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Section 85

"Fine," said Simmias. "I will tell you my difficulty, and then Cebes will tell you what he does not accept in what was said. For it seems to me, Socrates, as it perhaps does to you, that to know clear truth about such things in this present life is either impossible or extremely difficult. But to fail to test what is said about them in every way, and to give up before exhausting oneself examining them from every side, is the mark of a very weak man. One must achieve one of two things in these matters: either learn or discover the truth; or, if that is impossible, take the best and most irrefutable of human doctrines and ride upon it like a raft, to sail through life—unless one could make the journey more safely and less perilously upon a stronger vessel, some divine revelation. So now I will not be ashamed to ask, since you say this, nor will I blame myself later for not speaking what I think now. Examining what has been said, both by myself and with Cebes, it does not seem entirely adequate." Socrates said, "Perhaps you are right, my comrade. But tell me, in what way is it inadequate?" "In this way," he said. "One could use the exact same argument about harmony, a lyre, and its strings. One could say that the harmony is something unseen, incorporeal, very beautiful and divine in the tuned lyre, while the lyre itself and its strings are bodily, composite, earthy, and akin to the mortal. Now, if someone were to smash the lyre or cut its strings, and another person insisted—using your argument—that the harmony must still exist and cannot have perished; for it would be impossible for the mortal lyre and its strings to still exist, while the harmony, which is akin to the divine and immortal, had perished before the mortal. He would claim the harmony itself must still exist somewhere, and that the wood and strings must rot before the harmony suffers anything. For I think, Socrates, you have noticed yourself that we consider the soul to be something very much like this. Our body is stretched and held together by hot, cold, dry, and wet things, and our soul is a mixture and harmony of these very things, when they are mixed properly and proportionally with one another. If the soul is indeed a harmony, it is clear that when our body is overly relaxed or stretched by diseases or other evils, the soul must immediately perish—even though it is most divine—just like other harmonies in music or in the works of craftsmen, while the remains of the body last a long time before rotting or burning. See what we should say to this argument, if someone claims that the soul is a mixture of bodily elements, and that it perishes first in what is called death."