his thoughts. In the same passage (272 C) there occurs the first clear anticipation of an interrogatio naturae.
The impulse in this new direction, if not originated, was manifestly reinforced, through closer intercourse with the Pythagorean school. And the choice of Timaeus the Pythagorean as chief speaker is an acknowledgment of this obvious tendency. If in the course of the dialogue there occur ideas apparently borrowed from the Atomists, whom Plato persistently ignored, this fact ought probably to be referred to some early reaction of Atomic on Pythagorean doctrine. It is important to observe, however, that not only the Timaeus, but the unfinished whole of which it forms the introduction, is professedly an imaginative creation. For the legend of prehistoric Athens and of Atlantis, whereof Critias was to relate what belonged to internal policy and Hermocrates the conduct of the war, would have been no other than a prose poem, a “mythological lie,” conceived in the spirit of the Republic, and in the form of a fictitious narrative. And, therefore, when Timaeus professes to give only a probable account of shadowy truths, he must be taken at his word, and not criticized in too exacting a spirit. His descriptions have much the same relation to the natural philosophy of Plato's time that Milton's cosmology has to the serious investigations of Galileo or Copernicus—except that all physical speculation hitherto partook in some measure of this half-mythological character, and that Plato's mind, although working in an unfamiliar region, is still that of a speculative philosopher.
As Parmenides, after demonstrating the nonentity of growth and decay, was yet impelled to give some account of this non-existent and unintelligible phenomenal world,Timaeus. so Plato, although warned off by Socrates, must needs attempt to give a probable and comprehensive description of the visible universe and its creation. In doing so he acknowledges an imperfect truth in theories which his dialectic had previously set aside. In examining the earlier philosophers he has already transgressed the limits prescribed by Socrates, and the effort to connect ideas has made him more and more conscious of the gap between the ideal and the actual. He cannot rest until he has done his utmost to fill up the chasm—calling in the help of imagination where reason fails him. His dominant thought is still that of a deduction from the “reason of the best,” as in the Phaedo, or “the idea of good,” as in the Republic. But both his abstract idealism and his absolute optimism were by this time considerably modified, and, although not confounding “causes with conditions,” as he once accused Anaxagoras of doing, he yet assigns more scope to “second causes” than he would then have been willing to attribute to them. This partly comes of ripening experience and a deepening sense of the persistency of evil, and partly from the feeling—which seems to have grown upon him in later life—of the distance between God and man.
Timaeus begins by assuming (1) that the universe being corporeal is caused and had a beginning, and (2) that its mysterious author made it after an everlasting pattern. Yet, being bodily and visible, it can only be made the subject, humanly speaking, of probable discourse. Thus much being premised, he proceeds to unfold—(a) the work of mind in creation, (b) the effects of necessity, including the general and specific attributes of bodies, (c) the principles of physiology, and (d) an outline of pathology and medicine.
To give a full account of such a comprehensive treatise is beyond our scope, and the Timaeus, however great and interesting, has been well described as an out-building of the great fabric of original Platonism. A very few scattered observations are all that there is space for here.
a. 1. In the mythology of the Timaeus some of the conceptions which attained logical clearness in the Sophist and Philebus resume an ontological form. Thus, in compounding the soul-stuff of the universe, the father of all takes of the continuous and discrete and fuses them into an essence (the composite being of the Philebus). Again he takes of, the same and other (cf. the Sophist), overcoming their inherent repugnance by his sovereign act.
2. The notion of an economy or reservation in Plato has been often exaggerated and misapplied. But it is difficult to acquit him of intentional obscurity in speaking of the creation of the Earth. It is clear, though Plato does not say so, that she is meant to have been created together with the Heaven and together with Time, and so before the other “gods within the heaven,” i.e. the sun and moon and five planets, and it is a plausible supposition that she is the “artificer of day and night,” by interposing her bulk to the sun's rays. If the word εἱλλομένη in p. 40 implies motion (as Aristotle thought[1]), it cannot be, as Grote supposed, a motion consentaneous with that of the outer sphere, but either some far slower motion, perhaps assumed in order to account for the shifting of the seasons, or an equal retrograde motion which is supposed to neutralize in her case the “motion of the same.” She clings to the centre, as her natural abode. And the diurnal motion of the heavens is due not to any mechanical force but to the soul of the world extending from the centre to the poles and comprehending all.
3. Immortality is in the Timaeus dependent on the will of the Eternal. And the sublime idea of eternity is here first formulated.
4. The phenomena of vision and hearing are included among the works of reason, because the final cause of these higher senses is to give men perception of number, through contemplation of the measures of time.
b. 1. It has been commonly said that the four elements of the Timaeus are geometrical figures, without content. This is not true. For what purpose does Plato introduce, “besides the archetype and the created form, a third kind, dim and hard to conceive, a sort of limbec or matrix of creation,” if not to fill up the triangles which are elements of elements, and to be the vehicle of the forms compounded of them? It has been supposed that this “nurse of generation” is identical with “space,” and it cannot be said that they are clearly kept apart by Plato. But he had a distinct nomenclature for either, and, although gravity is explained away (so that his molecules, unlike Clerk Maxwell's, may be called imponderable), yet extension, or the property of filling space, is sufficiently implied.
2. The difference of size in the triangles and varying sharpness of their outlines are ingenious though inadequate expedients, adopted in order to account for qualitative difference and physical change.
3. In criticizing the illusory notion of “up and down,” Plato, apparently for the first time, broaches the conception of antipodes.
4. More distinctly than in the Philebus, bodily pleasure is explained by “a sudden and sensible return to nature” (cf. Ar. Rhet. i. 11, § 1; N.E., vii. 10).
5. Natural philosophers are warned against experimenting on the mixture of colours, which is a divine process and forbidden to man (Tim. 68D). (Ancient science was at a loss for a theory of colours.)
c. 1. Plato tends more and more in his later writings to account for moral evil by physical conditions, thus arriving at the Socratic principle of the involuntariness of vice by a different road.
Hence in the Timaeus not the body only is made by the inferior gods, but they also create the lower and mortal parts of the human soul: the principle of anger which is planted in the breast, within hearing of reason, and that of appetite which is lodged below the diaphragm like an animal tied in a stall, with the stomach for a crib and the liver for a “soothsaying” looking-glass to soothe or terrify it when tempted to break loose.
2. The brain-pan was left bare of protecting flesh “because the sons of God who framed us deliberately chose for us a precarious life with capability of reason, in preference to a long secure existence with obstruction of thought.”
3. The nails are a rudimentary provision for the lower animals, into which degenerate souls were afterwards to be transformed.
4. Vegetables have sensation but not motion.
5. By way of illustrating the very curious account here given of respiration, it is asserted that what is commonly thought to be the attraction of the magnet is really due to rotatory motion and displacement: a remarkable anticipation (Tim. 80c).
6. When the original particles wear out, and the bonds of soul and body in the marrow give way, the soul escapes delightedly and flies away. This is the painless death of natural decay.
d. 1. The dependence of mental disease on bodily conditions is more fully recognized in the Timaeus than elsewhere in Plato (contrast the Charmides, for example).
2. He has also changed his mind about the treatment of disease, and shows more respect for regimen and diet than in the Republic. Diseases are a kind of second nature, and should be treated accordingly.
3. It is also a remark in contrast with the Republic, that overstudy leads to head complications, which physicians ascribe to chill and find intractable.
Lastly, it is one of the strange irregularities in the composition of the Timaeus that the creation of woman and the relation of the sexes[2] to each other are subjects reserved to the end, because this is the place given to the lower animals, and woman (cf. the Phaedrus) is the first transmigration from the form of man. This order is probably not to be attributed to Plato's own thought, but to some peculiarity of Pythagorean or Orphic tradition.
VIII. The Laws.—The two series of dialogues, the dialectical and the imaginative—Sophistes, Politicus, Philosophus—Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates—were left incomplete. For Plato had concentrated his declining powers, in the evening of
