ed to
resemble as well as to differ from the Phaedo. While the first notion of
immortality is only in the way of natural procreation or of posthumous
fame and glory, the higher revelation of beauty, like the good in the
Republic, is the vision of the eternal idea. So deeply rooted in
Plato's mind is the belief in immortality; so various are the forms of
expression which he employs.

As in several other Dialogues, there is more of system in the Phaedo
than appears at first sight. The succession of arguments is based on
previous philosophies; beginning with the mysteries and the Heracleitean
alternation of opposites, and proceeding to the Pythagorean harmony and
transmigration; making a step by the aid of Platonic reminiscence, and
a further step by the help of the nous of Anaxagoras; until at last we
rest in the conviction that the soul is inseparable from the ideas,
and belongs to the world of the invisible and unknown. Then, as in
the Gorgias or Republic, the curtain falls, and the veil of mythology
descends upon the argument. After the confession of Socrates that he is
an interested party, and the acknowledgment that no man of sense will
think the details of his narrative true, but that something of the kind
is true, we return from speculation to practice. He is himself more
confident of immortality than he is of his own arguments; and the
confidence which he expresses is less strong than that which his
cheerfulness and composure in death inspire in us.

Difficulties of two kinds occur in the Phaedo--one kind to be explained
out of contemporary philosophy, the other not admitting of an entire
solution. (1) The difficulty which Socrates says that he experienced in
explaining generation and corruption; the assumption of hypotheses which
proceed from the less general to the more general, and are tested by
their consequences; the puzzle about greater and less; the resort to the
method of ideas, which to us appear only abstract terms,--these are to
be explained out of the position of Socrates and Plato in the history of
philosophy. They were living in a twilight between the sensible and
the intellectual world, and saw no way of connecting them. They
could neither explain the relation of ideas to phenomena, nor their
correlation to one another. The very idea of relation or comparison was
embarrassing to them. Yet in this intellectual uncertainty they had a
conception of a proof from results, and of a moral truth, which rem