n is awakened into life and consciousness by the sight of the
things which resemble them on earth. The soul evidently possesses such
innate ideas before she has had time to acquire them. This is proved by
an experiment tried on one of Meno's slaves, from whom Socrates elicits
truths of arithmetic and geometry, which he had never learned in this
world. He must therefore have brought them with him from another.

The notion of a previous state of existence is found in the verses
of Empedocles and in the fragments of Heracleitus. It was the natural
answer to two questions, 'Whence came the soul? What is the origin of
evil?' and prevailed far and wide in the east. It found its way into
Hellas probably through the medium of Orphic and Pythagorean rites and
mysteries. It was easier to think of a former than of a future life,
because such a life has really existed for the race though not for the
individual, and all men come into the world, if not 'trailing clouds of
glory,' at any rate able to enter into the inheritance of the past. In
the Phaedrus, as well as in the Meno, it is this former rather than a
future life on which Plato is disposed to dwell. There the Gods, and men
following in their train, go forth to contemplate the heavens, and are
borne round in the revolutions of them. There they see the divine forms
of justice, temperance, and the like, in their unchangeable beauty, but
not without an effort more than human. The soul of man is likened to
a charioteer and two steeds, one mortal, the other immortal. The
charioteer and the mortal steed are in fierce conflict; at length the
animal principle is finally overpowered, though not extinguished, by the
combined energies of the passionate and rational elements. This is one
of those passages in Plato which, partaking both of a philosophical
and poetical character, is necessarily indistinct and inconsistent. The
magnificent figure under which the nature of the soul is described has
not much to do with the popular doctrine of the ideas. Yet there is one
little trait in the description which shows that they are present to
Plato's mind, namely, the remark that the soul, which had seen truths
in the form of the universal, cannot again return to the nature of an
animal.

In the Phaedo, as in the Meno, the origin of ideas is sought for in a
previous state of existence. There was no time when they could have been
acquired in this life, and therefore they must have been recovered fr