[79b]
“Well then,” said Socrates, “are we not made up of two parts, body and soul?”“Yes,” he replied.“Now to which class should we say the body is more similar and more closely akin?”“To the visible,” said he; “that is clear to everyone.”“And the soul? Is it visible or invisible?”“Invisible, to man, at least, Socrates.”“But we call things visible and invisible with reference to human vision, do we not?”“Yes, we do.”“Then what do we say about the soul? Can it be seen or not?”“It cannot be seen.”“Then it is invisible?” “Yes.”“Then the soul is more like the invisible than the body is,
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1 translated by Harold North Fowler; Introduction by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1966.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.