w they have certainly made a very fine acquisition in
learning that when the day of their death arrives, they will perish
entirely. And if that really is the case--for I say nothing either
way--what is there agreeable or glorious in it? Not that I see any
reason why the opinion of Pythagoras and Plato may not be true; but
even although Plato were to have assigned no reason for his opinion
(observe how much I esteem the man), the weight of his authority would
have borne me down; but he has brought so many reasons, that he appears
to me to have endeavored to convince others, and certainly to have
convinced himself.

XXII. But there are many who labor on the other side of the question,
and condemn souls to death, as if they were criminals capitally
convicted; nor have they any other reason to allege why the immortality
of the soul appears to them to be incredible, except that they are not
able to conceive what sort of thing the soul can be when disentangled
from the body; just as if they could really form a correct idea as to
what sort of thing it is, even when it is in the body; what its form,
and size, and abode are; so that were they able to have a full view of
all that is now hidden from them in a living body, they have no idea
whether the soul would be discernible by them, or whether it is of so
fine a texture that it would escape their sight. Let those consider
this, who say that they are unable to form any idea of the soul without
the body, and then they will see whether they can form any adequate
idea of what it is when it is in the body. For my own part, when I
reflect on the nature of the soul, it appears to me a far more
perplexing and obscure question to determine what is its character
while it is in the body--a place which, as it were, does not belong to
it--than to imagine what it is when it leaves it, and has arrived at
the free aether, which is, if I may so say, its proper, its own
habitation. For unless we are to say that we cannot apprehend the
character or nature of anything which we have never seen, we certainly
may be able to form some notion of God, and of the divine soul when
released from the body. Dicaearchus, indeed, and Aristoxenus, because it
was hard to understand the existence and substance and nature of the
soul, asserted that there was no such thing as a soul at all. It is,
indeed, the most difficult thing imaginable to discern the soul by the
soul. And this, doubtless, is the meaning of the