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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: embalmer's art: how unlikely, then, that the soul will perish and be
dissipated into air while on her way to the good and wise God! She has
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
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