SOUL AND MIND The death of Socrates has been the subject of many paintings This one in the Uffizi is by Claude Dufresnoy (1611–68) B, A must have been smaller than B; if A becomes better than B, A must have been worse than B So opposites like larger and smaller, better and worse, come into being from each other But death and life are opposites, and the same holds here If death comes from life, must not life in turn come from death? Since life after death is not visible, it must be in another world (70c–72e) Socrates’ next argument sets out to prove the existence of a nonembodied soul not after, but before, its life in the body He argues Wrst that knowledge is recollection, and then that recollection involves preexistence We often see things, he says, that are more or less equal in size; but we never see any two things in the world absolutely equal to each other Our idea of equality, therefore, cannot be derived from experience The approximately equal things we see are simply reminders of an absolute 235