ordinary conception, and recollection is not thought; for recollection relates to man as a sensuous “this,” and not as a universal. The essential nature of the coming forth of knowledge is hence here mingled with the individual, with ordinary conception, and knowledge here appears in the form of soul, as of the implicitly existent reality, the one, for the soul is still only a moment of spirit. As Plato here passes into a conception the content of which has no longer the pure significance of the universal, but of the individual, he further depicts it in the form of a myth. He represents the implicit existence of mind in the form of a pre-existence in time, as if the truth had already been for us in another time. But at the same time we must remark that he does not propound this as a philosophic doctrine, but in the form of a saying received from priests and priestesses who comprehend what is divine. Pindar and other holy men say the same. According to these sayings, the human soul is immortal; it both ceases to be, or, as men say, it dies, and it comes again into existence, but in no way perishes. “Now if the soul is immortal and often reappears” (metempsychosis), “and if it has seen that which is here as well as in Hades,” (in unconsciousness) “and everything else, learning has no more meaning, for it only recollects what it has already known.”[20] Historians seize upon this allusion to what is really an Egyptian idea, and a sensuous conception merely, and say that Plato has laid down that such and such was the case. But Plato made no such statement whatever; what he here says has nothing to do with Philosophy, and more particularly nothing to do with his philosophy, any more than what afterwards is said regarding God. β. In other Dialogues this myth is further and more strikingly developed; it certainly employs remembrance in its ordinary sense, which is that the mind of man has in past time seen that which comes to his consciousness as the true and absolutely existent. Plato’s principal effort is, however, to show through this assertion of recollection, that the mind, the soul, thought, is on its own account free, and this has to the ancients, and particularly to the Platonic idea, a close connection with what we call immortality of the soul.