But first let us take care that we avoid a danger.
And what is that ? I said.
The danger of becoming misologists, he replied, which is one of the very worst things that can happen to us. For as there are misanthropists or haters of men, there are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises from the too great confidence of inexperience ; you trust a man and think him altogether true and good and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish ; and then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man, especially within the circle of his most trusted friends, as he deems them, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. I dare say that you must have observed this.
Yes, I said.
And is not this discreditable ? The reason is that a man, having to deal with other men, has no knowledge of them ; for if he had knowledge he would have known the true state of the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the interval between them.
How do you mean ? I said.
I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and very small, that nothing is more uncommon than a very large or a very small man ; and this applies generally to all extremes, whether of great and small, or swift and slow, or fair and foul, or black and white : and whether the instances you select be men or dogs or anything else, few are the extremes, but many are in the mean between them. Did you never observe this ?
Yes, I said, I have.
And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition of evil, the first in evil would be found to be very few ?
Yes, that is very likely, I said.
Yes, that is very likely, he replied ; not that in this respect arguments are like men — there I was led on by you to say more than I had intended ; but the point of comparison was that when a simple man who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think, at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind ; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or, indeed, of all things, which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ebb and flow.
That is quite true, I said.
Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and very melancholy too, if there be such a thing as truth or certainty or power of knowing at all, that a man should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general ; and forever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose the truth and knowledge of existence.
Yes, indeed, I said ; that is very melancholy.
Let us, then, in the first place, he said, be careful of admitting into our souls the notion that there is no truth or health or soundness in any arguments at all ; but let us rather say that there is as yet no health in us, and that we must quit ourselves like men and do our best to gain health — you and all other men with a view to the whole of your future life, and I myself with a view to death. For at this moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher ; like the vulgar, I am only a partisan. For the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. And the difference between him and me at the present moment is only this — that whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself ; to convince my hearers is a secondary matter with me. And do but see how much I gain by this. For if what I say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of the truth, but if there be nothing after death, still, during the short time that remains, I shall save my friends from lamentations, and my ignorance will not last, and therefore no harm will be done. This is the state of mind, Simmias and Cebes, in which I approach the argument. And I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of Socrates : agree with me, if I seem to you to be speaking the truth ; or if not, withstand me might and main, that I may not deceive you as well as myself in my enthusiasm, and, like the bee, leave my sting in you before I die.
And now let us proceed, he said. And first of all let me be sure that I have in my mind what you were saying. Simmias, if I remember rightly, has fears and misgivings whether the soul, being in the form of harmony, although a fairer and diviner thing than the body, may not perish first. On the other hand, Cebes appeared to grant that the soul was more lasting than the body, but he said that no one could know whether the soul, after having worn out many bodies, might not perish herself and leave her last body behind her ; and that this is death, which is the destruction not of the body but of the soul, for in the body the work of destruction is ever going on. Are not these, Simmias and Cebes, the points which we have to consider ?
They both agreed to this statement of them.
He proceeded : And did you deny the force of the whole preceding argument, or of a part only ?
Of a part only, they replied.
And what did you think, he said, of that part of the argument in which we said that knowledge was recollection only, and inferred from this that the soul must have previously existed somewhere else before she was enclosed in the body ? Cebes said that he had been wonderfully impressed by that part of the argument, and that his conviction remained unshaken. Simmias agreed, and added that he himself could hardly imagine the possibility of his ever thinking differently about that.