XXXIX. The others joined in encouraging me, and after a few minutes of silence I went on: ‘I must begin by saying |E| that it so happens that you, Ammonius, have given me a sort of opening for bringing forward now what I then said. For if the souls which have been separated from the body or have never had commerce with one at all, are daemons as you say, and God-like Hesiod[[183]] also:
Holy visitants of Earth and guardians sure of mortal men,
on what principle do we deprive souls while in their bodies of that faculty whereby the daemons know and declare beforehand things to be? It is not likely that any power or new part accrues to souls when they leave the body, which they did not possess before. Rather, they always have it, but in a weak degree while they are intermingled with the body; it is sometimes quite invisible and veiled, sometimes weak and dim, and, as with those who see through a mist or who try to move in a marshy place, inoperative and dull, demanding much attention to the virtue that is in them, and much pains to raise and remove and purify the obstructing veil. The sun when he chases the clouds away does not then become bright; he is bright always, |432| but to us through the mist his light appears dim and struggling. Even so the soul does not assume the prophetic power when it passes out of the body as out of a cloud; it has it even now, but is blinded by its close admixture with the mortal state. We should not be surprised or incredulous, if only because we see the great energy which Memory, as we call the faculty in the soul which answers to prophecy, exhibits, in preserving and protecting things that are past, or rather things that now are,[[184]] since of things past none is or has substance; all things |B| come into being and at the same time perish, all actions, words, and feelings, as time like a river bears each along. But this faculty of the soul, I know not how, gets a grasp of them, and invests with appearance and being that which is not present. The oracle given to the Thessalians about Arne[[185]] bade them attend to
That which a deaf man hears, a blind man sees.
But Memory is the hearing of things to which the ear is deaf, the seeing of things to which the eye is blind. Wherefore, as I said, it is no marvel that, as it grasps things which no longer are, so it should anticipate things which have not yet come into being. For these touch it more nearly, and with these it has sympathy; it confronts the future and attaches itself |C| thereto, whereas it is quit of things past and finished, saving only to remember them.
XL. ‘Having then this inborn power yet dimmed and hardly appearing, souls nevertheless break out and are uplifted, in dreams some of them or when nearing initiation, as the body becomes pure, and takes on a temperature, so to speak, which is suitable, or whether it be that the rational and intellectual part is relaxed and discharged from the present things, and so with the irrational and imaginative they reach towards futurity. That line of Euripides[[186]] is not true:
The best of prophets he who guesses well.
No, the prophet is the sensible man, he who follows the rational part of his soul in the road where it leads him with probability. Divination, like a scroll with no writing or method, in itself |D| indeterminate, but capable of receiving fancies and presentiments by the feelings, gets touch with the future, yet not by inference, when it passes most completely outside the present. It passes out through such a temperament and disposition of the body as produce a change called by us inspiration. Often the body attains this disposition of itself; but the earth sends up many streams of many potencies, some which bring trances, diseases, or death, others beneficial, mild, and serviceable, as is proved on those who chance upon them. Of all the currents the stream, or breath, of prophecy is most divine and holy, |E| whether it be drawn from the air direct, or come mingled with the moisture of a spring; for when absorbed into the body it produces in souls a temperament unfamiliar and strange, the special quality of which it is hard to state in clear words, though reason suggests many conjectures. Probably, by heat and dispersion, it opens certain passages to admit imaginings of the future, just as the fumes of wine bring many other stirrings, and unveil words and thoughts which were stored away and unheeded, |F|
For in the wine-god’s votary’s mood,
As in the madman’s, lies much prophecy,