Phaedo.
Socrates, Simmias.
if I am not mistaken, that what a man recollects he must have known at some previous time.
Very true.
A person may recollect what he has never seen together with what he has seen. How is this? And what is the nature of this knowledge or recollection? I mean to ask, Whether a person who, having seen or heard or in any way perceived anything, knows not only that, but has a conception of something else which is the subject, not of the same but of some other kind of knowledge, may not be fairly said to recollect that of which he has the conception?
What do you mean?
I mean what I may illustrate by the following instance:—The knowledge of a lyre is not the same as the knowledge of a man?
True.
Recollection is the knowledge of some person or thing derived from some other person or thing which may be either like or unlike them. And yet what is the feeling of lovers when they recognize a lyre, or a garment, or anything else which the beloved has been in the habit of using? Do not they, from knowing the lyre, form in the mind's eye an image of the youth to whom the lyre belongs? And this is recollection. In like manner any one who sees Simmias may remember Cebes; and there are endless examples of the same thing.
Endless, indeed, replied Simmias.
And recollection is most commonly a process of recovering that which has been already forgotten through time and inattention.
Very true, he said.
Well; and may you not also from seeing the picture of a horse or a lyre remember a man? and from the picture of Simmias, you may be led to remember Cebes;
True.
Or you may also be led to the recollection of Simmias himself?
Quite so. 74
And in all these cases, the recollection may be derived from things either like or unlike?
It may be.
And when the recollection is derived from like things, then another consideration is sure to arise, which is—whether the likeness in any degree falls short or not of that which is recollected?
