other guide brings them back again after many revolu tions of ages. Now this journey to the other world is not, as Aeschylus says in the Telephus, a single and straight path-no guide would be wanted for that, and no one could miss a single path; but there are many partings of the road, and windings, as I must infer from the rites and sacrifices which are offered to the gods below in places where three ways meet on earth. The wise and orderly soul is conscious of her situation, and follows in the path; but the soul which desires the body, and which as I was relating before, has long been fluttering about the lifeless frame and the world of sight, is after many struggles and many sufferings hardly and with violence carried away by her attendant genius, and when she arrives at the place where the other souls are gathered, if she be impure and have done impure deeds, or been concerned in foul murders and other crimes which are the brothers of these, and the works of brothers in crime-from that soul every one flees and turns away; no one will be her companion, no one her guide, but alone she wanders in extremity of evil until certain times are fulfilled, and then they are fulfilled, she is borne irresistibly to her own fitting habitation; as every pure and just soul which has passed through life in the company and under the guidance of the gods has also her own proper home.

"Now the earth has divers wonderful regions, and is indeed in nature and extent very like the notion of geographers, as I believe on the authority of one who shall be nameless."

"What do you mean, Socrates?" said Simmias. "I have myself heard many descriptions of the earth, but I do not know in what you are putting faith, and I should like to know."

There follows a long description of the earth and the regions of Tartarus which it is not necessary to quote,

and then comes the account of what happens to the dead.

"Such is the nature of the other world; and when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally conveys them, first of all, they have sentence passed upon them, as they have lived well and piously or not. And those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the river Acheron, and mount such conveyances as they can get, and are carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds and suffer the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved, and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts. But those who seem to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes-who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like-such are hurled into Tartarus which is suitable destiny, and they never come out. Those again who have committed crimes, which, although great, are not unpardonable-who in a moment of anger, for example, have done violence to a father or a mother, and have repented for the remainder of their lives, or who have taken the life of another under the like extenuating circumstancesthese are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year, but at the end of the year the wave casts them forth-mere homicides by way of Cocytus, parricides and matricides by way of Periphlegethon-and they are borne to the Acherusian lake, and there they lift up their voices and call upon the victims whom they have slain or wronged, to have pity on them, and to receive them, and to let them come out of the river into the lake. And if they prevail, then they come forth and cease from their troubles; but if not they are carried back again into Tartarus and from thence into the rivers unceasingly, until they obtain mercy from those whom

they have wronged; for that is the sentence inflicted upon them by their judges. Those also who are remarkable for having led holy lives are released from this earthly prison and go to their pure home which is above, and dwell in the purer earth (heaven in Plato's idea, or ether); and those who have duly purified themselves with philosophy, live henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer far than these, which may not be described, and of which the time would fail me to tell.

"Wherefore, Simmias, seeing all these things, what ought we not to do to obtain virtue and wisdom in this life? Fair is the prize and the hope great.”

Those familiar with the Christian scheme of rewards and punishments will recognize the similarity here with very common ideas still. But they may not notice the remarkable significance of the first part of the passage as it is similar to what Spiritualism has taught for many ages. It is that each soul has its "guide" or genius during its embodiment and that this guide meets the soul at death and leads it into its proper place in the next life. But there is here a hint at reincarnation in the doctrine that the soul obtains another guide to "bring it back again after many revolutions." In other respects the man familiar with the teachings of Spiritualism will recognize an old doctrine, and one wonders whether Plato had any acquaintance with mediumship. But Plato, still in the personality of Socrates, adds the following important statement.

"I do not mean to affirm that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true a man of sense ought hardly to say that. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of the kind is true."

In the Tenth Book of the Republic he gives a similar myth, that of Er, son of Armenius, but I shall not

quote it. It suffices to know that Plato regarded such a conception of the soul as mythical and imaginative, and we may then well ask what he regarded as the scientific conception.

Now Plato expressed his more scientific view in the doctrine of metempsychosis or transmigration, reincarnation being another term for the same. This theory was that the soul had to pass through one physical embodiment after another in its process of purification or salvation. During the period of Christian domination and the interpretation of Plato after the conceptions of his mythical views, the real nature of his reincarnation was not observed. It offers a clear picture to the mind when viewed in the ordinary way. But Plato did not have a mythical or imaginative conception of it. In the first place he held that memory was lost by death and subsequent reincarnations had no memory connection with the past. It was probably this conception of the process that led Christianity to eliminate reincarnation from its affiliations with Plato. But in any case we shall not fully understand Plato's real view of immortality unless we look at what he meant by the scientific view of it.

It would take a volume to explain this fully and especially to work out its philosophic basis, and I do not mean to undertake such a task. But its origin and meaning, I think, can easily be stated dogmatically. It must be found in the main trend of Greek ideas. What had impressed minds like Plato was the evidence of permanence and change in the world. Certain things were eternal, others were ephemeral. The evolutions of nature, in spite of change and death, showed the permanence of type. The habit of seeking the explanation of things in the material causes, or stuff, out of which things were made, and the observation that these combinations perished demonstrated the perishable nature of organic and complex things. But there was

always identity of type and the material cause of this was supposed to be the permanent element of things. The accidents perished. The essential properties were permanent. But the individual was transient. The eternal was the abstract universal, as it is sometimes called. This was merely the common properties that determined the type and that did not constitute the nature of the individual.

Hence Plato's eternal or immortality was nothing more than the permanent or repeated qualities that appeared in the perishing individual. He had no such conception of a future life as had haunted the minds of the Christian world. He employed the same language but it was tinctured with philosophy totally opposed to Christianity. But Plato, nevertheless, was a many sided man, and we cannot pick out his view of reincarnation as representing the whole of the ideas that floated through his speculative vision. There are touches here and there, besides the one that I have mentioned, which showed that he was often on the borderland of another philosophy and what could have deterred him from following up the clues no one knows, unless it was that the philosophic and scientific reaction against the primitive religions prevented attaching any value to phenomena that kept the mind on the boundaries of madness.

Aristotle affirmed the immortality of the soul, just as Plato did, but he qualified it so that students have to inquire into his meaning. It was the rational soul that survived while the animal and vegetable soul perished. This distinction requires us to examine what he meant by the "soul" in general, and what he meant by the rational "soul" or intellect in particular. If he had meant by the rational soul that self-consciousness survived but that the sensory consciousness perished, we might have understood him to mean very much what Mr. Myers held; namely, that the subliminal