Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1902-02-07

honor of sepulture; but that our legions, as have remarked in my
Antiquities, have often gone with cheerful and undaunted mind to
that place from which they believed that they should never return.
Shall, then, wel-instructed old men be afraid of that which young
men, and they not only ignorant, but mere peasants, despised3 On
the whole, as it seems to me indeed, a safety of all pursuits causes
a safety of life. There are pursuits peculiar to boyhood; do there
fore young men regret the loss of them2 There are also some of
early youth; does that now settled age, which is called middle life,
seek after these? There re also some of this period; neither are
they looked for by old age. There are some final pursuits of old
age; accordingly, as the pursuits of the earlier parts of life fall into
disuse, SO also do those of old age, and when this has taken place,
safety Of life brings on the seasonable period of death.
Indeed do not see why should not venture to tell you what
l myself think concerning death, because fancy see it SO much
the more clearly, in proportion a 1 am less distant from it. am
persuaded that your fathers, Pubhus Scipio and Caius LRlius, men
of the greatest eminence and very dear friends of mine, are living;
and that life too which alone deserves the name of life. For whilst
we are shut up in this prison of the body we are fulfilling as it we're
the function and painful task of destiny, for the heaven-born soul has
been degraded from its dweling-place above, and as it were buried in
the earth, a situation uncongenial to its divine and immortal nature.
But | believe that the immortal gods have shed souls into human
bodies, that beings might exist who might tend the earth, and by
contemplating the order Of the heavenly bodies, might initiate it in
the manner and regularity of lives. Nor have reason and argument
alone influenced me thus to believe, but likewise the high name and
authority of the greatest philosophers. used to hear that Pytha-
goras and the Pythagoreans, who were all but our neighbors, who
were formerly called the Italian philosophers, had no doubt that we
possess souls derived from the universal divine mind. Moreover, the
arguments were conclusive to me, which Socrates delivered on the
last day of his life concerning the immortality of the soul,-he who
was pronounced by the oracle of Apollo the wisest of all men. But
why say more? have thus persuaded myself, such is my belief
that since such is the activity of our souls, so tenacious their men,
DRY of things past, and their sagacity regarding things future-so
many arts, SO many sciences, so many discoveries, that the nature
which comprises these qualities cannot be mortal; and since the
mind is ever in action and has no source of motion, because it
moves itself, believe that it never will find any end of motion. be-
cause it never will part from itself, and since the nature of the soul
is incorporated, and has not in itself any admixture heterogeneous
and dssimilar to itself, maintain that it cannot undergo dissolution,
and if this be not possible, it cannot perish, and it is a strong areu-
ment that men know very many things before they are born, since
when mere boys, while they are learning difficult subjects, they SO
quickly catch up numberless ideas, that they seem not to be learn
ing them then for the first time, but to remember them, and to be
calling them to recollection. Thus did our Plato argue.