(2) But again, in at least one phase of his thinking, Plato pictures the purification of the imperfect soul as effected, of at least as begun, not in a succession of “places” of an extensionally small but organic kind, bodies, but in a “place” of an extensionally larger but inorganic sort,--the shore of a lake, where the soul has to wait. “The Acherusian lake is the lake to the shores of which the many go when they are dead; and, after waiting an appointed time, which to some is longer and to others shorter, they are sent back to be born as animals.” Here we evidently get a survival of the conception, predominant in Homer, of a pain-and-joyless Hades, but limited here to the middle, the imperfect class of souls, and followed, in their case, by transmigration, to which alone, apparently, purification is directly attached. In the same Dialogue we read later on: “Those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill … go to the river Acheron, and are carried to the lake; and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds … and are absolved and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts.” Here we have, evidently, still the same “many” and the same place, the shores of the Acherusian lake, but also an explicit affirmation of purification effected there, for this purification is now followed directly, not by re-incarnation, but by the ultimate happiness in the soul’s original and fundamentally congenial “place.” And this scheme is far more conformable to Plato’s fundamental position: for how can bodies, even lower than the human, help to purify the soul which has become impure precisely on occasion of its human body?--We can see how the Christian Purgatorial doctrine derives some of its pictures from the second of these parallel passages; yet that the “longer or shorter waiting” of the first passage also enters into that teaching,--especially in its more ordinary modern form, according to which there is, in this state, no intrinsic purification.