ns allow.

Very good, Socrates, said Simmias; then I will tell you my difficulty,
and Cebes will tell you his. I feel myself, (and I daresay that you have
the same feeling), how hard or rather impossible is the attainment of
any certainty about questions such as these in the present life. And yet
I should deem him a coward who did not prove what is said about them to
the uttermost, or whose heart failed him before he had examined them
on every side. For he should persevere until he has achieved one of two
things: either he should discover, or be taught the truth about them;
or, if this be impossible, I would have him take the best and most
irrefragable of human theories, and let this be the raft upon which he
sails through life--not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some
word of God which will more surely and safely carry him. And now, as
you bid me, I will venture to question you, and then I shall not have to
reproach myself hereafter with not having said at the time what I think.
For when I consider the matter, either alone or with Cebes, the argument
does certainly appear to me, Socrates, to be not sufficient.

Socrates answered: I dare say, my friend, that you may be right, but I
should like to know in what respect the argument is insufficient.

In this respect, replied Simmias:--Suppose a person to use the same
argument about harmony and the lyre--might he not say that harmony is
a thing invisible, incorporeal, perfect, divine, existing in the lyre
which is harmonized, but that the lyre and the strings are matter and
material, composite, earthy, and akin to mortality? And when some one
breaks the lyre, or cuts and rends the strings, then he who takes this
view would argue as you do, and on the same analogy, that the harmony
survives and has not perished--you cannot imagine, he would say, that
the lyre without the strings, and the broken strings themselves which
are mortal remain, and yet that the harmony, which is of heavenly and
immortal nature and kindred, has perished--perished before the mortal.
The harmony must still be somewhere, and the wood and strings will decay
before anything can happen to that. The thought, Socrates, must have
occurred to your own mind that such is our conception of the soul;
and that when the body is in a manner strung and held together by the
elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, then the soul is the harmony or
due proportionate admixture of them. But if so, whenever the s