rean numbers,'
against the Heracleitean doctrine of perpetual generation. The answer to
the 'very serious question' of generation and destruction is really
the denial of them. For this he would substitute, as in the Republic, a
system of ideas, tested, not by experience, but by their consequences,
and not explained by actual causes, but by a higher, that is, a more
general notion. Consistency with themselves is the only test which is to
be applied to them. (Republic, and Phaedo.)

18. To deal fairly with such arguments, they should be translated as
far as possible into their modern equivalents. 'If the ideas of men are
eternal, their souls are eternal, and if not the ideas, then not the
souls.' Such an argument stands nearly in the same relation to Plato and
his age, as the argument from the existence of God to immortality among
ourselves. 'If God exists, then the soul exists after death; and if
there is no God, there is no existence of the soul after death.' For
the ideas are to his mind the reality, the truth, the principle of
permanence, as well as of intelligence and order in the world. When
Simmias and Cebes say that they are more strongly persuaded of the
existence of ideas than they are of the immortality of the soul, they
represent fairly enough the order of thought in Greek philosophy. And we
might say in the same way that we are more certain of the existence
of God than we are of the immortality of the soul, and are led by the
belief in the one to a belief in the other. The parallel, as Socrates
would say, is not perfect, but agrees in as far as the mind in either
case is regarded as dependent on something above and beyond herself. The
analogy may even be pressed a step further: 'We are more certain of our
ideas of truth and right than we are of the existence of God, and
are led on in the order of thought from one to the other.' Or more
correctly: 'The existence of right and truth is the existence of God,
and can never for a moment be separated from Him.'

19. The main argument of the Phaedo is derived from the existence of
eternal ideas of which the soul is a partaker; the other argument of the
alternation of opposites is replaced by this. And there have not been
wanting philosophers of the idealist school who have imagined that the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul is a theory of knowledge, and
that in what has preceded Plato is accommodating himself to the popular
belief. Such a view can only be elic