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of the True Statesman is, indeed, nothing but the apprehension of the Social Good as determined by the Cosmic Good. The method of the Republic was to write the goodness of the Individual large in the goodness of the State. But we must not stop here. The goodness of the State must be written large in that of the Universe: written, not, indeed, in characters which the scientific faculty can at last be sure that it has deciphered, but in the hieroglyphics, as it were, of a mysterious picture-writing which, although it does not further definite knowledge, inspires that Wonder which is the source of Philosophy, that Fear which is the beginning of Wisdom.

But, secondly, Timaeus goes far beyond the mere recommendation of a study of Cosmology for the sake of the better realisation of the political end. He tells the company, in this Myth, that the political end is not the only end which man may propose to himself. The life of the State and of Man as member of the State, however it may be ennobled and made to seem more choice-worthy by being viewed as part of the blessed life of the One, Only Begotten, Living Creature which is the express image of God, is nevertheless an end in which it is impossible to acquiesce. The best-ordered State cannot escape the Decline and Fall which await all human institutions; and the life of the citizen is incomparably shorter than that of his earthly city. If Man is to have any abiding end it must be in a life of the Soul which lies beyond death, outside the κύκλος τῆς γενέσεως. Γ

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To be remembered, and even to be worshipped, by future generations on earth is an "immortality" which can satisfy no man; and still less satisfying is the "immortality absorption in the Spirit of the Universe. The only immortality which can satisfy a man, if he can only believe in it, is a personal life after bodily death, or, it may be, after many bodily deaths, when he shall return to his "native star,"

1 "In Plato the State, like everything else upon Earth, is essentially related to the other world, whence all truth and reality spring. This is the ultimate Source of his political idealism. . . . The State, therefore, serves not only for moral education, but also as a preparation for the higher life of the disembodied spirit into which a beautiful glimpse is opened to us at the end of the Republic' (Zeller, Aristotle, ii. 212, Engl. Transl.; cf. Rohde, Psyche, ii. 293). The latter half of the Republic, as has been pointed out, is not before us in the Timaeus.

and be there for ever what the grace of God and his own efforts after κáðapois have made him.

This third sort of immortality obviously holds the field against the two other sorts mentioned; for, first, it is worth believing, which the second sort, however easy to believe, is not; and, secondly, it is more worth believing than the first sort, because it is a true "immortality "—a personal life for ever and ever,—whereas the first sort, consisting in the lapsing memory of the short-lived individuals of a Race itself destined in time to disappear from the earth, is not a true immortality, however comforting it may be to look forward to it as a brief period in the true immortality. Lastly, the third sort of immortality, being worth believing, is, in addition to that, easy to believe, because no evidence drawn from the Natural World can ever be conclusive against it. It is not like a miracle alleged to have occurred in the Natural World in opposition to the recognised Laws of that World. No objective Law of Nature is violated by the personal immortality of the disembodied Soul. The evidence against it, as for it, is subjective only. Does belief in personal immortality comfort men? If it does, they will be found believing a few, fervently, the majority, perhaps, in passive fashion.

So far I have tried to express the thought and feeling which seem to be in unison with the note of the Timaeus Myth. But there is another type of thought and feeling, on this great subject, which we cannot ignore, although the Timaeus Myth ignores it entirely. We must remember that for the Buddhist East personal immortality has little or no attraction. Final sleep seems to be the ideal for a large portion of the human race.

It would be foolish, then, to say that belief in personal immortality is at all a subjective necessity. All that we are entitled to say is that, as a matter of fact, this belief has prevailed among the races which hitherto have taken the lead in the world. Whether or no it is bound to remain prevalent it is impossible to say. The overworked and the indolent, in modern Europe, easily acquiesce in-nay, gladly embrace, the ideal of eternal sleep; and even for some energetic constructive minds the time comes when they simply wish to rest from their labours, contented to think,

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or hope, that the mundane system, political, industrial, or scientific, for which they have worked hard, will continue to prosper when they are gone. The ideal of work or duty

done is the ideal which, in the West, now competes most seriously with the ideal of personal immortality :—

ὦ ξεῖν ̓ ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

II

(Timaeus, 42, and 91 D ff.)

The lower animals were created after (1) man, and (2) woman, to embody the Souls of human beings who had lived unrighteously.

Here, as elsewhere in Plato,—in the Phaedrus Myth; in the Myth of Er; in Phaedo, 81, 82; in Laws, ix. 872 E,— the raison d'étre of metempsychosis is κόλασις and κάθαρσις, Correction and Purification-its raison d'être also in the

Orphic teaching and in Buddhism. But we must not suppose that belief in metempsychosis is necessarily associated with the notions of κόλασις and κάθαρσις. Metempsychosis recommended itself to the imagination of man as Natural History long before it was used for an ethical purpose.1 The notion that there is a fixed number of souls always in existence-perhaps a fixed number of bodies-and that all the people successively born on earth are dead people who return from the place of spirits or from their graves, by some law of nature in the presence of which sexual intercourse has quite a subordinate place, is a notion which prevails widely among primitive races, and is entertained merely as an item of Natural History as a theory of generation, and has no ethical import.

Now it seems to me that the difference between men and beasts which belief in metempsychosis as process of kóλaois and κálaρois makes little of, is one which belief in metempsychosis as mode of generation is bound to regard as very

1 The ideas of retribution and purification seem to be entirely absent from Irish transmigration stories: see The Voyage of Bran, by Myer and Nutt, ii. 96.

real. It may conduce to the κálapois of a man's Soul that it should be incarnate afterwards in the body of a lion or a swan; but if mere generation is all that is effected by metempsychosis it is natural to suppose that the Souls re-incarnated in one generation of men are those which appeared on earth in a former generation of men, and will reappear in some future generation of men. Where a beast becomes a man or a man a beast, and the change is not conceived as promoting xá@apois, we have something exceptionalnot a case of the normal metempsychosis by which the human race is propagated, but rather a case of metamorphosis due to some particular act of magic, like Circe's, or some other extraordinary cause like that which changed the daughters of Pandion, one into a nightingale, and the other into a swallow. The notion of a man's being able to transform himself or another man into a beast by magic is as primitive and as deeply rooted as that of metempsychosis, but in itself has nothing in common with the notion of metempsychosis.

I would therefore distinguish sharply between belief in the reappearance, in human bodies, of departed human soulsor perhaps I ought to say the reappearance of departed human beings, Soul and Body not being regarded as separate entities -the normal generative process by which the human race is maintained on earth, and belief in the sudden bodily transformation, by magic or other cause, of men into beasts and beasts into men—an exceptional occurrence.

Having distinguished two beliefs which I think ought to be distinguished, I am ready to admit considerable "contamination" of each by the other, even before the advent of the notion of ráðapois as an end served by re-incarnation of human Souls, not only in human bodies, but also in the bodies of beasts.

We see how natural it is that such " contamination should take place, if we consider the mental condition which expresses itself in the Beast-Fable. It is a state of chronic dream-consciousness. The Beast-Fable is a dream in which men and beasts talk and act together; in which the transformation of a man into a beast, or a beast into a man, is taken as a matter of course; in which beasts, in short, are at once men and beasts.

The mental condition which expresses itself in the dream of the Beast-Fable easily lends itself to belief in bodily transformations of men into beasts, and beasts into men, effected supernaturally by magicians; or sometimes taking place naturally, so that one who was a man in a former generation is born again in this generation as a beast, and may reappear in a future generation as a man. Here the originally independent notions of metempsychosis and metamorphosis begin to "contaminate" each other. Metamorphosis, which is properly the supernatural bodily transformation of a man into a beast, or a beast into a man, appears as the re-birth, in due natural course, of a beast as a man, or a man as a beast metamorphosis has insinuated itself into the place occupied by metempsychosis, and has become a sort of metempsychosis; while metempsychosis, originally a kind of re-birth of departed human beings as human beings, now includes the notion of departed human beings reappearing in new births as beasts, and of beasts as human beings.1

As soon as the notions of retribution and purification came to be connected with the notion of metempsychosis, the modification produced in that notion by the notion of magical metamorphosis would be greatly accentuated: to be born again as a beast would in many cases seem to be more appropriate, from the point of view of retribution and purification, than to be born again in the natural course as a human being.

III

Timaeus, 41 D, ξυστήσας τὸ πᾶν διεῖλε ψυχὰς ἰσαρίθμους τοῖς ἄστροις, ἔνειμέ θ' ἑκάστην πρὸς ἕκαστον.

Susemihl (Genet. Entw. ii. 369) and Archer-Hind (Tim. ad loc.) think that the Creator assigned to the fixed stars, not already differentiated individual Souls, but masses of the, as yet, undifferentiated Soul-stuff which he had compounded in the bowl. Only when the time came that Souls should be

1 The case of Tuan Mac Cairill, in Irish legend, may be quoted as illustrating the manner in which the ideas of metamorphosis, metempsychosis, and pregnancy without male intervention, run into one another. Tuan became, in succession, a Stag, a Bear, an Eagle, and a Salmon. The Salmon was boiled and eaten by a woman, who thereupon conceived, and brought forth Tuan again in human form. See The Voyage of Bran, by Myer and Nutt, ii. 76.

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