sometimes fairly given up and handed over to the realm of faith. The
perplexity should not be forgotten by us when we attempt to submit the
Phaedo of Plato to the requirements of logic. For what idea can we form of
the soul when separated from the body? Or how can the soul be united with
the body and still be independent? Is the soul related to the body as the
ideal to the real, or as the whole to the parts, or as the subject to the
object, or as the cause to the effect, or as the end to the means? Shall
we say with Aristotle, that the soul is the entelechy or form of an
organized living body? or with Plato, that she has a life of her own? Is
the Pythagorean image of the harmony, or that of the monad, the truer
expression? Is the soul related to the body as sight to the eye, or as the
boatman to his boat? (Arist. de Anim.) And in another state of being is
the soul to be conceived of as vanishing into infinity, hardly possessing
an existence which she can call her own, as in the pantheistic system of
Spinoza: or as an individual informing another body and entering into new
relations, but retaining her own character? (Compare Gorgias.) Or is the
opposition of soul and body a mere illusion, and the true self neither soul
nor body, but the union of the two in the 'I' which is above them? And is
death the assertion of this individuality in the higher nature, and the
falling away into nothingness of the lower? Or are we vainly attempting to
pass the boundaries of human thought? The body and the soul seem to be
inseparable, not only in fact, but in our conceptions of them; and any
philosophy which too closely unites them, or too widely separates them,
either in this life or in another, disturbs the balance of human nature.
No thinker has perfectly adjusted them, or been entirely consistent with
himself in describing their relation to one another. Nor can we wonder
that Plato in the infancy of human thought should have confused mythology
and philosophy, or have mistaken verbal arguments for real ones.

5. Again, believing in the immortality of the soul, we must still ask the