Phaedo. It cannot.
Or
rather, to speak exactly, Simmias,
no soul will have any wickedness at all, if the soul
is a harmony; for if a harmony is entirely harmony, it could have no part in
discord.
Certainly
not.
Then the soul, being
entirely soul, could have no part in wickedness.
How could it, if what we have said is
right?
According to this
argument, then, if all souls are by nature equally souls, all souls of all
living creatures will be equally good.
So it seems, Socrates,
said he.
And,
said Socrates, do you think that
this is true and that our reasoning would have come to this end, if the theory
that the soul is a harmony were correct?
Not in the least,
he replied.Well,
said Socrates, of all the parts that make up a man,
do you think any is ruler except the soul, especially if it be a wise
one?
No, I do
not.
Does it yield to the
feelings of the body or oppose them? I mean, when the body is hot and thirsty,
does not the soul oppose it and draw it away from drinking, and from eating when
it is hungry, and do we not see the soul opposing the body
in countless other ways?
Certainly.
Did we not
agree in our previous discussion that it could never, if it be a harmony, give
forth a sound at variance with the tensions and relaxations and vibrations and
other conditions of the elements which compose it, but that it would follow them
and never lead them?
Yes,
he
replied, we did, of course.
Well then, do we not now find that the soul acts in exactly the
opposite way, leading those elements of which it is said to consist and opposing
them
in almost everything through all our
life, and tyrannizing over them in every way, sometimes inflicting harsh and
painful punishments (those of gymnastics and medicine), and sometimes milder
ones, sometimes threatening and sometimes admonishing, in short, speaking to the
desires and passions and fears as if it were distinct from them and they from
it, as Homer has shown in the Odyssey when he says of
Odysseus:
He smote his breast, and thus
he chid his heart:
Hom. Od
20.17-18
Do you suppose that, when he wrote those
words, he thought of the soul as a harmony which would be led by the conditions
of the body, and not rather as something fitted to lead and rule them, and
itself a far more divine thing than a harmony?Endure it, heart, you have born worse
than this.
By Zeus, Socrates, the latter, I think.