields, or stood before the tribunal of Minos to receive his
doom, was thought to correspond in aspect with the aspect of the body at
death. It was thus that Ulysses recognized the forms of Patroclus and
Achilles, and other heroes of the ten years' siege; it was thus that the
peasant recognized the ghost of his enemy or friend. As a matter of
superstition, these notions had their use, but in a philosophical sense
it is impossible to conceive anything more defective.

[Sidenote: Relations of the past and future to man.]

Man differs from a lifeless body or a brute in this, that it is not with
the present moment alone that he has to deal. For the brute the past,
when gone, is clean gone for ever; and the future, before it approaches,
is as if it were never to be. Man, by his recollection, makes the past a
part of the present, and his foreknowledge adds the future thereto,
thereby uniting the three in one.

[Sidenote: Criticism on the Ideal theory.]

Some of the illustrations commonly given of Plato's Ideal theory may
also be instructively used for showing the manner in which his facts are
dealt with by the methods of modern science. Thus Plato would say that
there is contained in every acorn the ideal type of an oak, in
accordance with which as soon as suitable circumstances occur, the acorn
will develop itself into an oak, and into no other tree. In the act of
development of such a seed into its final growth there are, therefore,
two things demanding attention, the intrinsic character of the seed and
the external forces acting upon it. The Platonic doctrine draws such a
distinction emphatically; i