Chapter I: Introduction: And Analysis

Of all the writings of Plato the Timaeus is the most obscure and
repulsive to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the
greatest influence over the ancient and mediaeval world. The
obscurity arises in the infancy of physical science, out of the
confusion of theological, mathematical, and physiological
notions, out of the desire to conceive the whole of nature
without any adequate knowledge of the parts, and from a greater
perception of similarities which lie on the surface than of
differences which are hidden from view. To bring sense under the
control of reason; to find some way through the mist or labyrinth
of appearances, either the highway of mathematics, or more
devious paths suggested by the analogy of man with the world, and
of the world with man; to see that all things have a cause and
are tending towards an end—this is the spirit of the ancient
physical philosopher. He has no notion of trying an experiment
and is hardly capable of observing the curiosities of nature
which are ‘tumbling out at his feet,’ or of interpreting even the
most obvious of them. He is driven back from the nearer to the
more distant, from particulars to generalities, from the earth to
the stars. He lifts up his eyes to the heavens and seeks to guide
by their motions his erring footsteps. But we neither appreciate
the conditions of knowledge to which he was subjected, nor have
the ideas which fastened upon his imagination the same hold upon
us. For he is hanging between matter and mind; he is under the
dominion at the same time both of sense and of abstractions; his
impressions are taken almost at random from the outside of
nature; he sees the light, but not the objects which are revealed
by the light; and he brings into juxtaposition things which to us
appear wide as the poles asunder, because he finds nothing
between them. He passes abruptly from persons to ideas and
numbers, and from ideas and numbers to persons,—from the heavens
to man, from astronomy to physiology; he confuses, or rather does
not distinguish, subject and object, first and final causes, and
is dreaming of geometrical figures lost in a flux of sense. He
contrasts the perfect movements of the heavenly bodies with the
imperfect representation of them (Rep.), and he does not always
require strict accuracy even in applications of number and figure
(Rep.). His mind lingers around the forms of mythology, which he
uses as symbols or translates into figures of speech. He has no
implements of observation, such as the telescope or microscope;
the great science of chemistry is a blank to him. It is only by
an effort that the modern thinker can breathe the atmosphere of
the ancient philosopher, or understand how, under such unequal
conditions, he seems in many instances, by a sort of inspiration,
to have anticipated the truth.

The influence with the Timaeus has exercised upon posterity is
due partly to a misunderstanding. In the supposed depths of this
dialogue the Neo-Platonists found hidden meanings and connections
with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and out of them they
elicited doctrines quite at variance with the spirit of Plato.
Believing that he was inspired by the Holy Ghost, or had received
his wisdom from Moses, they seemed to find in his writings the
Christian Trinity, the Word, the Church, the creation of the
world in a Jewish sense, as they really found the personality of
God or of mind, and the immortality of the soul. All religions
and philosophies met and mingled in the schools of Alexandria,
and the Neo-Platonists had a method of interpretation which could
elicit any meaning out of any words. They were really incapable
of distinguishing between the opinions of one philosopher and
another— between Aristotle and Plato, or between the serious
thoughts of Plato and his passing fancies. They were absorbed in
his theology and were under the dominion of his name, while that
which was truly great and truly characteristic in him, his effort
to realize and connect abstractions, was not understood by them
at all. Yet the genius of Plato and Greek philosophy reacted upon
the East, and a Greek element of thought and language overlaid
and partly reduced to order the chaos of Orientalism. And kindred
spirits, like St. Augustine, even though they were acquainted
with his writings only through the medium of a Latin translation,
were profoundly affected by them, seeming to find ‘God and his
word everywhere insinuated’ in them (August. Confess.)

There is no danger of the modern commentators on the Timaeus
falling into the absurdities of the Neo-Platonists. In the
present day we are well aware that an ancient philosopher is to
be interpreted from himself and by the contemporary history of
thought. We know that mysticism is not criticism. The fancies of
the Neo-Platonists are only interesting to us because they
exhibit a phase of the human mind which prevailed widely in the
first centuries of the Christian era, and is not wholly extinct
in our own day. But they have nothing to do with the
interpretation of Plato, and in spirit they are opposed to him.
They are the feeble expression of an age which has lost the power
not only of creating great works, but of understanding them. They
are the spurious birth of a marriage between philosophy and
tradition, between Hellas and the East—(Greek) (Rep.). Whereas
the so-called mysticism of Plato is purely Greek, arising out of
his imperfect knowledge and high aspirations, and is the growth
of an age in which philosophy is not wholly separated from poetry
and mythology.

A greater danger with modern interpreters of Plato is the
tendency to regard the Timaeus as the centre of his system. We do
not know how Plato would have arranged his own dialogues, or
whether the thought of arranging any of them, besides the two
‘Trilogies’ which he has expressly connected; was ever present to
his mind. But, if he had arranged them, there are many
indications that this is not the place which he would have
assigned to the Timaeus. We observe, first of all, that the
dialogue is put into the mouth of a Pythagorean philosopher, and
not of Socrates. And this is required by dramatic propriety; for
the investigation of nature was expressly renounced by Socrates
in the Phaedo. Nor does Plato himself attribute any importance to
his guesses at science. He is not at all absorbed by them, as he
is by the IDEA of good. He is modest and hesitating, and
confesses that his words partake of the uncertainty of the
subject (Tim.). The dialogue is primarily concerned with the
animal creation, including under this term the heavenly bodies,
and with man only as one among the animals. But we can hardly
suppose that Plato would have preferred the study of nature to
man, or that he would have deemed the formation of the world and
the human frame to have the same interest which he ascribes to
the mystery of being and not-being, or to the great political
problems which he discusses in the Republic and the Laws. There
are no speculations on physics in the other dialogues of Plato,
and he himself regards the consideration of them as a rational
pastime only. He is beginning to feel the need of further
divisions of knowledge; and is becoming aware that besides
dialectic, mathematics, and the arts, there is another field
which has been hitherto unexplored by him. But he has not as yet
defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between
medicine and mathematics, and he would have felt that there was
as great an impiety in ranking theories of physics first in the
order of knowledge, as in placing the body before the soul.

It is true, however, that the Timaeus is by no means confined to
speculations on physics. The deeper foundations of the Platonic
philosophy, such as the nature of God, the distinction of the
sensible and intellectual, the great original conceptions of time
and space, also appear in it. They are found principally in the
first half of the dialogue. The construction of the heavens is
for the most part ideal; the cyclic year serves as the connection
between the world of absolute being and of generation, just as
the number of population in the Republic is the expression or
symbol of the transition from the ideal to the actual state. In
some passages we are uncertain whether we are reading a
description of astronomical facts or contemplating processes of
the human mind, or of that divine mind (Phil.) which in Plato is
hardly separable from it. The characteristics of man are
transferred to the world-animal, as for example when intelligence
and knowledge are said to be perfected by the circle of the Same,
and true opinion by the circle of the Other; and conversely the
motions of the world-animal reappear in man; its amorphous state
continues in the child, and in both disorder and chaos are
gradually succeeded by stability and order. It is not however to
passages like these that Plato is referring when he speaks of the
uncertainty of his subject, but rather to the composition of
bodies, to the relations of colours, the nature of diseases, and
the like, about which he truly feels the lamentable ignorance
prevailing in his own age.

We are led by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the
centre or inmost shrine of the edifice, but as a detached
building in a different style, framed, not after the Socratic,
but after some Pythagorean model. As in the Cratylus and
Parmenides, we are uncertain whether Plato is expressing his own
opinions, or appropriating and perhaps improving the
philosophical speculations of others. In all three dialogues he
is exerting his dramatic and imitative power; in the Cratylus
mingling a satirical and humorous purpose with true principles of
language; in the Parmenides overthrowing Megarianism by a sort of
ultra-Megarianism, which discovers contradictions in the one as
great as those which have been previously shown to exist in the
ideas. There is a similar uncertainty about the Timaeus; in the
first part he scales the heights of transcendentalism, in the
latter part he treats in a bald and superficial manner of the
functions and diseases of the human frame. He uses the thoughts
and almost the words of Parmenides when he discourses of being
and of essence, adopting from old religion into philosophy the
conception of God, and from the Megarians the IDEA of good. He
agrees with Empedocles and the Atomists in attributing the
greater differences of kinds to the figures of the elements and
their movements into and out of one another. With Heracleitus, he
acknowledges the perpetual flux; like Anaxagoras, he asserts the
predominance of mind, although admitting an element of necessity
which reason is incapable of subduing; like the Pythagoreans he
supposes the mystery of the world to be contained in number.
Many, if not all the elements of the Pre-Socratic philosophy are
included in the Timaeus. It is a composite or eclectic work of
imagination, in which Plato, without naming them, gathers up into
a kind of system the various elements of philosophy which
preceded him.

If we allow for the difference of subject, and for some growth in
Plato’s own mind, the discrepancy between the Timaeus and the
other dialogues will not appear to be great. It is probable that
the relation of the ideas to God or of God to the world was
differently conceived by him at different times of his life. In
all his later dialogues we observe a tendency in him to personify
mind or God, and he therefore naturally inclines to view creation
as the work of design. The creator is like a human artist who
frames in his mind a plan which he executes by the help of his
servants. Thus the language of philosophy which speaks of first
and second causes is crossed by another sort of phraseology: ‘God
made the world because he was good, and the demons ministered to
him.’ The Timaeus is cast in a more theological and less
philosophical mould than the other dialogues, but the same
general spirit is apparent; there is the same dualism or
opposition between the ideal and actual—the soul is prior to the
body, the intelligible and unseen to the visible and corporeal.
There is the same distinction between knowledge and opinion which
occurs in the Theaetetus and Republic, the same enmity to the
poets, the same combination of music and gymnastics. The doctrine
of transmigration is still held by him, as in the Phaedrus and
Republic; and the soul has a view of the heavens in a prior state
of being. The ideas also remain, but they have become types in
nature, forms of men, animals, birds, fishes. And the attribution
of evil to physical causes accords with the doctrine which he
maintains in the Laws respecting the involuntariness of vice.

The style and plan of the Timaeus differ greatly from that of any
other of the Platonic dialogues. The language is weighty, abrupt,
and in some passages sublime. But Plato has not the same mastery
over his instrument which he exhibits in the Phaedrus or
Symposium. Nothing can exceed the beauty or art of the
introduction, in which he is using words after his accustomed
manner. But in the rest of the work the power of language seems
to fail him, and the dramatic form is wholly given up. He could
write in one style, but not in another, and the Greek language
had not as yet been fashioned by any poet or philosopher to
describe physical phenomena. The early physiologists had
generally written in verse; the prose writers, like Democritus
and Anaxagoras, as far as we can judge from their fragments,
never attained to a periodic style. And hence we find the same
sort of clumsiness in the Timaeus of Plato which characterizes
the philosophical poem of Lucretius. There is a want of flow and
often a defect of rhythm; the meaning is sometimes obscure, and
there is a greater use of apposition and more of repetition than
occurs in Plato’s earlier writings. The sentences are less
closely connected and also more involved; the antecedents of
demonstrative and relative pronouns are in some cases remote and
perplexing. The greater frequency of participles and of absolute
constructions gives the effect of heaviness. The descriptive
portion of the Timaeus retains traces of the first Greek prose
composition; for the great master of language was speaking on a
theme with which he was imperfectly acquainted, and had no words
in which to express his meaning. The rugged grandeur of the
opening discourse of Timaeus may be compared with the more
harmonious beauty of a similar passage in the Phaedrus.

To the same cause we may attribute the want of plan. Plato had
not the command of his materials which would have enabled him to
produce a perfect work of art. Hence there are several new
beginnings and resumptions and formal or artificial connections;
we miss the ‘callida junctura’ of the earlier dialogues. His
speculations about the Eternal, his theories of creation, his
mathematical anticipations, are supplemented by desultory remarks
on the one immortal and the two mortal souls of man, on the
functions of the bodily organs in health and disease, on sight,
hearing, smell, taste, and touch. He soars into the heavens, and
then, as if his wings were suddenly clipped, he walks
ungracefully and with difficulty upon the earth. The greatest
things in the world, and the least things in man, are brought
within the compass of a short treatise. But the intermediate
links are missing, and we cannot be surprised that there should
be a want of unity in a work which embraces astronomy, theology,
physiology, and natural philosophy in a few pages.

It is not easy to determine how Plato’s cosmos may be presented
to the reader in a clearer and shorter form; or how we may supply
a thread of connexion to his ideas without giving greater
consistency to them than they possessed in his mind, or adding on
consequences which would never have occurred to him. For he has
glimpses of the truth, but no comprehensive or perfect vision.
There are isolated expressions about the nature of God which have
a wonderful depth and power; but we are not justified in assuming
that these had any greater significance to the mind of Plato than
language of a neutral and impersonal character... With a view to
the illustration of the Timaeus I propose to divide this
Introduction into sections, of which the first will contain an
outline of the dialogue: (2) I shall consider the aspects of
nature which presented themselves to Plato and his age, and the
elements of philosophy which entered into the conception of them:
(3) the theology and physics of the Timaeus, including the soul
of the world, the conception of time and space, and the
composition of the elements: (4) in the fourth section I shall
consider the Platonic astronomy, and the position of the earth.
There will remain, (5) the psychology, (6) the physiology of
Plato, and (7) his analysis of the senses to be briefly commented
upon: (8) lastly, we may examine in what points Plato approaches
or anticipates the discoveries of modern science.