le philosophy. If he was in earnest about
any doctrine, it was the doctrine that all knowledge is
reminiscence. The following declarations are his. "Soul is older
than body." "Souls are continually born over again from Hades into
this life." "To search and learn is simply to revive the images of
what the soul saw in its pre existent state of being in the world
of realities."27 Why should we hesitate to attribute a sincere
belief in the metempsychosis to the acknowledged author of the
doctrine that the soul lived in another world before appearing
here, and that its knowledge is but reminiscence? If born from the
other world

27 Menexenus, 15.

once, we may be many times; and then all that is wanted to
complete the dogma of transmigration is the idea of a presiding
justice. Had not Plato that idea?

Thirdly, the doctrine of a judicial metempsychosis was most
profoundly rooted in the popular faith, as a strict verity,
throughout the great East, ages before the time of Plato, and was
familiarly known throughout Greece in his time. It had been
imported thither by Musaus and Orpheus at an early period, was
afterwards widely recommended and established by the Pythagoreans,
and was unquestionably held by many of Plato's contemporaries. He
refers once to those "who strongly believe that murderers who have
gone to Hades will be obliged to come back and end their next
lives by suffering the same fate which they had before inflicted
on others."28 It is also a remarkable fact that he states the
conditions of transmigration, and the means of securing exemption
from it, in the same way that the Hindus have from immemorial
time: "The soul which has beheld the essence of truth remains free
from harm until the next revolution; and if it can preserve the
vision of the truth it shall always remain free from harm," that
is, be exempt from birth; but "when it fails to behold the field
of truth it falls to the earth and is implanted in a body."29 This
statement and several others in the context corresponds precisely
with Hindu theology, which proclaims that the soul, upon attaining
real wisdom, that is, upon penetrating beneath illusions and
gazing on reality, is freed from the painful necessity of repeated
births. Now, since the Hindus and the Pythagoreans held the
doctrine as a severe truth, and Plato states it in the identical
forms which they employed, and never implies that he is merely
poetizing, we naturally conclude that he, t