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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: been gathered into herself, holding aloof from the body, and practising
death all her life long, and she is now finally released from the errors
and follies and passions of men, and for ever dwells in the company of the
gods.
But the soul which is polluted and engrossed by the corporeal, and has no
eye except that of the senses, and is weighed down by the bodily appetites,
cannot attain to this abstraction. In her fear of the world below she
lingers about the sepulchre, loath to leave the body which she loved, a
ghostly apparition, saturated with sense, and therefore visible. At length
entering into some animal of a nature congenial to her former life of
sensuality or violence, she takes the form of an ass, a wolf or a kite.
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