taneum as a public
benefactor. Not a smile from him; not a tremor. He elected
deliberately; he chose death; knowing well that, as things
stood, he could serve humanity in no other way so well. So he put
aside Crito's very feasible plan for his escape, and at the last
gathered his friends around him, and discoursed to them.

On Reincarnation. It was an old tradition, said he; and what
could be more reasonable than that the soul, departing to Hades,
should return again in its season:--the living born from the
dead, as the dead are from the living? Did not experience show
that opposites proceed from opposites? Then life must proceed
from, and follow, death. If the dead came from the living, and
not the living from the dead, the universe would at last be
consumed in death. Then, too, there was the doctrine that
knowledge comes from recollection; what is recollected must have
been previously known. Our souls must have existed then,
before birth. . . .

Why did he talk like that: thus _reasoning_ about reincarnation,
and not stating it as a positive teaching? Well; there would be
nothing new and startling about it, to the Greeks. They knew of
it as a teaching both of Pythagoras and of the Orphic Mysteries:
that is, those did who were initiates or Pythagoreans. But it
was not public teaching, known to the multitude; and except
among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired
its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge. (So scientific
discovery and the spread of education have impaired the vitality
now of Christian presentations of ethics.) So that to have
announced it positively, at that time, would have served his
purpose but little: men would have said, "We have heard all that
before; had he nothing better to give us than stale ideas from
the Mysteries or Pythagoras?" What he wanted to do was to take
it out of the region of religion, where familiarity with it had
bread an approach to contempt; and restate it robbed of that
familiarity, and clothed anew in a garb of sweet reasonableness.
So once more, and as ususal, he assumed ignorance, and approached
the whole subject in a quiet and rational way, thus: I do not
say that this is positively so; I do not announce it as a dogma.
Dogmas long since have lost their efficacy, and you must stand or
fall now by the perceptions of your own souls, not by what I or
any authority may tell you. But as reasoning human beings, does
it not appeal to you?