already described, but is of a different character. It treats of a former
rather than of a future life. It represents the conflict of reason aided
by passion or righteous indignation on the one hand, and of the animal
lusts and instincts on the other. The soul of man has followed the company
of some god, and seen truth in the form of the universal before it was born
in this world. Our present life is the result of the struggle which was
then carried on. This world is relative to a former world, as it is often
projected into a future. We ask the question, Where were men before birth?
As we likewise enquire, What will become of them after death? The first
question is unfamiliar to us, and therefore seems to be unnatural; but if
we survey the whole human race, it has been as influential and as widely
spread as the other. In the Phaedrus it is really a figure of speech in
which the 'spiritual combat' of this life is represented. The majesty and
power of the whole passage--especially of what may be called the theme or
proem (beginning 'The mind through all her being is immortal')--can only be
rendered very inadequately in another language.

The myth in the Statesman relates to a former cycle of existence, in which
men were born of the earth, and by the reversal of the earth's motion had
their lives reversed and were restored to youth and beauty: the dead came
to life, the old grew middle-aged, and the middle-aged young; the youth
became a child, the child an infant, the infant vanished into the earth.
The connection between the reversal of the earth's motion and the reversal
of human life is of course verbal only, yet Plato, like theologians in
other ages, argues from the consistency of the tale to its truth. The new
order of the world was immediately under the government of God; it was a
state of innocence in which men had neither wants nor cares, in which the
earth brought forth all things spontaneously, and God was to man what man
now is to the animals. There were no great estates, or families, or
private possessions, nor any traditions of the past, because men were all