y offering to Asclepius in token of his recovery.

*****

1. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has sunk deep into
the heart of the human race; and men are apt to rebel against any
examination of the nature or grounds of their belief. They do not like
to acknowledge that this, as well as the other 'eternal ideas; of
man, has a history in time, which may be traced in Greek poetry or
philosophy, and also in the Hebrew Scriptures. They convert feeling into
reasoning, and throw a network of dialectics over that which is really
a deeply-rooted instinct. In the same temper which Socrates reproves in
himself they are disposed to think that even fallacies will do no harm,
for they will die with them, and while they live they will gain by the
delusion. And when they consider the numberless bad arguments which have
been pressed into the service of theology, they say, like the companions
of Socrates, 'What argument can we ever trust again?' But there is a
better and higher spirit to be gathered from the Phaedo, as well as from
the other writings of Plato, which says that first principles should
be most constantly reviewed (Phaedo and Crat.), and that the highest
subjects demand of us the greatest accuracy (Republic); also that we
must not become misologists because arguments are apt to be deceivers.

2. In former ages there was a customary rather than a reasoned belief
in the immortality of the soul. It was based on the authority of the
Church, on the necessity of such a belief to morality and the order of
society, on the evidence of an historical fact, and also on analogies
and figures of speech which filled up the void or gave an expression
in words to a cherished instinct. The mass of mankind went on their
way busy with the affairs of this life, hardly stopping to think about
another. But in our own day the question has been reopened, and it is
doubtful whether the belief which in the first ages of Christianity
was the strongest motive of action can survive the conflict with a
scientific age in which the rules of evidence are stricter and the mind
has become more sensitive to criticism. It has faded into the distance
by a natural process as it was removed further and further from the
historical fact on which it has been supposed to rest. Arguments derived
from material things such as the seed and the ear of corn or transitions
in the life of animals from one state of being to another (the chrysalis
and the butterfly)