Why did he talk like that:  thus reasoning about reincarnation, and not stating it as a positive teaching?  Well; there would be nothing new and startling about it, to the Greeks.  They knew of it as a teaching both of Pythagoras and of the Orphic Mysteries:  that is, those did who were initiates or Pythagoreans.  But it was not public teaching, known to the multitude; and except among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge. (So scientific discovery and the spread of education have impaired the vitality now of Christian presentations of ethics.) So that to have announced it positively, at that time, would have served his purpose but little:  men would have said, “We have heard all that before; had he nothing better to give us than stale ideas from the Mysteries or Pythagoras?” What he wanted to do was to take it out of the region of religion, where familiarity with it had bread an approach to contempt; and restate it robbed of that familiarity, and clothed anew in a garb of sweet reasonableness.  So once more, and as ususal, he assumed ignorance, and approached the whole subject in a quiet and rational way, thus:  I do not say that this is positively so; I do not announce it as a dogma.  Dogmas long since have lost their efficacy, and you must stand or fall now by the perceptions of your own souls, not by what I or any authority may tell you.  But as reasoning human beings, does it not appeal to you?

And the very spirit in which he approached it and approached his death was precisely the one to engrave his last spoken ideas on the souls of his hearers as nothing else could.  No excitement; no uplift or ecstasy of the martyr; quiet reasoning only; full, serene, and, for him, common-place command of the faculties of his mind.  The shadow of death made no change in Socrates; how then should they misunderstand or magnify the power of the shadow of death?—­“How shall we bury you?” asks Crito.  Socrates turns to the others present, and says:  “I cannot persuade Crito that I here am Socrates—­I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse.  He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and by, a corpse.”—­So the scene went on until the last moment, when “Phaedo veiled his face, and Crito started to his feet, and Apollodorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst out into a loud and angry cry which broke down everyone but Socrates.”

Someone has said that there is nothing in tragedy or history so moving as this death of Socrates, as Plato tells it.  And yet its tragic interest, its beauty, is less important, to my thinking, than the insight it gives us into the methods and mental workings of an Adept.  Put ourselves into the mind of Socrates.  He is going to his death; which to him is about the same as, to us, going to South Ranch or San Diego.  You say I am taking the beauty and nobility out of it; but no; I am only trying to