Whatever we may think of Plato’s different proofs, they have furnished the armories of apologists almost down to our own day. In antiquity they were constantly repeated, in whole or in part, not only by devoted members of the Academy and later by the Neoplatonists, but by the Eclectics and others, like Cicero in the first book of his Tusculan Disputations, and at the close of Scipio’s Dream; they were borrowed by the Stoics, and some eight hundred years after Plato had first formulated them, they were employed by St. Augustine in his tract _De Immortalitate Animae_. The religious intuition of the Orphic and Pythagorean then was given a rational basis by Plato, and thus supported, proved so convincing to antiquity that Plato’s views were the most important of all in supporting belief in the soul’s immortality. They were in large measure taken up by the Christian church, and, as has been often shown, the doctrine of a spiritual immortality apart and free from the body, was of immense service to primitive Christianity, when the hope of the early return of Christ to found a new kingdom on earth faded before the lengthening years. To Plato himself his belief in immortality was of the greatest moment, for the whole fabric of his ethical and political philosophy is built against the background of that doctrine. And indeed we should all grant much validity to the argument that the human reason, though weak and limited, is one with the divine and infinite reason; otherwise the human could have no understanding of the divine. But when it is further argued that if the human reason is of the same nature with the divine, it must be eternal and immortal, we may reply that, even so, we are not convinced that the individual soul must therefore have a conscious and separate existence through all eternity; its identity may be lost by absorption into the universal reason, the supreme idea. This is a matter on which Plato nowhere delivers a clear opinion, but his thought is so plainly centered on the individual soul that we can hardly believe that it was possible for him to conceive of the soul’s personality ever being lost in the Absolute.