V. Plato is called by Emerson the synthesis of

Europe and Asia, and a decidedly oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color. He had traveled in Egypt and Asia Minor and among the Pythagoreans of Italy. As he died (b. c. 848) twenty years before Alexander's invasion of India he missed that opportunity of learning the Hindu ideas.
In the great " myth," or allegory, of Phsedrus, the classic description of the relation of the soul to the material world, what he says of the judgment upon mankind and their subsequent return to human or animal bodies coincides substantially with the Egyp- tian and Hindu religions. But his theory of pre- existence and of absolute knowledge seems to be oris;- inal. It grows out of his cardinal doctrine (and that of his master Socrates) concerning the reality and
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validity of truth, in opposition to the skepticism of contemporary sophists, who claimed that truth is mere subjective opinion — what each man troweth.
The Phaedrus myth is evidently suggested by the splendid religious procession which closed the Athenian festival. With gorgeous ceremony nearly the whole city's population participated in this crowning glory of their most sacred holiday. The procession wound through the finest streets of the city and then up the steep ascent of the Acropolis, whose precipitous in- cline kept the horses struggling for a foothold. That elevated site commanded a view of the busy city, the plains beyond, and the distant mountains and sea under the deep blue canopy of the Greek sky, pre- senting to the worshipers' sight a panorama of the changing aspects of human life and a type of heaven's repose. From this picture the poet-philosopher con- jures up a sublimer procession marshalled by the king of gods and men, moving through the heavenly orbits of the soul's progress, until they ascend the celestial dome itself, whence the soul may gaze upon the unspeakable glories of spiritual Truth.1
The Socrates of the dialogue first likens the soul to " a winged team and their charioteer. In the case of the gods both horses and charioteer are all good and of good breed ; those of the rest are mixed. And first of all, our charioteer drives a pair ; in the next place, the one is good and noble in itself and by breed, while the other is the opposite in both regards. And so the management of the chariot must needs be difficult and harassing. Just how the living being which is immortal is distinguished from that which is
1 See the article on " Pre-existence," in the Penn Monthly, September, 1877.
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mortal, I must endeavor to tell you. All that is soul lias the charge of that which is soulless, and trav the whole heaven, appearing now in one form, now in another. When perfect and possessed of wings, she moves in mid air and controls the whole world (hosmos). But if she lose her feathers, she is borne hither and thither until she lays hold of something that is fixed and solid, and there making her home, and taking to herself an earthly body, which seems to be self-moved by reason of the force she furnishes, soul and body are fastened together and come to be called mortal. . . . But let us take up the reason of that stripping off the feathers by which the soul is brought to its fall. It is as follows : The power of the wing is designed to bear up that which is heavy through mid air, where the race of the gods dwells, and of all that is corporeal this has most in common with the divine ; for the divine is the beautiful, the wise, the good, and everything of the sort, and by these the wing of the soul is nourished and groweth especially. But by what is base and evil, and what- ever else is the opposite of divine, it wastes away and is destroyed.
" Now Zeus, the great Leader in heaven, leads the van, driving a winged chariot, the marshal and guar- dian of all. And he is followed by the host of the gods and demons marshalled in eleven bands, for Hestia alone remaineth in the house of the gods, and those of the rest who belong to the number of The Twelve [Great Gods] lead on as captains of their companies, each in the order to which he has been assigned. Now there are within heaven many and blessed views and ways of passage in which the race of the happy gods pass to and fro, each of them doing
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his own work, and whoever can and will follows, for envy stands aloof from the choir of the gods.
" But whenever they go to banquet and to feast, then they proceed all together up towards the lofty vault of heaven. Now the chariots of the gods, being well balanced and obedient to the rein, proceed easily, but the rest with difficulty. For the horse that par- takes of evil slips downward, sinking and gravitating towards the earth, if he has not been properly broken in by the charioteer. Then it is that toil and ex- tremest conflict press hard upon the soul. But those souls which are called immortal, when they reach the summit, go forth and stand upon the back [the convex] of the heaven, and as they stand the revolu- tion [of the sphere] carries them around with it, and they behold the things which are outside of the heaven.
" Now the place which is above the heaven no earthly poet has ever praised as it deserves, nor ever will : but it is thus. For I must dare to tell the truth, especially when I am talking about Truth. The colorless, formless, and intangible Being which is Be- ing, is visible only to the Reason (nous), which is the governor of the soul. Round about this [pure Being] is located the true sort of knowledge. Since then the intelligence of God — like that of every soul in so far as it is to receive what best befits it — is nourished on Reason and pure Knowledge, in beholding at last the Being it loves it, and in contemplating the Truth is nourished and gladdened, until the revolution [of the sphere] brings it round again to its starting-place. And in this circuit it beholds Righteousness itself, be- holds Temperance itself, beholds Knowledge — not that which has origin, nor that which differs in the
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different things to which we ascribe existence, but Knowledge which has a real being in that which is Being indeed. And other equally real existences she beholds and is feasted upon, and then reentering the heaven she returns homeward. And when she has come thither, the charioteer, staying his horses at their stall, fodders them with ambrosia, and waters them with nectar. And this is the life of the gods.
" But as to the other souls, that which best follows God and is most like Him lifts up the head of the charioteer to the place outside the heaven, and is car- ried around the revolution with Him, disturbed indeed by the horses, and beholding the things which have true being with difficulty. Another lifts up the head at times, at others draws it in because compelled by the horses, and therefore beholds some and not others ; the rest one and all desire and follow that which is above, but not being able to reach it, they are carried around submerged beneath the heaven, they tread and fall upon each other, each trying to get precedence of the other. Noise, and rivalry, and sweat to the last degree ensue, whereupon many are maimed in their wings by the fault of their charioteers. And all of them, after long toil, depart uninitiated into the vision of Being, and when they have gone are fed on the food of opinion. Whence then that great desire of theirs to behold the plain of Truth ? Is it not because the pasturage which befits what is best in the soul happens to grow in that meadow, and the growth of the wing by which the soul soars is nourished with this?
" And this is this law of Adrastea [or Nemesis, the inevitable Order] : whatsoever soul has shared with God, in beholding any of those things that are true
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and real, is unharmed until the next period, and if she is always able to do this, is always unhurt. But should it happen that she cannot follow on to know, and by any mischance grows heavy through being filled with forgetfulness and faultiness, and through that heaviness loses her feathers and falls to the earth, then the lav/ is that this soul shall not take upon her the nature of any beast in the first generation [or birth], but the soul that has seen most shall come to the birth of a man who is to be a philosopher, or an artist, or of some musician and lover ; and the second, [to the birth] of a lawful king, or warrior and ruler ; the third, of a statesman, or of some financier, or man of affairs ; the fourth, of a toil-loving gymnast, or of some one who is to be a physician ; the fifth, the life of a soothsayer, or some hierophantic function ; to the sixth, the life of a poet, or of some other sort of mimic, will be suitable ; to the seventh, that of an artisan or a husbandman ; to the eighth, that of a sophist or a demagogue ; to the ninth, that of a tyrant. And whoever in any of these positions conducts him- self rightly receives a better lot ; but whoever be- haves otherwise, a worse.
" No soul arrives at that place from whence it came for ten thousand years, except it be that one who is honestly a philosopher, or a lover who has a share of philosophy. These in the third period of a thousand years, if thrice successively they have chosen this manner of life, and have thus received their wings, depart thither in the three thousandth year. But the rest, when they have finished the first life assigned them, undergo a judgment. And after the judgment, some of them proceed to the prison-house under the earth and receive punishment ; and the others, having
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been raised by the judgment to a place in the heaven, pass their time in a manner worthy of the life they lived in human form.
" And when, in the thousandth year, they come to a casting of lots and a choice of their second life, each chooses whichever she wishes. And thereupon a human soul comes to the life of a beast ; and one that has been a man becomes from a beast a man again.
" But that soul which has never beheld the Truth will never come into this [human] form ; the under- standing of general truth collected from many percep- tions into unity by rational thought is an essential of humanity. And this is the recollection of those things which our soul has once seen when accompanying God, and disdaining those things which we now speak of as being, and lifting up our heads to behold true Be- ing. Wherefore it is just that the intelligence of the philosopher alone receives wings ; for he is ever with all his might busied with the recollections of these things, occupation with which makes God what he is. And only the man who makes right use of such recol- lections, and thus continually attains initiation into perfect mysteries, becomes truly perfect ; and for giv- ing up human pursuits and becoming enwrapt in the divine, he is esteemed by the many as beside himself, for they fail to see that he is God-possessed.
. . . "As has been said, every human soul is by nature a beholder of Being, else she would not have entered into this form of life. But it is not easy for every soul to awaken those recollections which she brought from thence, or they may then have had but scant vision of what was there, or since they have fallen thence they may have had the mischance to be
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diverted by bad associations to that which is unjust, and to fall into forgetfulness of the holy things which they then beheld. A few are left, who retain enough of the recollection ; but whenever they behold any resemblance of what is there, they are struck with astonishment, and are no longer masters of them- selves ; but they know not why they are thus af- fected, because they have no adequate perception. But there is no brilliancy in those earthly like- nesses of justice and temperance, and whatever else is precious to the soul; for through obscure instru- ments, it is given with difficulty and to but few to draw near to those images and behold what manner of thing it is that they represent. But then it was permitted to behold Beauty in all its splendor, when along with the blessed chorus, we [philosophers] fol- lowing Zeus, others some other of the gods, we shared in the beatific vision and contemplation, and were in- itiated into mysteries which it is just to call the most perfect of all, and whose rapturous feast we kept in innocence, and while still inexpert of those evils which were awaiting us in a time still future. And we be- held visions innocent and simple and peaceful and happy, as if spectators at the mysteries, in pure array, ourselves pure, and without a sign upon us of this which we now carry about with us and call a body, and are bound thereto like an oyster to his shell. Let us indulge in these memories, whereby we are led to speak the longer from desire of the things which we then saw." l
We penetrate into the inmost secret of Plato's thought in the super-celestial plain, the dwelling-place of substantial ideas, the essential Truth, the absolute , 1 From Jowett's translation.
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knowledge, in which the pure Being holds the supreme place which we assign to God, the Hindu to Brahm, and the Egyptian to Osiris, but which the polytheist could not ascribe to his gods. Plato, like the in- itiated priests of India and Egypt, to whom the high- est deity was nameless, knew the objects of common worship were but exalted men, above whom was One whose nature was undisclosed to men, and of whom it was audacious childishness to assert human attributes. The Highest was the centre of those Realities dimly shadowed in earthly appearance, and Plato's pictorial representation of his thought is only a parable cloak- ing the essential principle that during the eternal past we have strayed from the real Truth through repeated lives into the present.
Of Plato's philosophy of preexistence, Professor "W. A. Butler says in his masterly lectures on Ancient Philosophy : " It is certain that with Plato the con- viction was associated with a vast and pervading prin- ciple, which extended through every department of nature and thought. This principle was the priority of mind to body, both in order of dignity and in order of time ; a principle which with him was not satisfied by the single admission of a divine preexist- ence, but extended through every instance in which these natures could be compared. A very striking example of the manner in which he thus generalized the principle of priority of mind to body is to be found in the well-known passage in the tenth book of his ' Laws,' in which he proves the existence of di- vine energy. The argument employed really applies to every case of motion and equally proves that every separate corporeal system is but a mechanism moved by a spiritual essence anterior to itself. The universe
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is full of gods, and the human soul is, as it were, the god or demon of the human body."