which we are now
fettered."21

To suppose all this employed by Plato as mere fancy and metaphor
is to commit an egregious error. In studying an ancient author, we
must forsake the modern stand point of analysis, and envelop
ourselves in the ancient atmosphere of thought, where poetry and
science were as indistinguishably blended in the personal beliefs
as oxygen and nitrogen are in the common air. We have not a doubt
that Plato means to teach, literally, that the soul was always
immortal, and that in its anterior states of existence, in the
realm of ideas on high, it was in the midst of those essential
realities whose shifting shadows alone it can behold in its lapsed
condition and bodily imprisonment here. That he closely
intertwisted ethical with physical theories, spiritual destinies
with insphering localities, the fortunes of men with the
revolutions of the earth and stars, is a fact which one can hardly
read the Timaus and fail to see; a fact which continually
reappears. It is strikingly shown in his idea of the consummation
of all things at regular epochs determined by the recurrence of a
grand

20 Republic, lib. vii. cap. 1 4.

21 Phadrus, 56-58, 63, 64.

revolution of the universe, a period vulgarly known under the name
of the "Platonic Year."22 The second point, therefore, in the
present explanation of Plato's doctrine of another life, is the
conception that there is in the empyrean a glorious world of
incorruptible truth, beauty, and goodness, the place of the gods,
the native haunt of souls; and that human souls, having yielded to
base attractions and sunk into bodies, are but banished sojourners
in this phenomenal world of evanescent shadows and illusions,
where they are "stung with resistless longings for the skies, and
only solaced by the vague and broken reminiscences of their former
state."

Thirdly, Plato taught that after death an unerring judgment and
compensation await all souls. Every soul bears in itself the plain
evidence of its quality and deeds, its vices and virtues; and in
the unseen state it will meet inevitable awards on its merits. "To
go to Hades with a soul full of crimes is the worst of all
evils."23 "When a man dies, he possesses in the other world a
destiny suited to the life which he has led in this."24 In the
second book of the Republic he says, "We shall in Hades suffer the
punishment of our misdeeds here;" and he argues at much length the
absolute impossibility of in an