disarming suspicion that the finest poetry contains and conveys the finest philosophy. You will never let any man hold his right station: you would rank Solon with Homer for poetry. This is absurd. The only resemblance is in both being eminently wise. Pindar, too, makes even the cadences of his dithyrambics keep time to the flute of Reason. My tub, which holds fifty-fold thy wisdom, would crack at the reverberation of thy voice. _Plato._ Farewell. * * * * * _Diogenes._ I mean that every one of thy whimsies hath been picked up somewhere by thee in thy travels; and each of them hath been rendered more weak and puny by its place of concealment in thy closet. What thou hast written on the immortality of the soul goes rather to prove the immortality of the body; and applies as well to the body of a weasel or an eel as to the fairer one of Agathon or of Aster. Why not at once introduce a new religion, since religions keep and are relished in proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and out? and all of them must have one great crystal of it for the centre; but Philosophy pines and dies unless she drinks limpid water. When Pherecydes and Pythagoras felt in themselves the majesty of contemplation, they spurned the idea that flesh and bones and arteries should confer it: and that what comprehends the past and the future should sink in a moment and be annihilated for ever. 'No,' cried they, 'the power of thinking is no more in the brain than in the hair, although the brain may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not corporeal, it is not of this world; its existence is eternity, its residence is infinity.' I forbear to discuss the rationality of their belief, and pass on straightway to thine; if, indeed, I am to consider as one, belief and doctrine. _Plato._ As you will. _Diogenes._ I should rather, then, regard these things as mere ornaments; just as many decorate their apartments with lyres and harps, which they themselves look at from the couch, supinely complacent, and leave for visitors to admire and play on. _Plato._ I foresee not how you can disprove my argument on the immortality of the soul, which, being contained in the best of my dialogues, and being often asked for among my friends, I carry with me. _Diogenes._ At this time? _Plato._ Even so. _Diogenes._ Give me then a certain part of it for my perusal. _Plato._ Willingly. _Diogenes._ Hermes and Pallas! I wanted but a cubit of it, or at most a fathom, and thou art pulling it out by the plethron. _Plato._ This is the place in question. _Diogenes._ Read it. _Plato._ [_Reads._] 'Sayest thou not that death is the opposite of life, and that they spring the one from the other?' '_Yes._' 'What springs then from the living?' '_The dead._' 'And what from the dead?' '_The living._' 'Then all things alive spring from the dead.' _Diogenes._ Why the repetition? but go on.