time, which may be traced in Greek poetry or philosophy, and also in the
Hebrew Scriptures. They convert feeling into reasoning, and throw a
network of dialectics over that which is really a deeply-rooted instinct.
In the same temper which Socrates reproves in himself they are disposed to
think that even fallacies will do no harm, for they will die with them, and
while they live they will gain by the delusion. And when they consider the
numberless bad arguments which have been pressed into the service of
theology, they say, like the companions of Socrates, 'What argument can we
ever trust again?' But there is a better and higher spirit to be gathered
from the Phaedo, as well as from the other writings of Plato, which says
that first principles should be most constantly reviewed (Phaedo and
Crat.), and that the highest subjects demand of us the greatest accuracy
(Republic); also that we must not become misologists because arguments are
apt to be deceivers.

2. In former ages there was a customary rather than a reasoned belief in
the immortality of the soul. It was based on the authority of the Church,
on the necessity of such a belief to morality and the order of society, on
the evidence of an historical fact, and also on analogies and figures of
speech which filled up the void or gave an expression in words to a
cherished instinct. The mass of mankind went on their way busy with the
affairs of this life, hardly stopping to think about another. But in our
own day the question has been reopened, and it is doubtful whether the
belief which in the first ages of Christianity was the strongest motive of
action can survive the conflict with a scientific age in which the rules of
evidence are stricter and the mind has become more sensitive to criticism.
It has faded into the distance by a natural process as it was removed
further and further from the historical fact on which it has been supposed
to rest. Arguments derived from material things such as the seed and the
ear of corn or transitions in the life of animals from one state of being