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 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'être 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.' 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 κóλaois and κálapois 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 xálapois, 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 κábaρois 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. " sown on the opyava Xpóvov, the planets and earth, were these masses of Soul-stuff in the fixed stars taken and differentiated into individual Souls. I agree with Zeller (Plato, pp. 390, 391, Engl. Transl.) in holding that the Souls are differentiated as individuals when they are assigned each one to its fixed star; and that it is these individual Souls which, on the completion of their speculative journey round the outer sphere of the Heaven, are transferred to the earth and planets in order to partake of their first birth, yéveσis πράτη, in the flesh. Mr. Archer-Hind asks (note, ad loc.) what is the purpose of this distribution of (as he supposes) masses of undifferentiated Soul-stuff among the fixed stars; and finds the explanation in Phaedrus, 252 C, D, where different gods are assigned as patrons for persons of various temperament. If the reader will turn to the passage in the Phaedrus referred to by Mr. Archer-Hind, he will find that the patron gods, i.e. stars, are not the fixed stars, but the planets, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun; and this is only in accordance with the prevailing belief—that it is from the planets that the varieties of temperament are, at least, chiefly derived. The purpose of the distribution of Souls (in my view, individual Souls, not masses of Soul-stuff) among the fixed stars is what Plato distinctly says it is—that these Souls may learn the Laws of the Universe—τηv Toû παντὸς φύσιν. X THE PHAEDRUS MYTH CONTEXT THE subject of the Phaedrus is "Rhetoric and Love." Socrates and the young Phaedrus take a walk together outside the Walls, and rest under a plane-tree by the bank of the Ilissus. There Phaedrus reads to Socrates a rhetorical piece, which he has just heard delivered by Lysias, in praise of the nonlover as distinguished from the lover. Socrates does not think much of the performance, and delivers a better speech on the same subject-in dispraise of the lover and praise of the non-lover. When he has finished his speech, he rises to go away, but is stopped by his daiμóviov, or Familiar Spirit, and stays to deliver a Recantation of his blasphemous dispraise of Love. The sanity of the non-lover, on which he had enlarged, is indeed a paltry thing, he now says, as compared with the madness of the lover. Madness is the gift of God. There are four kinds of divine madness: the first is prophetic inspiration as the name μavTIKń, derived from μaviký, μαντική, μανική, shows; the second is religious exaltation—the feeling of the μúorns, or initiated person; the third is poetic genius; and the fourth is the Love by which the immortal Soul is winged for her flight to Heaven. The Myth describes the birth and growth of this Love, which it presents as the nisus of the Soul after the True, the Beautiful, and the Good-in one word, as Philosophy. |