the unvarying regularity of their life. Nor is it only
reason and arguments that have brought me to this belief, but the great
fame and authority of the most distinguished philosophers. I used to
be told that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans--almost natives of
our country, who in old times had been called the Italian school of
philosophers--never doubted that we had souls drafted from the universal
Divine intelligence. I used besides to have pointed out to me the
discourse delivered by Socrates on the last day of his life upon the
immortality of the soul--Socrates who was pronounced by the oracle at
Delphi to be the wisest of men. I need say no more. I have convinced
myself, and I hold--in view of the rapid movement of the soul, its vivid
memory of the past and its prophetic knowledge of the future, its many
accomplishments, its vast range of knowledge, its numerous discoveries
--that a nature embracing such varied gifts cannot itself be mortal.
And since the soul is always in motion and yet has no external source of
motion, for it is self-moved, I conclude that it will also have no end
to its motion, because it is not likely ever to abandon itself. Again,
since the nature of the soul is not composite, nor has in it any
admixture that is not homogeneous and similar, I conclude that it is
indivisible, and, if indivisible, that it cannot perish. It is again
a strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when mere
children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that
they are not then taking them in for the first time, but remembering and
recalling them. This is roughly Plato's argument.

22. Once more in Xenophon we have the elder Cyrus on his deathbed
speaking as follows:--

"Do not suppose, my dearest sons, that when I have left you I shall be
nowhere and no one. Even when I was with you, you did not see my soul,
but knew that it was in this body of mine from what I did. Believe then
that it is still the same, even though you see it not. The honours paid
to illustrious men had not continued to exist after their death, had
the souls of these very men not done something to make us retain our
recollection of them beyond the ordinary time. For myself, I never could
be persuaded that souls while in mortal bodies were alive, and died
directly they left them; nor, in fact, that the soul only lost all
intelligence when it left the unintelligent body. I believe rather that
when, by being liberated f