These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as consciously reasoned knowledge (erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai).+ That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us--the doctrine namely of metempsychôsis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then, would be immortal (athanatos an hê psychê eiê)+ prospectively as well as in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth "over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all events, it seemed plain that "the soul is eternal. It is right therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that is to say, one does not remember, just now." Those notions were in the boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half- obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again now, so kindly, so firmly! Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the proper vocation of the philosophic teacher [67] to supervene with his encouraging questions. And there was another doctrine--a persuasion still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains-- "reminiscence." Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno, in the locus classicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain religious persons, priests and priestesses,