"Death, says Socrates, is the separation of the soul from the body. Here we come upon Plato's dualism: between reality and appearance, ideas and sensible objects, reason and sense perception, soul and body. These pairs are connected: the first in each pair is superior to the second both in reality and in goodness. An ascetic morality was the natural consequence of this dualism. Christianity adopted this doctrine in part, but never wholly. There were two obstacles. The first was that the creation of the visible world, if Plato was right, must have been an evil deed, and therefore the Creator could not be good. The second was that orthodox Christianity could never bring itself to condemn marriage, though it held celibacy to be nobler. The Manichaeans were more consistent in both respects."
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Bertrand Russell A History of Western Philosophy Book One, Part II, Chapter XVI, Plato's Theory of Immortality, p. 134
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Dualism
Dualism (from the Latin word duo meaning "two") denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in other usages to indicate a system which contains two essential parts in its own.
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