CHAPTER  V.                                 57

ties the soul to the body, nails it down in the body,
and gives it, as it were, a bodily figure. The soul
which is not pure cannot go to Hades. It quits the
body still filled with its nature, and then migrates
hastily into another body, in which it is, as it were,
deposited and made fast. Therefore, it has no share in
the living of the company of the unique, pure, divine
essence."

Further he says: "If the soul is an independent
being, our learning is nothing but remembering that
which we had learned previously, because our souls
were in some place before they appeared in this human
figure. When people see a thing to the use of which
they were accustomed in childhood, they are under the
influence of this impressionability, and a cymbal, for
instance, reminds them of the boy who used to beat it,
whom they, however, had forgotten. Forgetting is the
vanishing of knowledge, and knowing is the soul's
remembrance of that which it had learned before it
entered the body."

Proclus says: "Remembering and forgetting are
peculiar to the soul endowed with reason. It is
evident that the soul has always existed. Hence it
follows that it has always been both knowing and for- Page 29.
getting, knowing when it is separated from the body,
forgetting when it is in connection with the body. For,
being separated from the body, it belongs to the realm
of the spirit, and therefore it is knowing; but being
connected with the body, it descends from the realm of
the spirit, and is exposed to forgetting because of some
forcible influence prevailing over it."

The same doctrine is professed by those Sufi who suft
teach that this world is a sleeping soul and yonder
world a soul awake, and who at the same time admit
that God is immanent in certain places—e.g. in heaven
—in the seat and the throne of God (mentioned in the
Koran).    But then there are others who  admit that