Another reason for believing in the immortality of the soul lies in the fact that ideas present in the soul have neither beginning nor end. They are eternal; therefore, the soul in which they have their existence must also be eternal. On no other basis does Plato think it possible to account for the ideas that one can think of but that are never experienced through the senses. One can think of a perfect circle or a perfectly straight line, although neither has ever been seen. Plato's explanation is that the ideas have always been present in the soul. One's awareness of such perfect ideas is a recollection of what happened in some former existence. They are latent in the soul of a human being and are raised to the level of consciousness as a result of the stimuli provided by sensations.
When Plato writes his account of the death of Socrates, he makes a clear distinction between what happens to the physical body and what happens to the soul. When Socrates' friends visit Socrates in prison during his last hours, Socrates explains that his imminent death is not an occasion for sadness because the time is close at hand when his soul will be released from the body in which it has been imprisoned for so many years. Only the physical body dies. The soul journeys to another world unencumbered with the difficulties that have attended its existence in a mortal body. In this future existence, the soul will receive a just reward for whatever goodness it has achieved; because Socrates believes that he has lived well, he looks to the future with joyful anticipation.
This conception of the soul and its relation to a life beyond physical death was widely accepted by the Gentiles of the Greco- Roman world during New Testament times. Although neither the Jews nor the early Jewish Christians thought of this issue in this way, many, if not most, of them believed in some kind of survival after physical death. We know that the early Christian movement was greatly based on a firm belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Because the story of this resurrection was told in various places, it was not always interpreted in the same way. People whose orientation was in the Greek tradition were bound to see in it something quite different from people who were brought up in a Jewish environment.
