"PHAEDO," by Plato, excerpt

"When Socrates finished, Cebes intervened: Socrates, he said, everything else you said is excellent, I think, but men find it very hard to believe what you say about the soul. They think that after it has left the body it no longer exists anywhere, but that it is destroyed and dissolved on the day the man dies, as soon as it leaves the body; and, on leaving it, it is dispersed like breath or smoke, has flown away and gone and is no longer anything anywhere.... "Personally, said Cebes, I should like to hear your opinion on the subject... "Do not, he said, confine yourself to humanity if you want to understand this more readily, but take all animals and plants into account, and, in short, for all things which come to be, let us see whether they come to be in this way, that is, from their opposites if they have such, as the beautiful is the opposite of the ugly and the just of the unjust, and a thousand other things of the kind. Let us examine whether those that have an opposite must necessarily come to be from their opposite and from nowhere else, as for example when something comes to be larger it must necessarily become larger from having been smaller before.... "There is a further point...about these opposites: between each of those pairs of opposites there are two more processes: from the one to the other and then again from the other to the first; between the larger and the smaller there is increase and decrease... "Well then, is there an opposite to living, as sleeping is the opposite of being awake? "Quite so, he said. "What is it? "Being dead, he said. "Therefore, if these are opposites, they come to be from one another, and there are two processes of generation between the two? "Of course... "What shall we do then? Shall we not supply the opposite process of becoming? Is nature to be lame in this case ? Or must we provide a process of becoming opposite to dying? "We surely must. "And what is that? "Coming to life again. "Therefore, he said, if there is such a thing as coming to life again, it would be a process of coming from the dead to the living? "Quite so. "It is agreed between us then that the living come from the dead in this way no less than the dead from the living and, if this so, it seems to be a sufficient proof that the souls of the dead must be somewhere whence they can come back again." P.60-63, "Phaedo," PLATO COMPLETE WORKS (1997)