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Rebirth-A Philosophical Study
whence they never come forth again Those who have sufficiently purified themselves with philosophy are set free from the body altogether and ascend to the heavenly sphere from whence they came But this is hardly to be accomplished in a single life The soul of a philosopher or the soul of a lover who is not without philosophy may attain deliverance at the end of 3,000 years, if thrice in succession they have chosen lives aright, but, for the majority, a cycle of 10,000 years must be completed before, by the repeated experience of good and evil, they learn eventually to choose the good 11
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According to Plato soul is perfect and is associated with the world of ideas It is immortal and indestructible However, Plato suys that souls are immortal and industrictible in time They are not eternal in the sense in which that is true of the Ideas 13 Yet by feeding on proper food, the soul may, appropriate the absolute content and make the true and the beautiful its habitual element and become the partaker of Eternity
Plato gives arguments for establishing the immortality of soul He says that the soul partakes of the eternal because it is rational in nature By its rational nature it has kinship with ideas and as such it has eternity imbedded in it As a concrete existence it is grounded in time But as an immaterial substance it partakes of the eternity 13
(2) Plato speaks of the three parts of the soul The rational part Is the highest Next comes the noble irrational part which is constituted of sentiments, and the lowest in level is the ignoble irrational part which comprises of impulses aud passions The rational part is the real soul and it is immortal The divine principle is located in the head The nobler part of the moral soul is endowed with courage and is settled round the heart so that it might be within the hearing of reason The baser part of the mortal soul which desires meat and drinks and all things where of it has need owing to the nature of the body is below the midriff. There the desires are bound like a wild animal which was chained up with man and must be reared with him In the Republic Plato speaks of the combination of man, the llon and the many-headed monster, combined in the external semblance of the man This gives the threefold division of man 14 The rational soul alone will survive the death of the body Aristotle drew similar conclusion in his doctrine of Active Reason
Plato says that everything which has an opposite is generated only from its opposite A sleeping man awakes, and a waking man goes to
11 The Phaedrus, p 248-49
12 The Laws p 904
13 The Phaedo, p 79
14 The Republic, p 588
