CHAPTER VII

IMMORTALITY: A STUDY IN PLATO

If it should happen that among my readers there are some hitherto mute, inglorious Shakespeares, I would venture to suggest to them that one of the plays for which the world is still waiting is that magnificent tragedy in three acts, to be entitled, The Death of Socrates. It was by a very unfortunate oversight that Shakespeare (whom the high gods probably sent into the world for the special purpose of writing this play) omitted to do it. Perhaps it was because neither North nor Holland happened to translate Plato; perhaps because Shakespeare felt that the theme was too sublime, even for him. Yet it may be that the intention of the gods has been not frustrated, but only deferred. It may be that, in the fulness of time, after we have recovered from the age of Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, the tragedy of The Death of Socrates will get itself written and acted.

1

Very little actual invention will be needed by its author. The materials and the characters are at hand in the Platonic trilogy. The first act will present the trial and condemnation of Socrates, with his superb contempt of Court, his refusal to say or do anything which might imply that the Court owed him aught save honour and respect, or that an acquittal by them, or even the granting of maintenance in the Prytaneum, would be an unmerited favour to him. The second act 1 The Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo.

will take place in the prison, at an early hour of morning; the curtain rising upon the scene where the aged Crito watches by the bed of the sleeping Socrates, astonished that his friend can rest so soundly, seeing that on the morrow he is to die. The sacred ship from Delos has been sighted off Sunium, and with her arrival the life of Socrates must end, as the life of Meleager ends with the consuming of the brand that flamed when he was born. The substance of this second act will be the attempt of Crito to induce Socrates to escape, and the statement by Socrates of his reasons for refusing.

The third act will set upon the stage the tale told by Phaedo to Echecrates of Phlius. The day is that on which Socrates is to drink the poison. From early morning his friends are about him, and they spend the day in discussing with him the question of the soul's immortality. In the course of the talk various little incidents of which the dramatist can make good use occur or are alluded to: as when, for example, Socrates is represented as stroking the curly hair of his beloved disciple Phaedo; and again when the jailer comes weeping to tell his illustrious prisoner that the hour of his death has struck, and Socrates, serene and unmoved, turns to his heart-broken companions with the remark, "How charming the man is!" Then, with the rays of the setting sun falling upon him like the pointing hand of God, the wisest man of his age drinks the hemlock and sets forth on the high adventure called death.

If the next Shakespeare should agree with his predecessor in thinking such a theme too sublime for dramatic presentation, one's hope of seeing this great play written will be disappointed or indefinitely deferred. But meantime one may remind the Michael Angelos of

twentieth-century America that no theme has ever been considered too sacred for the painter to depict. An attempt has indeed been made to put on canvas the scene of the death of Socrates, but unfortunately the artist shared the prevalent illusion that Greek men were like stone statues, only less alive. When the predestined painter of this scene arrives, he will be one who recognizes that Athenian gentlemen of the fourth century B. C. were exactly like the most cultivated sons of the twentieth century of the Christian era. He will therefore seek his models not in the British Museum or the Louvre, or in the shop of an antique dealer, but in—let us say— the literary clubs of Boston or London, or in the Senate at Washington.

But to our theme:

It is well to bear in mind, when reading the words of Plato concerning immortality, that he was not confused by the mental muddle created in modern times by the attempt to furnish a substitute for it. He knew, what the unsophisticated consciousness has always known, that the immortality which men desire is personal or nothing. It means the continuance (with whatever development) of the self-conscious individual soul. If it is not this, it is not immortality. The attempt of Positivism to deny this, and at the same time to provide the same consolation, by talking about the incorporation of the (non-existent) soul into the Great Being Humanity, if taken seriously (and there actually are some people who take it seriously), is a strange piece of intellectual jugglery. It is like the construction sometimes placed upon the Apostles' Creed, according to which "conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary" means, "conceived of the carpenter Joseph, born of the married

woman Mary"; and "I believe in the resurrection of the body" means, "I deny the resurrection of the body, but I rather fancy that the soul may be immortal."

I would not even seem to disparage that noble aspiration which is expressed by George Eliot in The Choir Invisible. "To make undying music in the world," to "be to other souls the cup of strength in some great agony," to leave to after-times "the sweet presence of a good diffused, and in diffusion ever more intense," this is the sole aim worthy of the life of man. But to call it immortality is to use language with reckless ambiguity. An influence is not a person; it is not a consciousness; and a personal consciousness is the only possible subject of the kind of life to which this desire relates. To anybody who longs for personal continuance, the surrogate arrangement offered by Positivism is a positive insult. If you do not believe in conscious life after death, and some bereaved friend comes to you for consolation, be brave enough to tell what you really think. Do not say, "I can offer you an excellent substitute," because you cannot. Do not imitate those vegetarian restaurants in London, where they give you a hash-up of beans and fried potatoes, and call it steak. Do not say in effect, "Of course you want to be assured that your friend is alive, and that you and he will meet again, whereas he is really dead and done for; but you can easily lull yourself into believing that it is very much the same as if he were still living." In other words, do not pretend that a figure of speech is a statement of fact. We can permit the poet to speak of "those immortal dead who live again in lives made better by their presence," only upon the strict understanding that this is not to be offered as a consolation to anybody who is seeking the kind of com

fort of which this doctrine is a denial. Such persons need first to be weaned from their vain yearning,—vain, because the assurance they seek is unattainable, and led up to that nobler but quite different faith to which George Eliot's spirit can appeal.

Of Plato's attempt to find a rational basis for his belief in personal survival, Matthew Arnold speaks almost with asperity: "By what futilities the demonstration of our immortality may be attempted is to be seen in Plato's Phaedo." Mr. Arnold then proceeds to indulge in a futility of his own:—

Man's natural desire for continuance, however little it may be worth as a scientific proof of our immortality, is at least a proof a thousand times stronger than any such demonstration. The want of solidity in such argument is so palpable that one scarcely cares to turn a steady regard upon it at all.1

It may be so. We may never be able to find, on either side of the question, arguments that will sustain one moment's steady regard; and yet the everlasting riddle will always continue to be propounded. Although we have no data which could convert our feeling of what is probable into a knowledge of what is actual, we shall continue to dispute about this subject, because we must; and after we have recognized the "futilities" of Plato and of Arnold for what they are, we shall proceed to invent fresh ones of our own. Those whose faith in immortality is shocked or shaken by Arnold's criticism may at least find comfort by remembering that nothing that Plato or anybody else, down to the most ranting

1 Literature and Dogma, chap. xii.