of immortality and to examine the various proofs that could be offered for immortality based on the nature of the soul. Plato's doctrine of recollection holds that learning is the remembering of a wisdom that the soul enjoyed prior to its incarnation, another aspect of the idea that there are ideal forms "remembered" by the soul in this world, and this is actually a mythical statement of this view that neither reason nor the intelligible order that it reveals is alien to the human soul. Plato is seen as a rationalist in that he finds the good, the beautiful, and the just all contained in the true, in what can be deduced or distilled from experience by pure reason:
Thus the vision he gives us of the political community in the Republic, as well as in the Statesman and the Laws, is founded not only in currents of aestheticism and moralism. . . the political community is not only true but also good and beautiful (Nisbet 7).
In The Republic, Plato has Socrates discuss the soul and the nature of the soul and to examine ways in which the soul may be said to be made up of divisions or parts rather than being a unified whole. What emer
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