/lit/ - Literature

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ATHENIAN: The next step is to remember our earlier admission that if
soul were shown to be older than matter, the spiritual order of things
would be older than the material.
CLINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: So habits, customs, will, calculation, right opinion, diligence
and memory will be prior creations to material length, breadth, depth and
strength, if (as is true) soul is prior to matter.
CLINIAS: Unavoidably.
ATHENIAN: And the next unavoidable admission, seeing that we are
going to posit soul as the cause of all things, will be that it is the cause of
good and evil, beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice and all the oppo-
sites.
CLINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: And surely it’s necessary to assert that as soul resides and e
keeps control anywhere where anything is moved, it controls the heavens
as well.
CLINIAS: Naturally.
ATHENIAN: One soul, or more than one? I’ll answer for you both: more
than one. At any rate, we must not assume fewer than two: that which
does good, and that which has the opposite capacity.
CLINIAS: That’s absolutely right.
ATHENIAN: Very well, then. So soul, by virtue of its own motions, stirs
into movement everything in the heavens and on earth and in the sea.
The names of the motions of soul are: wish, reflection, diligence, counsel, 897
opinion true and false, joy and grief, cheerfulness and fear, love and hate.
Soul also uses all related or initiating motions which take over the second-
ary movements of matter and stimulate everything to increase or diminish,
separate or combine, with the accompanying heat and cold, heaviness and
lightness, roughness and smoothness, white and black, bitter and sweet.
These are the instruments soul uses, whether it cleaves to divine reason
(soul itself being, if the truth were told, a divinity), and guides everything
to an appropriate and successful conclusion, or allies itself with unreason
and produces completely opposite results. Shall we agree this is the case,
or do we still suspect that the truth may be different?
CLINIAS: By no means.