, "seem to you to know these
things?"

"By no means."

"Do they remember, then, what they once learned?"

"Necessarily so."

"When did our souls receive this knowledge? Not surely, since we were
born into the world."

"Assuredly not."

"Before, then?"

"Yes."

"Our souls, therefore, Simmias, existed before they were in a human
form, separate from bodies, and possessed intelligence."

57. "Unless, Socrates, we receive this knowledge at our birth, for this
period yet remains."

"Be it so, my friend. But at what other time do we lose it? for we are
not born with it, as we have just now admitted. Do we lose it, then, at
the very time in which we receive it? Or can you mention any other
time?"

"By no means, Socrates; I was not aware that I was saying nothing to the
purpose."

"Does the case then stand thus with us, Simmias?" he proceeded: "If
those things which we are continually talking about really exist, the
beautiful, the good, and every such essence, and to this we refer all
things that come under the senses, as finding it to have a prior
existence, and to be our own, and if we compare these things to it, it
necessarily follows, that as these exist, so likewise our soul exists
even before we are born; but if these do not exist, this discussion will
have been undertaken in vain, is it not so? And is there not an equal
necessity both that these things should exist, and our souls also,
before we are born; and if not the former, neither the latter?"

58. "Most assuredly, Socrates," said Simmias, "there appears to me to be
the same necessity; and the argument admirably tends to prove that our
souls exist before we are born, just as that essence does which you have
now mentioned. For I hold nothing so clear to me as this, that all such
things most certainly exist, as the beautiful, the good, and all the
rest that you just now spoke of; and, so far as I am concerned, the case
is sufficiently demonstrated."

"But how does it appear to Cebes?" said Socrates; "for it is necessary
to persuade Cebes too."

"He is sufficiently persuaded, I think," said Simmias, "although he is
the most pertinacious of men in distrusting arguments. Yet I think he is
sufficiently persuaded of this, that our soul existed before we were
born. But whether, when we are dead, it will still exist does not appear
to me to have been demonstrated, Socrates," he continued; "but that
popular doubt, which Cebes just now mentioned, still sta