the body; but harmony is produced after the lyre is formed, so that the
two cases are totally different. And, further, there are various degrees
of harmony, but every soul is as much a soul as any other. But, then,
what will a person who holds this doctrine, that the soul is harmony,
say of virtue and vice in the soul? Will he call them another kind of
harmony and discord? If so, he will contradict himself; for it is
admitted that one soul is not more or less a soul than another, and
therefore one can not he more or less harmonized than another, and one
could not admit of a greater degree of virtue or vice than another; and
indeed a soul, being harmony, could not partake of vice at all, which is
discord.

Socrates, having thus satisfactorily answered the argument adduced by
Simmias, goes on to rebut that of Cebes,[21] who objected that the soul
might in time wear out. In order to do this, he relates that, when a
young man, he attempted to investigate the causes of all things, why
they exist and why they perish; and in the course of his researches,
finding the futility of attributing the existence of things to what are
called natural causes, he resolved on endeavoring to find out the
reasons of things. He therefore assumed that there are a certain
abstract beauty and goodness and magnitude, and so of all other things;
the truth of which being granted, he thinks he shall be able to prove
that the soul is immortal.

This, then, being conceded by Cebes, Socrates[22] argues that every
thing that is beautiful is so from partaking of abstract beauty, and
great from partaking of magnitude, and little from partaking of
littleness. Now, it is impossible, he argues, that contraries can exist
in the same thing at the same time; for instance, the same thing can not
possess both magnitude and littleness, but one will withdraw at the