THREE:I have been necessarily brief in my statement of Teichmüllers theses; and to judge of them apart from the facts and arguments by which they are supported in the two very interesting volumes above named would be in the highest degree unfair. I feel bound, however, to mention the chief reasons which make me hesitate to accept his conclusions. It seems to me, then, that although Plato was moving in the direction of pantheismas I have myself pointed out in more than one passage of this workhe never actually reached it. For (i.) he does not, like Plotinus, attempt to deduce his material from his ideal principle, but only blends without reconciling them in the world of sensible experience. (ii.) In opposing the perishable nature of the individual (or rather the particular) to the eternal nature of the universal, he is going on the facts of experience rather than on any necessary opposition between the two, and on experience of material or sensible objects rather than of immaterial souls; while, even as regards material objects, the heavenly bodies, to which he attributes everlasting duration, constitute such a sweeping exception to his rule as entirely to destroy its applicability. (iii.) Platos multiplied and elaborate arguments for the immortality of the soul would be superfluous were his only object to prove that the soul, like everything else, contains an eternal element. (iv.) The Pythagorean theory that the soul is a harmony, which Plato rejects, wouldxx have been perfectly compatible with the ideal and impersonal immortality which Teichmüller supposes him to have taught; for while the particular harmony perishes, the general laws of harmony remain. (v.) Teichmüller does not dispose satisfactorily of Platos crowning argument that the idea of life is as inseparable from the soul as heat from fire or cold from snow. He says (op. cit., p. 134) that, on this principle, the individual soul may still perish, just as particular portions of fire are extinguished and particular portions of snow are melted. Yes, but portions of fire do not grow cold, nor portions of snow hot, which and which alone would offer an analogy to the extinction of a soul.
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