eem to us to hold Plato's pages in the
full glare of the nineteenth century and read them in the
philosophic spirit of Bacon and Comte, instead of holding them in
the old shades of the Academy and pondering them in the marvelling
spirit of Pythagoras and Empedocles.

We are led by the following considerations to think that Plato
really meant to accredit the transmigration of souls literally.
First, he often makes use of the current poetic imagery of Hades,
and of ancient traditions, avowedly in a loose metaphorical way,
as moral helps, calling them "fables." But the metempsychosis he
sets forth, without any such qualification or guard, with so much
earnestness and frequency, as a promise and a warning, that we are
forced, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, to
suppose that he meant the statements as sober fact and not as
mythical drapery. As with a parable, of course we need not
interpret all the ornamental details literally; but we must accept
the central idea. And in the present case the fundamental thought
is that of repeated births of the soul, each birth trailing
retributive effects from the foregone. For example, the last four
chapters of the tenth book of the Republic contain the account of
Erus, a Pamphylian, who, after lying dead on the battle field ten
days, revived, and told what he had seen in the other state. Plato
in the outset explicitly names this recital an "apologue." It
recounts a multitude of moral and physical particulars. These
details may fairly enough be considered in some degreeas mythical
drapery, or as the usual traditional painting; but the essential
conception running through the account, for the sake of which it
is told, we are not at liberty to explain away as empty metaphor.
Now, that essential conception is precisely this: that souls after
death are adjudged to Hades or to heaven as a recompense for their
sin or virtue, and that, after an appropriate sojourn in those
places, they are born again, the former ascending, squalid and
scarred, from beneath the earth, the latter descending, pure, from
the sky. In perfect consonance with this conclusion is the moral
drawn by Plato from the whole narrative. He simply says, "If the
company will be persuaded by me, considering the soul to be
immortal and able to bear all evil and good, we shall always
persevere in the road which leads upwards."

Secondly, the conception of the metempsychosis is thoroughly
coherent with Plato's who