or ever, and if existing for ever, must be
immortal?

Certainly.

That is the conclusion, I said; and, if a true conclusion, then the
souls must always be the same, for if none be destroyed they will not
diminish in number. Neither will they increase, for the increase of
the immortal natures must come from something mortal, and all things
would thus end in immortality.

Very true.

But this we cannot believe--reason will not allow us--any more than we
can believe the soul, in her truest nature, to be full of variety and
difference and dissimilarity.

What do you mean? he said.

The soul, I said, being, as is now proven, immortal, must be the
fairest of compositions and cannot be compounded of many elements?

Certainly not.

Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are
many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now
behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you
must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity;
and then her beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all
the things which we have described will be manifested more clearly.
Thus far, we have spoken the truth concerning her as she appears at
present, but we must remember also that we have seen her only in a
condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose
original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are
broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways,
and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and
stones, so that he is more like some monster than he is to his own
natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition,
disfigured by ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there
must we look.

Where then?

At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society
and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal
and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly
following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of
the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and
shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up
around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good
things of this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she
is, and know whether she has one shape only or many, or what her nature
is. Of her affection