y way escaping this. The fact of a
full reward for all wisdom and justice, a full retribution for all
folly and vice, is asserted unequivocally in scores of passages,
most of them expressly connecting the former with the notion of an
ascent to the bright region of truth and intellect, the latter
with a descent to the black penal realm of Hades. Let the citation
of a single further example suffice. "Some souls, being sentenced,
go to places of punishment beneath the earth; others are borne
upward to some region in heaven."25 He proves the genuineness of
his faith in this doctrine by continually urging it, in the most
earnest, unaffected manner, as an animating motive in the
formation of character and the conduct of life, saying, "He who
neglects his soul will pass lamely through existence, and again
pass into Hades, aimless and unserviceable."26

The fourth and last step in this exposition is to show the
particular form in which Plato held his doctrine of future
retribution, the way in which he supposed the consequences of
present good and evil would appear hereafter. He received the
Oriental theory of transmigration. Souls are born over and over.
The banishment of the wicked to Tartarus is provisional, a
preparation for their return to incarnate life. The residence of
the good in heaven is contingent, and will be lost the moment they
yield to carelessness or material solicitations. The circumstances
under which they are reborn, the happiness or misery of their
renewed existence, depend on their character and conduct in their
previous career; and thus a poetic justice is secured. At the
close of the Timaus, Plato describes the whole animal kingdom as
consisting of degraded human souls, from "the tribe of birds,
which were light minded souls, to the tribe of oysters, which have
received the most remote habitations as a punishment of their
extreme ignorance." "After this manner, then, both formerly and

22 Statesman, 14, 15.

23 Gorgias, 165.

24 Republic, lib. vi. cap. i.

25 Phadrus, 61.

26 Timaus, 18.

now, animals transmigrate, experiencing their changes through the
loss or acquisition of intellect and folly." The general doctrine
of metempsychosis is stated and implied very frequently in many of
the Platonic dialogues. Some recent writers have tried to explain
these representations as figures of speech, not intended to
portray the literal facts, but merely to hint their moral
equivalents. Such persons s