The fourth dimension

APPENDIX II 253

But its usefulness must not blind us to the fact that it is artificial. If we really look deep into nature, we find a much greater complexity than we at first suspect. And so behind this simple “I,” this myself, is there not a parallel complexity? Plato’s “soul” would be quite acceptable to a large class of thinkers, if by “soul” and the complexity he attributes to it, he meant the product of a long course of evolutionary changes, whereby simple forms of living matter endowed with rudimentary sensation had gradually developed into fully conscious beings.

But Plato does not mean by “soul” a being of such a kind. His soul is a being whose faculties are clogged by its bodily environment, or at least hampered by the difficulty of directing its bodily frame—a being which is essentially higher than the account it gives of itself through its organs. At the same time Plato’s soul is not incorporeal, It is a real being with a real experience. The question of whether Plato had the conception of nonspatial existence has been much discussed. The verdict is, I believe, that even his “ideas” were conceived by him as beings in space, or, as we should say, real. Plato’s attitude is that of Science, inasmuch as he thinks of a world in Space. But, granting this, it cannot be denied that there is a fundamental divergence between Plato’s conception and the evolutionary theory, and also an absolute divergence between his conception and the genetic account of the origin of the human faculties. The functions and capacities of Plato’s “soul” are not derived by the interaction of the body and its environment.

Plato was engaged on a variety of problems, and his religious and ethical thoughts were so keen and fertile that the experimental investigation of his soul appears involved with many other motives. In one passage Plato will combine matter of thought of all kinds and from all sources, overlapping, interrunning. And in no case is he