ABSTRACT
The soul is what brings life to the body. It can do this only because the soul has life, or we might say, because the soul necessarily has life; this seems to be what Socrates is assuming throughout his argument. It would generally be admitted, I suppose, by his interlocutors, that the soul does bring life to the body. If you could speak of the death of the soul, that could be the perishing of the soul altogether. But this is putting the matter in a very abbreviated form, because the question of what life is, is not at all one that is easy to answer. The comparison of the life which the soul has and the heat which fire has, although it may be illuminating for certain purposes, is misleading for a good many others. This appears if you consider what Socrates says about the soul and philosophy, about the sort of striving that the soul exhibits during the period when it is in the body, and during the period when it is bringing life to the body, for instance. The soul has knowledge of the Forms, and the soul is guided by the Forms. Its activity is an activity in accordance with them. The soul is also striving to get a purer knowledge of the Forms, and to rid itself of the confusions which the bodily sensations and passions at first seem to inflict upon it. In this it is quite unlike fire, for instance. Fire may behave as it does because of the Forms it exhibits and because of the Forms that are exhibited by the other things that it encounters. But it does not have knowledge of the Forms; and it does not do anything comparable to the analysis and drawing of conclusions which are characteristic of the activity of the soul.
