Ceb. Very true.
Soc. And this corporeal element, my friend, is heavy and weighty and earthy, and is that element by which such a soul is depressed and dragged down again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the invisible and of the world below—prowling about tombs and sepulchres, in the neighbourhood of which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed pure, but are cloyed with sight and therefore visible.
Ceb. That is very likely, Socrates.
Soc. Yes, that is very likely, Cebes; and these must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, who are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they continue to wander until through the craving after the corporeal which never leaves them, they are imprisoned finally in another body. And they may be supposed to find their prisons in the same natures which they have had in their former lives.
Further on in the same dialogue, Socrates says:
Each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body, and having the same delights, she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure, but is always infected by the body.—Extracted from Jowett’s Translation of the Dialogues.
[468.] imbodies and imbrutes, i.e. becomes materialised and brutish. Imbody, ordinarily used as a transitive verb, is here intransitive. Imbrute (said to have been coined by Milton) is also intransitive; in Par. Lost, ix. 166, it is transitive. The use of the word may have been suggested by the Phaedo, where the souls of the wicked are said to “find their prisons in the same natures which they have had in their former lives,” those of gluttons and drunkards passing into asses and animals of that sort.
[469.] divine property. In his prose works Milton calls the soul ‘that divine particle of God’s breathing’: comp. Horace, Sat. ii. 2. 79, “affigit humo divinae particulam aurae”; and Plato’s Phaedo, “The soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortal.”
[470.] gloomy shadows damp: see [note], l. 207.
[471.] charnel-vaults, burial vaults. ‘Charnel’ (O.F. charnel, Lat. carnalis; caro, flesh): comp. ‘carnal,’ l. [474].