the loss of his health or property which he has sacrificed to his lusts—but an evil greater far, which is the greatest and worst of all evils, and one of which he never thinks. What is it, Socrates? said Cebes. The evil is that when the feeling of pleasure or pain is most intense, every soul of man imagines the objects of this intense feeling to be then plainest and truest: but this is not so, they are really the things of sight. Very true. And is not this the state in which the soul is most enthralled by the body? How so? Why, because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always infected by the body; and so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple. Most true, Socrates, answered Cebes. And this, Cebes, is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave; and not for the reason which the world gives. Certainly not. 84 [Sidenote: _The first great argument concluded._] [Sidenote: The soul which has been emancipated from pleasures and pains will not be blown away at death.] Certainly not! The soul of a philosopher will reason in quite another way; she will not ask philosophy to release her in order that then released she may deliver herself up again to the thraldom of pleasures and pains, doing a work only to be undone again, weaving instead of unweaving her Penelope’s web. But she will calm passion, and follow reason, and dwell in the contemplation of her, beholding the true and divine (which is not matter of opinion), and thence deriving nourishment. Thus she seeks to live while she lives, and after death she hopes to go to her own kindred and to that which is like her, and to be freed from human ills. Never fear, Simmias and Cebes, that a soul which has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure from the body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing. [Sidenote: Simmias and Cebes have their doubts, but think that this is not the time to express them.]