Cebes now objects that what Socrates has been saying implies the continued existence of our souls and their retention of intelligence after death. This, as Socrates agrees, needs to be proved. We accordingly come to the first argument for immortality, which is briefly that wherever we have a pair of opposites they are generated from each other in a cycle of perpetual recurrence; ‘living and dead’ are therefore on a par with ‘waking and sleeping’, or with ‘greater and smaller’. Moreover, in all such cases two opposite processes are involved; in the case before us one of these processes, dying, is an obvious occurrence, from which we may infer the occurrence of its opposite, returning to life.

To this speech of Socrates Cebes replied as follows:

‘Most of what you have been saying, Socrates, seems to me excellent, but your view about the soul is one that people find it very hard to accept; they suspect that, when it has left the body, it no longer exists anywhere; on the day when a man dies his soul is destroyed and annihilated; immediately upon its departure, its exit, it is dispersed like breath or smoke, vanishing into thin air, and thereafter not existing anywhere at all. Of course if it could exist somewhere gathered together by itself, and quit of all the troubles which you were enumerating a while ago, then, Socrates, one might confidently cherish the hope that what you say is true; but to show that the soul exists when the man has died, and possesses some power and intelligence–well, that, I feel, needs a great deal of persuasive argument.’