er; or to be or have, like the stars, a principle
of motion (Arist. de Anim.). At length Anaxagoras, hardly distinguishing
between life and mind, or between mind human and divine, attained
the pure abstraction; and this, like the other abstractions of Greek
philosophy, sank deep into the human intelligence. The opposition of
the intelligible and the sensible, and of God to the world, supplied an
analogy which assisted in the separation of soul and body. If ideas were
separable from phenomena, mind was also separable from matter; if the
ideas were eternal, the mind that conceived them was eternal too. As
the unity of God was more distinctly acknowledged, the conception of the
human soul became more developed. The succession, or alternation of
life and death, had occurred to Heracleitus. The Eleatic Parmenides had
stumbled upon the modern thesis, that 'thought and being are the same.'
The Eastern belief in transmigration defined the sense of individuality;
and some, like Empedocles, fancied that the blood which they had shed
in another state of being was crying against them, and that for thirty
thousand years they were to be 'fugitives and vagabonds upon the earth.'
The desire of recognizing a lost mother or love or friend in the world
below (Phaedo) was a natural feeling which, in that age as well as in
every other, has given distinctness to the hope of immortality. Nor were
ethical considerations wanting, partly derived from the necessity of
punishing the greater sort of criminals, whom no avenging power of this
world could reach. The voice of conscience, too, was heard reminding
the good man that he was not altogether innocent. (Republic.) To these
indistinct longings and fears an expression was given in the mysteries
and Orphic poets: a 'heap of books' (Republic), passing under the names
of Musaeus and Orpheus in Plato's time, were filled with notions of an
under-world.

16. Yet after all the belief in the individuality of the soul after
death had but a feeble hold on the Greek mind. Like the personality of
God, the personality of man in a future state was not inseparably bound
up with the reality of his existence. For the distinction between the
personal and impersonal, and also between the divine and human, was far
less marked to the Greek than to ourselves. And as Plato readily passes
from the notion of the good to that of God, he also passes almost
imperceptibly to himself and his reader from the future life of the