the body, but (what is greatest of all) he breathed into man a great and powerful soul (ψυχὴν κρατίστην τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ ἐνέpure);" "nor must you suppose while your soul (†vxýv) is φυσε);” able to think (Opovτičew) of objects here and of those in Egypt and Sicily, that the intelligence of God (Tηv Toû Jeoû opóvnow) is not able to care at once for all things." In his last conversation with his friends (as reported in the Phædo of Plato), he discourses of the soul (vxn) as including all the intellectual and spiritual faculties of man, asserts its separate existence after death, not only in full consciousness, but with faculties of increased activity and superior advantages for the pursuit of truth. He says the immortality of the soul was an "old doctrine (maλaiòs λóyos), and that the founders of their mysteries had long ago shadowed it forth (Táλai aivíτTeodai). He nowhere hints at such an expansion or development of the idea expressed by yuxý as the modern school of German criticism asserts, but on the concontrary appeals to antiquity in support of his own theory of the spiritual, separable, and immortal nature of the soul, against the scepticism of his own age. It is out of the question, then, that ux in the Homeric poems should have meant a mere shade, a breath, a phantom, a beingless individual, and in the mouth of Socrates, "the seat of all intelligence," "a great and powerful soul," "the continent of the voûs,2 without which the vous cannot exist, which yet he held to be indelible and eternal- and that this total change (for it can, in no sense, be called a development) in the meaning of the word should not have attracted the notice of so acute an observer of the force of words, so profound a thinker on the nature of the mind, and withal one so familiar with every aspect of the Homeric poetry as Socrates.

The treatise "On the life and writings of Homer," included among the Works of Plutarch, affirms3 that "this

Thus we translate, without pretending to understand Professor Nägelsbach's expression "Wesenlose Häupter," p. 341.

2 So he terms it in the Timaeus.

Ubi Sup. p. 1157. coll. de Anima, p. 722.

most noble of doctrines, that the soul is immortal, is a doctrine of great antiquity (Tauráλaios); and what is stranger yet, he affirms that Homer taught it to Pythagoras and Plato. (τίς οὖν τοῦτο πρῶτον ἀνεφώνησεν ; "Ομηρος.)

The view we have taken of the psychology of Homer, is fully sustained by the opinion of the early Christian writers. It is only necessary to cite a very remarkable passage in the first Apology of Justin Martyr.1 In reasoning against the cruelty exercised against the Christians, he solemnly reminds the emperor and his sons of that death which awaited kings in common with all other men, and of that conscious state after death, and those future retributions, which were the ancient and universal objects of human belief. “If,” he says, "death were a passage into an unconscious state,2 a fortunate circumstance would it be for all unjust men. But since consciousness remains to all who have once existed,3 and eternal punishment is in reserve, trifle not with the conviction and belief of these truths." He appeals to the very superstitions of the ancients, the divinations by the dead, the universal authority of the oracles, the opinions of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato, and Socrates; and, in conclusion, "the ditch described by Homer and the descent of Odysseus to an interview with the souls of the departed,” 4 in order to prove the immemorial and universal belief that "after death, the souls of men are in a perceptive (or conscious) state." 5 Of the impression naturally made by the eleventh book of the Odyssey, to which allusion is here made, on a mind accustomed to use the Greek language and familiar with the whole system of antiquity (as Justin was, in no

C. 18. Otto's edition, Vol. I. p. 46. Jenae. 1847.

2 Εἰ εἰς ἀναισθησίαν ἐχώρει.

3 Ἐπεὶ καὶ αἴσθησις πᾶσι γενομένοις μένει καὶ κόλασις αἰωνία ἀπόκειται.

4 Ο παρ' Ομήρῳ βόθρος καὶ ἡ κάθοδος Οδυσσέως εἰς τὴν τούτων ἐπίσκεψιν.

5. Οτι καὶ μετὰ θάνατον ἐν αἰσθήσει εἰσὶν αἱ ψυχαί. Let it be remembered that Justin throughout this passage is boldly reasoning from the concessions of the Pagans whom he was addressing, and it will be seen that the sceptical hypothesis of which we have been treating could hardly be more precisely stated or more directly contradicted.

common degree), no stronger proof could be given. Nor would Basil, in his excellent " Address to young men on the study of the ancient Greeks," have pronounced “the whole Homeric poetry a commendation of virtue," if he had understood the great poet to have inculcated the doctrine of a mere animal soul, deprived of all spiritual attributes, and of consciousness itself, afer death.

Even the caricatures of Lucian are here not without significance; for their object was to reproduce the characters and ideas of Homer in order to hold them up to ridicule. They undoubtedly show how the Homeric descriptions of the world beyond death were popularly understood. In these pictures, it is needless to say, the dead are represented as possessing perfect consciousness, remembrance of their life on earth, the capacity of acquiring new knowledge,3 and of mental and moral expansion in every way.

We cannot allow that the German critics understand Homer better than the ancient Greeks themselves. At least it will require much better reasons than any yet produced by the authors of this new theory to prove that both the popu lar impression of his ideas and the opinions of the most acute and thoughtful minds of his own race, from Pythagoras down to Eustathius, were "incorrect" and "false."

The Homeric soul, then, representing the whole interior and immaterial man, survives death and is immortal. Whether it is poetically said to pass through a fatal wound, or to go out through the lips in the last breath," whatever catastrophe breaks the mysterious bond which holds it to the body, its purely mental and spiritual faculties are only disengaged and set at liberty by the change. It "quits the limbs," and "swift-winged" (TтаμÉVη, ȧπоTтаμévn) "takes

1 Πᾶσα μὲν ἡ ποίησις τῷ Ὁμήρῳ ἀρετῆς ἐστιν ἔπαινος, c. 4. The same thought is several times repeated in this fine discourse, which is contained in the Works of Basil, Tom. II. pp. 243 seq. (Bened. Ed. reprinted by Gaume, Paris 1839). Achil. and Antil.

* Μνήμη τῶν παρὰ τὸν βίον.

3 Alex. and Han. Where Hannibal says he had learned Greek since he entered Hades.

4 Il. 14. 518, 19.

5 Il 9. 409.

its flight (TETÓTηTau) - reflecting, the meanwhile, remembering, expecting, comparing, grieving, experiencing, in short, that various, and wondrous play of thought, emotion, and volition which bespoke its divine activity while in the body, to the general abode of the departed. There, after long ages, it rehearses its earthly history, and enters into large and various discourse with a living man who had been divinely guided to and instructed for the interview, every utterance of that discourse manifesting (as in fact every human utterance does) the attributes of personal and conscious existence.

By what process Nägelsbach, Voelcker, and Müller have been able to persuade themselves that this thinking, reasoning, remembering, rejoicing, and sorrowing soul is "destitute of mental faculties," "bewustlos," "wesenlos," having "kein Geist, kein Gefühl, kein Denke, kein Wille," passes all comprehension, unless it be explained by that habit of substituting hypothesis for induction, which so largely characterizes the historical criticism of German scholars under the influence of the "newest fashion" (as Sir James M'Intosh called it) of German philosophy. The theory of historical development is considered established and indisputable. Homer must bow to it. Homer, who be sides all he has said incidentally of the divine birth and divine faculties and post-mortal state of man, has left a whole book of the discourses and actions of disembodied soulsdiscourses which instructed, warned, and guided the future conduct of "the most sagacious of men." Homer must be made to unsay all his premature and disorderly psychological utterances, to go back to his proper place in the line of development, and humble himself to the confession that when the body dies, "the spirit of man is dead also." But after all the critical torture to which the old bard has been put by these German inquisitors, he recants in every line, and, like Galileo, indignantly and pertinaciously reiterates : "it lives notwithstanding."

The truth is, the expectation of a future life is not at all a result of development. It is not a product of ratiocination.

It is a tradition, a sentiment of the heart, a primary truth of consciousness, or all the three combined. It is as old as history, as universal as humanity. It is one of those аураπта Kao paλn of which Sophocles has nobly said:

Οὐ γάρ τι νῦν γε καχθες, ἀλλ ̓ ἀεί ποτε

Ζῇ ταῦτα, κοὐδεὶς οἶδεν ἐξ ὅτου φάνη.

It has rather lost than gained in strength and distinctness when the logical faculty has been brought to its assistance. One cannot read over Socrates' demonstration of the im mortality of the soul, in the Phædo of Plato, without being struck with the feebleness and inconclusiveness of the argu. ments. But when the sound minded old man throws himself on the support of the original sentiment, and says: "I know, I feel that I shall live after death, that I shall meet better men in that other state than I have associated with here, and that I shall still have a kind and provident God to care for me," his words find an echo in every human bosom. Man feels his own immortality. He cannot prove it, but he need not. He knows it without proof, before proof. It is too far back, too deep down to be capable of proof. It is more certain than anything that can be brought to demonstrate it, stronger than anything that can be brought to sup port it. When the logical faculty goes to work upon it, we find it as hard to construct a satisfactory process for the ergo ero as Descartes did for the ergo sum. It would seem, then, that consciousness includes a future life among its perceptions. Just as a man knows that he is, he knows that he will continue to be. His intelligence looks before and after, just as it contemplates the now. It was not, perhaps, without a special meaning that our great poet called it, in connection with this peculiarity of its operation, "godlike rea son." For in this quality the soul bears the image of its divine Parent, who "inhabiteth eternity." Wherever the natural sentiments of humanity have not been perverted or

1 Ant. 454 seq.