For my own part, when I reflect on the nature of the soul, it appears to me a far more perplexing and obscure question to determine what is its character while it is in the body--a place which, as it were, does not belong to it--than to imagine what it is when it leaves it, and has arrived at the free aether, which is, if I may so say, its proper, its own habitation.

For unless we are to say that we cannot apprehend the character or nature of anything which we have never seen, we certainly may be able to form some notion of God, and of the divine soul when released from the body.

Dicaearchus, indeed, and Aristoxenus, because it was hard to understand the existence and substance and nature of the soul, asserted that there was no such thing as a soul at all.

It is, indeed, the most difficult thing imaginable to discern the soul by the soul.

And this, doubtless, is the meaning of the precept of Apollo, which advises every one to know himself.