Superphysics
Is the Soul a Harmony?
5 minutes • 1042 words
Simmias, My Theban friend, you will have to think differently if you still maintain that:
- harmony is a compound, and
- the soul is a harmony made out of strings set in the frame of the body
Your belief is that, before it took the form and body of man, the soul existed and was made up of [harmonious] elements which as yet had no existence.
But harmony is not like the soul, as you suppose.
- The lyre, the strings, and the sounds exist in a state of discord.
- Then harmony is made last of all, and perishes first.
Your notion of the [temporal] soul cannot agree with harmony.
Yet, there should be harmony in a discourse about harmony.
But there is no harmony in the 2 propositions that:
- Knowledge is recollection
- The soul is a harmony
Which of them will you retain?
I have a much stronger faith in the first which has been demonstated.
The 2nd has not been demonstrated at all. It rests only on probable and plausible grounds and so it is believed by many.
The soul is not a harmony.
A harmony or any other composition cannot be in a state other than that of the elements, out of which it is compounded.
Then a harmony does not lead the parts or elements which make up the harmony, but only follows them. For harmony cannot possibly have any motion, or sound, or other quality which is opposed to its parts.
The nature of every harmony depend on how its elements are harmonized. A harmony admits of degrees. A harmony is more harmonious if it is more truly and fully harmonized. It is less of a harmony, and less completely a harmony, when less truly and fully harmonized.
The soul admits of degrees. A soul in the very least degree more or less, or more or less completely, a soul than another.
Yet of two souls, one has intelligence and virtue, the other has folly and vice.
Some say that the soul is a harmony of this virtue and vice. —will they say that here is another harmony, and another discord, and that the virtuous soul is harmonized, and herself being a harmony has another harmony within her, and that the vicious soul is inharmonical and has no harmony within her?
I cannot tell. But I suppose that something of the sort would be asserted by those who say that the soul is a harmony.
No soul is more a soul than another. This would be equivalent to saying that harmony could be not-so-harmonious or more-harmonious-than-harmonious.
Then one soul which is not more or less absolutely a soul than another, is simply not more or less harmonized.
If the soul is a harmony, it will never have any vice. This is because a harmony is an absolute harmony. It has no part in the nonharmonical. Thus, a soul which is absolutely a soul has no vice.
Then, if all souls are equally by their nature souls, all souls of all living creatures will be equally good.
These are the consequences of the assumption that the soul is a harmony.
It cannot be true.
The wise soul is the ruler of the elements of human nature. The soul is in variance with the affections of the body.
For example:
- when the body is hot and thirsty, the soul inclines us against drinking
- when the body is hungry, against eating
This is only one instance out of ten thousand of the opposition of the soul to the things of the body.
But the soul is a harmony.
It can never utter a note at variance with the tensions, relaxations, and vibrations and other affections of the strings out of which she is composed.
It can only follow, but cannot lead them.
But now the soul is doing the exact opposite.
It is leading the elements which it is believed to be composed. It is almost always opposing and coercing them throughout life, sometimes more violently with the pains of medicine and gymnastic.
Sometimes more gently, threatening, or admonishing the desires, passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not Itself, as Homer in the Odyssee represents Odysseus doing in the words:
‘He beat his breast, and thus reproached his heart= Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured!’
Homer wrote this thinking that the soul is a harmony capable of being led by the affections of the body, and not rather of a nature which should lead and master them—herself a far diviner thing than any harmony.
Then, we are wrong in saying that the soul is a harmony, as this would contradict the divine Homer, and ourselves.
Thus Harmonia, your Theban goddess, has graciously yielded to us. But what about her husband Cadmus, how shall I make peace with him?
You will discover a way of propitiating him.
You have put the argument with Harmonia in a way that I could never have expected.
When Simmias was mentioning his difficulty, I imagined that no answer could be given to him.
So I was surprised that his argument could not sustain the first onset of yours, and not impossibly the other, whom you call Cadmus, may share a similar fate.
You think that the philosopher who is confident in death has but a vain and foolish confidence because he believes that he will fare better in the world below.
And so you want proof that the soul is imperishable and immortal.
You say that the demonstration of the soul’s strength, divinity, and her existence prior to our becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality.
You admit that the soul:
- is longlived
- has known and done much in a former state
But you still think that it is not immortal.
Its entrance into the human form might be a sort of disease which is the beginning of dissolution. After its toils of life are over it will get destroyed.
It does not make any difference in the fears of people whether the soul enters into the body once or many times.
Any man would be afraid if he did not know the soul’s immortality.
