this, death cannot
be an evil?

_A._ As you please; but no one shall drive me from my belief in mortality.

_M._ I commend you indeed, for that; though we should not be too confident
in our belief of anything; for we are frequently disturbed by some subtle
conclusion; we give way and change our opinions even in things that are
more evident than this; for in this there certainly is some obscurity.
Therefore, should anything of this kind happen, it is well to be on our
guard.

_A._ You are right in that, but I will provide against any accident.

_M._ Have you any objection to our dismissing our friends the Stoics?
those, I mean, who allow that the souls exist after they have left the
body, but yet deny that they exist for ever.

_A._ We certainly may dismiss the consideration of those men who admit
that which is the most difficult point in the whole question, namely, that
a soul can exist independently of the body, and yet refuse to grant that,
which is not only very easy to believe, but which is even the natural
consequence of the concession which they have made, that if they can exist
for a length of time, they most likely do so for ever.

_M._ You take it right; that is the very thing: shall we give, therefore,
any credit to Panaetius, when he dissents from his master, Plato? whom he
everywhere calls divine, the wisest, the holiest of men, the Homer of
philosophers; and whom he opposes in nothing except this single opinion of
the soul's immortality: for he maintains what nobody denies, that
everything which has been generated will perish; and that even souls are
generated, which he thinks appears from their resemblance to those of the
men who begot them; for that likeness is as apparent in the turn of their
minds as in their bodies. But he brings another reason; that there is
nothing which is sensible of pain which is not also liable to disease; but
whatever is liable to disease must be liable to death; the soul is
sensible of pain, therefore it is liable to perish.

XXXIII. These arguments may be refuted; for they proceed from his not
knowing that while discussing the subject of the immortality of the soul,
he is speaking of the intellect, which is free from all turbid motion; but
not of those parts of the mind in which those disorders, anger and lust,
have their seat, and which he whom he is opposing, when he argues thus,
imagines to be distinct and separate from the mind. Now this resemblance
is more remarka