herefore, should anything of this kind happen, it is
well to be on our guard.

_A._ You are right in that; but I will provide against any accident.

_M._ Have you any objection to our dismissing our friends the
Stoics--those, I mean, who allow that the souls exist after they have
left the body, but yet deny that they exist forever?

_A._ We certainly may dismiss the consideration of those men who admit
that which is the most difficult point in the whole question, namely,
that a soul can exist independently of the body, and yet refuse to
grant that which is not only very easy to believe, but which is even
the natural consequence of the concession which they have made--that if
they can exist for a length of time; they most likely do so forever.

_M._ You take it right; that is the very thing. Shall we give,
therefore, any credit to Pauaestius, when he dissents from his master,
Plato? whom he everywhere calls divine, the wisest, the holiest of men,
the Homer of philosophers, and whom he opposes in nothing except this
single opinion of the soul's immortality: for he maintains what nobody
denies, that everything which has been generated will perish, and that
even souls are generated, which he thinks appears from their
resemblance to those of the men who begot them; for that likeness is as
apparent in the turn of their minds as in their bodies. But he brings
another reason--that there is nothing which is sensible of pain which
is not also liable to disease; but whatever is liable to disease must
be liable to death. The soul is sensible of pain, therefore it is
liable to perish.

XXXIII. These arguments may be refuted; for they proceed from his not
knowing that, while discussing the subject of the immortality of the
soul, he is speaking of the intellect, which is free from all turbid
motion; but not of those parts of the mind in which those disorders,
anger and lust, have their seat, and which he whom he is opposing, when
he argues thus, imagines to be distinct and separate from the mind. Now
this resemblance is more remarkable in beasts, whose souls are void of
reason. But the likeness in men consists more in the configuration of
the bodies: and it is of no little consequence in what bodies the soul
is lodged; for there are many things which depend on the body that give
an edge to the soul, many which blunt it. Aristotle, indeed, says that
all men of great genius are melancholy; so that I should not have been
displeased