What shall I say of Dicaearchus, who denies that there is any soul?
In all these opinions, there is nothing to affect any one after death; for all feeling is lost with life, and where there is no sensation, nothing can interfere to affect us.

The opinions of others do indeed bring us hope; if it is any pleasure to you to think that souls, after they leave the body, may go to heaven as to a permanent home.
_A._ I have great pleasure in that thought, and it is what I most desire; and even if it should not be so, I should still be very willing to believe it.
_M._ What occasion have you, then, for my assistance?
Am I superior to Plato in eloquence?
Turn over carefully his book that treats of the soul; you will have there all that you can want.
_A._ I have, indeed, done that, and often; but, I know not how it comes to pass, I agree with it while I am reading it; but when I have laid down the book, and begin to reflect with myself on the immortality of the soul, all that agreement vanishes.
_M._ How comes that?
Do you admit this--that souls either exist after death, or else that they also perish at the moment of death?
_A._ I agree to that.

And if they do exist, I admit that they are happy; but if they perish, I cannot suppose them to be unhappy, because, in fact, they have no existence at all.

You drove me to that concession but just now.
_M._ How, then, can you, or why do you, assert that you think that death is an evil, when it either makes us happy, in the case of the soul continuing to exist, or, at all events, not unhappy, in the case of our becoming destitute of all sensation?
XII.

_A._ Explain, therefore, if it is not troublesome to you, first, if you can, that souls do exist after death; secondly, should you fail in that (and it is a very difficult thing to establish), that death is free from all evil; for I am not without my fears that this itself is an evil: I do not mean the immediate deprivation of sense, but the fact that we shall hereafter suffer deprivation.
_M._ I have the best authority in support of the opinion you desire to have established, which ought, and generally has, great weight in all cases.