[72] To the ἀΐδιος οὐσία, τὸ ἔστι μόνον κατὰ τὸν ἀληθῆ λόγον προσήκει Tim. 37 E.
[73] It is true that not until it becomes associated with the body does the soul, by obtaining αἴσθησις, ἐπιθυμία, θυμός, and all the other faculties that bring it into touch with Becoming and Changing, obtain what can strictly be called its individual personality. The perfectly adequate comprehension in thought of the ever-Unchanging by the bodiless and free soul would have no individualized content. We must not, however, (with Teichm., Pl. Fr. 40), conclude from this that Plato knew nothing of an immortality of the individual and of [487] individuality. He did not distinctly raise the question of the seat and origin of individuality in the soul. He is content to suppose that a plurality of individual souls was living before their entanglement with Becoming, and to conclude from this that in eternity, too, after their last escape from γένεσις, the same number of individual souls will still be living. Numerical distinctness (which affects in a scarcely intelligible manner the spaceless and immaterial) has to do duty with him for qualitative distinctness which would alone be able to account for the self-consciousness of this plurality. Acc. to the picture given in Tim. c. 14 (41 D ff.) the souls created by the δημιουργός are evidently all alike (hence also is γένεσις πρώτη τεταγμένη μία πᾶσιν, 41 E), and only when they are in the σῶμα, and bound up with mortal portions of soul, do they react in different ways to what affects them from without—and so become different. (This is so, however, in the pre-existent period, too, acc. to Phd.: but in that account θυμός and ἐπιθυμία are also bound up with the soul in pre-existence.) The influence of the lower soul-partners and of the τροφὴ παιδεύσεως (Tim. 44 B) makes the λογιστικά also of the souls differ among themselves. This acquired individual characterization, the fruit of differing παιδεία καὶ τροφή—something quite the reverse of the “common nature” of “soul” in general which Teichmüller supposes to be meant here: Stud. 143—is taken with it by the soul to the place of judgment, i.e. Hades, Phd. 107 D. When, however, by the best τροφὴ παιδεύσεως it has become completely pure and free from all the trammels of the physical and perishable and departs into bodiless existence in the ἀειδές—then in truth all individual distinctness has been dissolved out of it. Still, it must endure for ever as a self-conscious personality; for that this is what Plato meant cannot be doubted.
[74] Phd. 83 D.
[75] χωρίζειν ὅτι μάλιστα ἀπὸ τοῦ σώματος τὴν ψυχὴν, Phd. 67 C. ἀναχωρεῖν, 83 (quite in the manner of genuine mysticism—it is the “separateness” of the man who is to behold god, of which Eckhart speaks).
[76] Phd. 64 A ff., 67 E.
[77] Phd. 114 C.
[78] τοῦ σώματος πτόησις καὶ μανία, Crat. 404 A.
[79] τῷ ξυγγενεῖ πλησιάσας καὶ μιγεὶς τῷ ὄντι ὄντως, Rp. 490 B.
[80] The soul ἐῶσα χαίρειν τὸ σῶμα καὶ καθ’ ὅσον δύναται οὐ κοινωνοῦσα ὀρέγεται τοῦ ὄντος, Phd. 65 C. In the same way the Appearance yearns after the Idea; see above, this chap., [n. 9].
[81] τῆς φρονήσεως κτῆσις, Phd. 65 A ff.