individual soul to the eternal being of the absolute soul. There has
been a clearer statement and a clearer denial of the belief in modern
times than is found in early Greek philosophy, and hence the comparative
silence on the whole subject which is often remarked in ancient writers,
and particularly in Aristotle. For Plato and Aristotle are not further
removed in their teaching about the immortality of the soul than they
are in their theory of knowledge.

17. Living in an age when logic was beginning to mould human thought,
Plato naturally cast his belief in immortality into a logical form. And
when we consider how much the doctrine of ideas was also one of words,
it is not surprising that he should have fallen into verbal fallacies:
early logic is always mistaking the truth of the form for the truth of
the matter. It is easy to see that the alternation of opposites is
not the same as the generation of them out of each other; and that the
generation of them out of each other, which is the first argument in
the Phaedo, is at variance with their mutual exclusion of each other,
whether in themselves or in us, which is the last. For even if we admit
the distinction which he draws between the opposites and the things
which have the opposites, still individuals fall under the latter class;
and we have to pass out of the region of human hopes and fears to a
conception of an abstract soul which is the impersonation of the ideas.
Such a conception, which in Plato himself is but half expressed, is
unmeaning to us, and relative only to a particular stage in the history
of thought. The doctrine of reminiscence is also a fragment of a former
world, which has no place in the philosophy of modern times. But Plato
had the wonders of psychology just opening to him, and he had not the
explanation of them which is supplied by the analysis of language and
the history of the human mind. The question, 'Whence come our abstract
ideas?' he could only answer by an imaginary hypothesis. Nor is it
difficult to see that his crowning argument is purely verbal, and is
but the expression of an instinctive confidence put into a logical
form:--'The soul is immortal because it contains a principle of
imperishableness.' Nor does he himself seem at all to be aware that
nothing is added to human knowledge by his 'safe and simple answer,'
that beauty is the cause of the beautiful; and that he is merely
reasserting the Eleatic being 'divided by the Pythago