15. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul was not new to the
Greeks in the age of Socrates, but, like the unity of God, had a
foundation in the popular belief. The old Homeric notion of a gibbering
ghost flitting away to Hades; or of a few illustrious heroes enjoying
the isles of the blest; or of an existence divided between the two; or
the Hesiodic, of righteous spirits, who become guardian angels,--had
given place in the mysteries and the Orphic poets to representations,
partly fanciful, of a future state of rewards and punishments. (Laws.)
The reticence of the Greeks on public occasions and in some part of
their literature respecting this 'underground' religion, is not to be
taken as a measure of the diffusion of such beliefs. If Pericles in the
funeral oration is silent on the consolations of immortality, the
poet Pindar and the tragedians on the other hand constantly assume the
continued existence of the dead in an upper or under world. Darius
and Laius are still alive; Antigone will be dear to her brethren after
death; the way to the palace of Cronos is found by those who 'have
thrice departed from evil.' The tragedy of the Greeks is not 'rounded'
by this life, but is deeply set in decrees of fate and mysterious
workings of powers beneath the earth. In the caricature of Aristophanes
there is also a witness to the common sentiment. The Ionian and
Pythagorean philosophies arose, and some new elements were added to the
popular belief. The individual must find an expression as well as the
world. Either the soul was supposed to exist in the form of a magnet, or
of a particle of fire, or of light, or air, or water; or of a number or
of a harmony of number; or to be or have, like the stars, a principle
of motion (Arist. de Anim.). At length Anaxagoras, hardly distinguishing
between life and mind, or between mind human and divine, attained
the pure abstraction; and this, like the other abstractions of Greek
philosophy, sank deep into the human intelligence. The opposition of
the intelligible and the sensible, and of God to the world, supplied an
analogy which assisted in the separation of soul and body. If ideas were
separable from phenomena, mind was also separable from matter; if the
ideas were eternal, the mind that conceived them was eternal too. As
the unity of God was more distinctly acknowledged, the conception of the
human soul became more developed. The succession, or alternation of
life and death, had occurred to Heracleitus. The Eleatic Parmenides had
stumbled upon the modern thesis, that 'thought and being are the same.'
The Eastern belief in transmigration defined the sense of individuality;
and some, like Empedocles, fancied that the blood which they had shed
in another state of being was crying against them, and that for thirty
thousand years they were to be 'fugitives and vagabonds upon the earth.'
The desire of recognizing a lost mother or love or friend in the world