of _Reminiscence_, or Recollection, based upon a theory of the
prior existence of the soul. In the _Meno_, already alluded to,
Socrates is representing as eliciting from one of Meno's slaves {143}
correct answers to questions involving a knowledge or apprehension of
certain axioms of the science of mathematics, which, as Socrates
learns, the slave had never been taught. Socrates argues that since he
was never taught these axioms, and yet actually knows them, he must
have known them before his birth, and concludes from this to the
immortality of the soul. In the _Phaedo_ this same argument is worked
out more fully. As we grow up we discover in the exercise of our
senses that things are equal in certain respects, unequal in many
others; or again, we appropriate to things or acts the qualities, for
example, of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness. At the same time we
recognise that these are _ideals_, to which in actual experience we
never find more than an approximation, for we never discover in any
really existing thing or act _absolute_ equality, or justice, or
goodness. In other words, any act of judgment on our part of actual
experiences consists in a measuring of these experiences by standards
which we give or apply to them, and which no number of experiences can
give to us because they do not possess or exemplify them. We did not
consciously possess these notions, or ideals, or _ideas_, as he prefers
to call them, at birth; they come into consciousness in connection with
or in consequence of the action of the senses; but since the senses
could not give these ideas, the process of {144} knowledge must be a
process of _Recollection_. Socrates carries the argument a step
further. "Then may we not say," he continues, "that if, as we are
always repeating, there is an absolute beauty and goodness and other
similar ideas or essences, and to this standard, which is now
discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our
sensations, and with this compare them--assuming these ideas to have a
prior existence, then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if
not, not? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed
before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and
if not the ideas, then not the souls."

In the _Phaedrus_ this conception of a former existence is embodied in
one of the _Myths_ in which Plato's imaginative powers are seen at
their highest. In it the sou