in the scope of this book to indicate all the ways in
which Socrates leads his friends to the eternal. They all breathe the
same spirit. They all tend to show that man finds one thing when he
goes the way of transitory sense-perception, and another when his
spirit is alone with itself. It is to this original nature of spirit
that Socrates points his hearers. If they find it, they see with
their own spiritual eyes that it is eternal. The dying Socrates does
not prove the immortality of the soul, he simply lays bare the nature
of the soul. And then it comes to light that growth and decay, birth
and death, have nothing to do with the soul. The essence of the soul
lies in the true, and this can neither come into being nor perish. The
soul has no more to do with the becoming than the straight has with
the crooked. But death belongs to the becoming. Therefore the soul has
nothing to do with death. Must we not say of what is immortal, that it
admits of mortality as little as does the straight of the crooked?
Starting from this point, "must we not ask," adds Socrates, "that if
the immortal is imperishable, is it not impossible for the soul to
come to an end when death arrives? For from what has been already
shown, it does not admit of death, nor can it die any more than three
can be an even number."

Let us review the whole development of this dialogue, in which
Socrates brings his hearers to behold the eternal in human
personality. The hearers accept his thoughts, and they look into
themselves to see if they can find in their inner experiences
something which assents to his ideas. They make the objections which
strike them. What has happened to the hearers when the dialogue is
finished? They have found something within them which they did not
possess before. They have not merely accepted an abstract truth, but
they have gone through a development. Something has come to life in
them which was not living in them before. Is not this to be compared
with an initiation? And does not this throw light on the reason for
Plato's setting forth his philosophy in the form of conversation?
These dialogues are nothing else than the literary form of the events
which took place in the sanctuaries of the Mysteries. We are convinced
of this from what Plato himself says in many passages. Plato wished to
be, as a philosophical teacher, what the initiator into the Mysteries
was, as far as this was compatible with the philosophical manner of
commun