On the whole, this version of the _Phædo_ is well and carefully executed. As a treatise, it is of the highest interest, if only from the firm belief it everywhere shows in the immortality of the soul--a belief which is nothing short of a real faith, and which seems almost to _labour_ at demonstration by varied and often very subtle arguments, as if the writer was half conscious, all the while, that demonstration in such a matter is quite beyond the province either of logic or physics. But 'dialectics' were thought equal to any difficulty. Says Cebes (p. 72, E.), 'Yes, I entirely think so; we are not walking in a vain imagination; but I am confident in the belief that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that _the living spring from the dead_; and that the souls of the dead are in existence, and that the good souls have a better portion than the evil.' In this remarkable passage we recognise the same sublime faith which gave birth to the ecstatic exclamation, 'I _know_ that my Redeemer liveth,' and also the germs of the doctrine of a Resurrection in τὸ ἀναβιώσκεσθαι τοὺς τεθνηκότας. No pagan writer before Plato had attained to such exalted ideas of the destiny of a good man, _to be with God_ in the life hereafter. He is full of hope, Socrates says (p. 63, B.), that he shall meet in the other world the wise and the good who have departed hence before him, and still more sure that he shall go to those blessed beings whom (with his usual acquiescence in the popular mythology) he calls ἀγαθοὶ δεσπόται. The doctrine of Resurrection is not really distinct from that of Metempsychosis, both being in fact held by Orphic or Pythagorean teachers (ὁ παλαιὸς λόγος, p. 70, C.), as was that of a final judgment, often insisted on by Plato, as by Pindar and Æschylus before him. The fixed notion with the ancient physicists was, that _soul_ (ψυχὴ, or vitality) was air (πνεῦμα, _spiritus_, _animus_, ἄνεμος),--for all turn upon this notion. When a person died, his last gasp was supposed to be the vital air or soul leaving the body, and departing into its kindred and eternal ether. The air, in fact, was thought to be full of souls; and each nascent form, whether of man or animal, in drawing its first breath, might inhale _a life_, _i.e._, the actual ψυχὴ that had animated some former body. Hence arose the notion of cycles of existence, of more or less duration, and of triple lives of probation on earth (Pind. ol. ii. 68). This doctrine of a return to earth after some period of residence in Hades is plainly affirmed, _Phæd._, p. 107, E., and 113, A., and _Phædr._, p. 249. One of the penalties of a misspent life was thought to be a detention on earth in an inferior and grovelling state of existence. 'If we tell the wicked' (says Socrates in _Theætetus_, p. 177, A.) 'that if they do not get rid of that cleverness of theirs, that place which is pure and free from evil will never receive them after they are dead, but that here on earth