Meaning of “And is the soul seen or not seen?”

Phaedo, Benjamin Jowett translation; Socrates is reasoning with Cebes about visibility, mortality and the proposed nature of soul and body.

The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, First Book, §1, Haldane and Kemp translation, Project Gutenberg #38427. “Idea” translates Vorstellung in this historical philosophical vocabulary and should not be read as the everyday sense of a passing thought.

The Consolation of Philosophy, Book III, Chapter XI, H. R. James translation (Elliot Stock, 1897), printed page 149 in Project Gutenberg #14328. Lady Philosophy reaches ‘All things, then, seek the good’ after arguing that things naturally seek continued existence and unity, and that unity and goodness are the same. This remains late-antique metaphysical/philosophical argument mediated by translation, not an empirical description of every human motive or modern behavioral science.

My Confession, Leo Wiener translation; the question appears in Tolstoy’s investigation of how finite human life might be related to an infinite reality.

Soliloquies in England, “Dickens”; Santayana uses caricature to describe the gap between living reality and conventional masks.

Pensées; Pascal contrasts forms of knowing associated with the heart and with discursive reason.