idea of what it is when it is in the body. For my own part, when I
reflect on the nature of the soul, it appears to me a far more
perplexing and obscure question to determine what is its character
while it is in the body--a place which, as it were, does not belong to
it--than to imagine what it is when it leaves it, and has arrived at
the free æther, which is, if I may so say, its proper, its own
habitation. For unless we are to say that we cannot apprehend the
character or nature of anything which we have never seen, we certainly
may be able to form some notion of God, and of the divine soul when
released from the body. Dicæarchus, indeed, and Aristoxenus, because it
was hard to understand the existence and substance and nature of the
soul, asserted that there was no such thing as a soul at all. It is,
indeed, the most difficult thing imaginable to discern the soul by the
soul. And this, doubtless, is the meaning of the precept of Apollo,
which advises every one to know himself. For I do not apprehend the
meaning of the God to have been that we should understand our members,
our stature, and form; for we are not merely bodies; nor, when I say
these things to you, am I addressing myself to your body: when,
therefore, he says, "Know yourself," he says this, "Inform yourself of
the nature of your soul;" for the body is but a kind of vessel, or
receptacle of the soul, and whatever your soul does is your own act. To
know the soul, then, unless it had been divine, would not have been a
precept of such excellent wisdom as to be attributed to a God; but even
though the soul should not know of what nature itself is, will you say
that it does not even perceive that it exists at all, or that it has
motion? On which is founded that reason of Plato's, which is explained
by Socrates in the Phædrus, and inserted by me, in my sixth book of the
Republic.

XXIII. "That which is always moved is eternal; but that which gives