on what principle do we deprive souls while in their bodies of that
faculty whereby the daemons know and declare beforehand things to be? It
is not likely that any power or new part accrues to souls when they
leave the body, which they did not possess before. Rather, they always
have it, but in a weak degree while they are intermingled with the body;
it is sometimes quite invisible and veiled, sometimes weak and dim, and,
as with those who see through a mist or who try to move in a marshy
place, inoperative and dull, demanding much attention to the virtue that
is in them, and much pains to raise and remove and purify the
obstructing veil. The sun when he chases the clouds away does not then
become bright; he is bright always, [Sidenote: 432] but to us through
the mist his light appears dim and struggling. Even so the soul does not
assume the prophetic power when it passes out of the body as out of a
cloud; it has it even now, but is blinded by its close admixture with
the mortal state. We should not be surprised or incredulous, if only
because we see the great energy which Memory, as we call the faculty in
the soul which answers to prophecy, exhibits, in preserving and
protecting things that are past, or rather things that now are,[184]
since of things past none is or has substance; all things [Sidenote: B]
come into being and at the same time perish, all actions, words, and
feelings, as time like a river bears each along. But this faculty of the
soul, I know not how, gets a grasp of them, and invests with appearance
and being that which is not present. The oracle given to the Thessalians
about Arne[185] bade them attend to
_That which a deaf man hears, a blind man sees._
But Memory is the hearing of things to which the ear is deaf, the seeing
of things to which the eye is blind. Wherefore, as I said, it is no
marvel that, as it grasps things which no longer are, so it should
anticipate things which have not yet come into being. For these touch it
more nearly, and with these it has sympathy; it confronts the future and
attaches itself [Sidenote: C] thereto, whereas it is quit of things past
and finished, saving only to remember them.
XL. ‘Having then this inborn power yet dimmed and hardly appearing,
souls nevertheless break out and are uplifted, in dreams some of them or
when nearing initiation, as the body becomes pure, and takes on a
temperature, so to speak, which is suitable, or whether it be that the
rational and intellectual part is relaxed and discharged from the
present things, and so with the irrational and imaginative they reach
towards futurity. That line of Euripides[186] is not true:
_The best of prophets he who guesses well._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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