Souls Do Not Come Back

But what are we to say to what comes next? In the first place, if the living come from the dead just as the dead come from the living, then the number of the human race must always stay one and the same — the very number that first brought human life into the world. The living came first; then the dead came out of the living; then the living again out of the dead. And since the process was forever going on with the same persons, they must always have stayed the same in number, since they kept issuing from the same. Those who came up into life could never have been more, or fewer, than those who dropped out of it in death. [a]

But the records of human antiquity show us the human race growing steadily larger. Peoples take up new stretches of the earth as natives, or as wandering tribes, or as exiles, or as conquerors — the Scythians into Parthia, the sons of Temenus into the Peloponnese, the Athenians into Asia, the Phrygians into Italy, the Phoenicians into Africa. Or they move by the more ordinary method they call apoikiai, colonies, sent out to relieve a crowded homeland by emptying its overflow into other quarters. The natives stay on in their old settlements, and have also stocked other districts with loans of even larger populations.

Surely it is obvious enough, if you look at the world as a whole, that it grows better cultivated and more fully peopled every day than it was in earlier times. Every place is reachable now, every place known, every place open to trade. Delightful farms have blotted out what were once dreary and dangerous wastes. Plowed fields have put down forests. Flocks and herds have driven out the wild animals. Sand is sown; rock is planted; marshes are drained. There are large cities now where once there were hardly a few scattered huts. Islands are no longer dreaded, nor their rocky shores feared. Everywhere there are houses, and people, and settled government, and civilized life. What most often meets our eyes — and draws our complaint — is our own teeming numbers. We are a burden to the world. It can barely supply us out of its own natural stores. Our wants grow keener, our complaints more bitter in every mouth, while nature fails to give us what she used to.

In plain truth, plague and famine and war and earthquake have to be counted a remedy for the nations, a way of pruning back the rank growth of the human race. And yet, when the axe has once felled men in great masses, the world has never once been startled by the sight of its dead being given back to it, coming to life again after their thousand-year exile. A sight like that would have become obvious enough from the balance between the loss by death and the recovery of life — if it were true that the dead came back. And why should this return from death come only after a thousand years, and not at once? If the loss is not made good immediately, the race runs the risk of dying out altogether, since the failing runs ahead of the making up. Besides, the short leave of absence that is our present life is nothing like a thousand years long. It is so much briefer, and its torch is therefore so much more easily put out than lit again. So, since the interval that ought to fall between — supposing the living really are formed out of the dead — has never in fact occurred, it follows that we must not believe men come back to life from the dead.

Again, if this recovery of life from the dead happens at all, individuals must of course get their own individuality back. The souls that gave life to each particular body would have to return, each one separately, to its own body. But two or three or five souls are constantly shut up together in one womb, and in cases like that it does not amount to life coming from the dead, because there is none of the separate restoring that individuals ought to have — although at this rate, no doubt, the law laid down at the first creation is beautifully kept, by producing several souls out of only one! [e]

Then again, if souls depart at all the different ages of human life, how is it that they come back at one uniform age? Every man is fitted out with an infant soul at his birth. How does it happen that a man who dies old returns to life as a baby? If the soul, while it is out of the body, shrinks backward like this in age, how much more reasonable it would be for it to take up its life again with a richer gain in everything life has to give, after a thousand years had passed. At the very least it ought to come back at the age it had reached when it died, so that it could take up again the very life it had put down. But suppose they do come back the same, over and over, in their revolving cycles. Then they ought to bring back with them, if not the same bodily forms, at least their old peculiarities of character, taste and disposition — because it would be rash to count them the same if they were missing the very marks by which their identity has to be proved.

How can you possibly know, you ask, whether the whole thing is not a hidden process? May not the work of a thousand years take from you the power of recognizing them, so that they come back and you do not know them? But I am quite certain that is not the case — for it is you yourself who hand me Pythagoras as the restored Euphorbus. Well, look at Euphorbus. He plainly had a soldier’s soul, a fighting soul, as the very fame of the sacred shields proves. Pythagoras, on the other hand, was such a recluse and so unwarlike that he shrank from the military exploits Greece was then full of, and chose instead to give himself, in the quiet of Italy, to geometry, astrology and music — the very opposite of Euphorbus in taste and disposition. Then there is Pyrrhus, another of the men he claimed to have been. Pyrrhus spent his time catching fish, while Pythagoras would never touch a fish, and kept off the taste of them as he kept off any other animal food. And Aethalides and Hermotimus had counted the bean among the ordinary vegetables at table, while Pythagoras taught his students not even to walk across a plot planted with beans.

So I ask: how are the same souls taken up again, when they can offer no proof of their identity — not by disposition, not by habits, not by the way they live? And after all this we find that only four souls are listed as recovering life, out of all the multitudes of Greece. But suppose these things happen in Greece alone — as though migrations of souls and takings up of bodies were not going on everywhere, and every day at that, in every nation, at every age and rank and sex. How is it that Pythagoras alone goes through these changes from one person into another? Why should I not go through them too? Or if it is a privilege kept for philosophers — and for Greek philosophers only, as though Scythians and Indians had no philosophers — how is it that Epicurus never recalled having once been another man, nor Chrysippus, nor Zeno, nor even Plato himself, whom we might perhaps have taken for Nestor, from his honeyed eloquence?

But the fact is that Empedocles, who used to dream he was a god, and for that reason, I suppose, could not bear anyone to think he had once been merely some hero, says in so many words: [j]

“I once was Thamnus, and a fish.”

Why not a melon instead, seeing what a fool he was? Or a chameleon, to match his puffed-up bragging? It was no doubt as a fish — and a queer one at that — that he escaped rotting in some obscure grave, when he preferred to be roasted by diving into Etna. After that accomplishment there was an end forever to his metensomatosis, his putting of himself into another body: he was fit now only for the light course that comes after the roast. So at this point we must take our stand against a still more monstrous piece of presumption as well: that in the course of transmigration animals come from human beings and human beings from animals. Let Empedocles’ Thamnuses alone. Our passing notice of them will be quite enough; to linger over them would put us to the trouble of ridicule and laughter instead of serious instruction.

Our position is this: the human soul cannot by any means at all be transferred into animals — not even when the animals are supposed, on the philosophers’ own account, to arise out of the substances of the elements. Let us suppose that the soul is either fire, or water, or blood, or breath, or air, or light. We must not forget that the animals, in their several kinds, have properties opposed to each of these elements in turn. There are the cold creatures that stand opposed to fire — water snakes, lizards, salamanders, and whatever is produced out of water, fire’s rival element. In the same way, the creatures opposed to water are the ones that are dry and sapless by nature; locusts, butterflies and chameleons revel in drought. The creatures opposed to blood are the ones with none of its purple in them — snails, worms, and most of the fishy tribes. Opposed to breath are the creatures that seem to have no breathing at all, being furnished with neither lungs nor windpipe: gnats, ants, moths, and small things of that sort. Opposed to air are the ones that live always underground or underwater and never take air in — things whose existence you know better than their names. And opposed to light are the ones that are either wholly blind or have eyes only for the dark: moles, bats and owls. I have brought forward these examples so as to argue my subject from natures that are clear and palpable. But even if I could take Epicurus’ atoms in my hand, or see Pythagoras’ numbers with my eye, or stub my foot against Plato’s ideas, or lay hold of Aristotle’s entelechies, the odds are that even among those classes I should find animals I would have to set against one another on the ground of their contrariety.

For here is what I maintain. Whichever of the natures just named the human soul is made of, it could not possibly have passed over into new forms in animals so contrary to each of those separate natures, nor given those creatures their origin by passing into them. It would have to be shut out of them and thrown off, rather than let in and received — first because of that original contrariety we have supposed it to have, which hands the bodily substance that receives it over to endless strife, and then again because of the later contrariety that comes out of the development belonging inseparably to each several nature. The soul of man has had its dwelling assigned to it on quite different terms, and its food, and its order, and its sensation, and its affections, and its sexual life, and its bearing of children. On different terms too it has received its dispositions, its duties to fulfill, its likings and dislikings, its vices, desires, pleasures, illnesses and cures — in short, its own ways of living and its own outlets into death.

How, then, shall a human soul that cleaves to the earth — that cannot look out over any great height or down any great depth without alarm, that tires if it climbs many stairs and chokes if it is held under in a fishpond — how shall a soul beset with weaknesses like these mount up at some later stage into the air in an eagle, or plunge into the sea in an eel? And after being nourished on generous and delicate and exquisite dishes, how shall it settle down and feed on — I will not say husks, but even thorns, and the bitter leaves of the wild, and creatures off the dung heap, and poisonous worms — if it has to migrate into a goat or a quail? Or feed, it may be, on carrion, even on human corpses, in some bear or lion? And how indeed shall it stoop to that, when it remembers what it is? Submit every other case to this same test of incongruity, and so spare us the trouble of taking them one at a time. Now, whatever the measure of the human soul may be, and whatever its mode, the question forces itself on us: what will it do in far larger animals, or in very tiny ones? Every body, of whatever size, has to be filled up by the soul, and the soul has to be covered over entirely by the body. So how shall a man’s soul fill an elephant? And how shall it be contracted inside a gnat? Stretched or shrunk on that scale, it would surely be in danger.

And this brings me to another question. If the soul is by no means capable of this kind of migration into animals that are not fitted to receive it — either by the habits of their bodies or by the other laws of their being — will it then change to suit the properties of the various animals, and be adapted to their life, contrary as that is to human life, having in fact become contrary to its own human self by the completeness of the change? The truth is that if it undergoes such a transformation and loses what it once was, the human soul will not be what it was. And if it stops being its former self, then the metensomatosis, the fitting of some other body to it, comes to nothing, and of course cannot be credited to a soul that will have ceased to exist, on the supposition that it has changed completely. A soul can only be said to go through this moving into another body when it goes through it while remaining unchanged in its own original condition. So then: the soul does not admit of change, or it would stop being itself; and yet it cannot remain unchanged in its original state, since in that case it fails to receive the contrary bodies. I am still waiting for one credible reason that would justify the transformation we have been discussing.

Some men are indeed compared to animals for their character, disposition and pursuits — since even God says, “Man is like the animals that perish.” But it does not follow from this that greedy men become kites, or lecherous men dogs, or bad-tempered men panthers, or good men sheep, or talkative men swallows, or chaste men doves, as though the selfsame substance of the soul repeated its own nature everywhere in the properties of the animals it passed into.

Besides, a substance is one thing and the nature of that substance is another, since the substance is the particular property of one given thing, whereas its nature may well belong to many things. Take an example or two. A stone, or a piece of iron, is the substance; the hardness of the stone and of the iron is the nature of that substance. Their hardness puts them together under a common quality; their substances keep them apart. So again, there is softness in wool and softness in a feather: their natural qualities are alike, and that puts them on a level; their substantial qualities are not alike, and that keeps them distinct. So if a man is likewise called a wild beast or a harmless one, there is no identity of soul for all that. The likeness of nature is noticed precisely where the unlikeness of substance is most conspicuous. By the very act of judging that a man resembles a beast, you confess that their soul is not identical — for you say that they resemble each other, not that they are the same. And this is what the word of God means as well: it likens man to the animals in nature, but not in substance. God would never have made such a comment about man at all if he had known him to be, in substance, nothing but a beast.