Finally in the Cratylus,[204] where Socrates in discussing the origin and nature of language indulges in some serious fooling in connection with the name of the soul (ψυχή), he says that he imagines that those who first gave the soul its name “psyche,” (ψυχή), wished to express the truth that the soul when in the body is the source of life, and gives the body the ability to breathe and revive, and that when this power fails the body, then it perishes and dies. As for body, he reminds his interlocutor that that word (σῶμα) is variously interpreted, some saying that it is the grave (σῆμα) of the soul, which may be regarded as in a tomb during this present life; and he adds that the Orphic poets were probably the ones who invented the name, for they had the notion that the embodied soul is suffering punishment for sin, and that the body is a prison in which the soul is incarcerated until the penalty of sin is paid. Likewise in the Gorgias[205] Socrates refers to the same Orphic idea and quotes a verse from Euripides: “Who knows whether life be not death and death life?” That is, this death in life is due to the body which tends to strangle the soul. Only when the reasoning soul has escaped from this tomb of the flesh can it really live. This is the reason why the true philosopher is always pursuing death in the sense that he is trying to free his soul, so far as may be, from the concerns of the body that it may enjoy life at its best.[206] I have used Plato’s own words thus extensively for they set forth more eloquently than any words of mine the essential features of his doctrine. It requires no argument to show how great his debt to the Orphics and Pythagoreans was. But we cannot fail to see that he went far beyond his predecessors, for to their emotional belief in the immortality of the soul he gave an intellectual basis, by showing that the rational soul is of the same nature and substance as the Absolute, and therefore immortal and ever striving to apprehend the Absolute to which it belongs. In place of the external purifications and simple taboos which made up the Orphic course of life, Plato substitutes a noble discipline, reminding us of St. Paul—a discipline which has for its aim nothing less than the likening of man’s soul to God. When Plato teaches that man must begin his immortality here “by the practice of death,” we now see that he really means the practice of life; for life can only begin when the soul is released from its bodily tomb.