Chapter X: Section 8 (1)

We have now to consider how far in any of these speculations
Plato approximated to the discoveries of modern science. The
modern physical philosopher is apt to dwell exclusively on the
absurdities of ancient ideas about science, on the haphazard
fancies and a priori assumptions of ancient teachers, on their
confusion of facts and ideas, on their inconsistency and
blindness to the most obvious phenomena. He measures them not by
what preceded them, but by what has followed them. He does not
consider that ancient physical philosophy was not a free enquiry,
but a growth, in which the mind was passive rather than active,
and was incapable of resisting the impressions which flowed in
upon it. He hardly allows to the notions of the ancients the
merit of being the stepping-stones by which he has himself risen
to a higher knowledge. He never reflects, how great a thing it
was to have formed a conception, however imperfect, either of the
human frame as a whole, or of the world as a whole. According to
the view taken in these volumes the errors of ancient physicists
were not separable from the intellectual conditions under which
they lived. Their genius was their own; and they were not the
rash and hasty generalizers which, since the days of Bacon, we
have been apt to suppose them. The thoughts of men widened to
receive experience; at first they seemed to know all things as in
a dream: after a while they look at them closely and hold them in
their hands. They begin to arrange them in classes and to connect
causes with effects. General notions are necessary to the
apprehension of particular facts, the metaphysical to the
physical. Before men can observe the world, they must be able to
conceive it.

To do justice to the subject, we should consider the physical
philosophy of the ancients as a whole; we should remember, (1)
that the nebular theory was the received belief of several of the
early physicists; (2) that the development of animals out of
fishes who came to land, and of man out of the animals, was held
by Anaximander in the sixth century before Christ (Plut. Symp.
Quaest; Plac. Phil.); (3) that even by Philolaus and the early
Pythagoreans, the earth was held to be a body like the other
stars revolving in space around the sun or a central fire; (4)
that the beginnings of chemistry are discernible in the ‘similar
particles’ of Anaxagoras. Also they knew or thought (5) that
there was a sex in plants as well as in animals; (6) they were
aware that musical notes depended on the relative length or
tension of the strings from which they were emitted, and were
measured by ratios of number; (7) that mathematical laws pervaded
the world; and even qualitative differences were supposed to have
their origin in number and figure; (8) the annihilation of matter
was denied by several of them, and the seeming disappearance of
it held to be a transformation only. For, although one of these
discoveries might have been supposed to be a happy guess, taken
together they seem to imply a great advance and almost maturity
of natural knowledge.

We should also remember, when we attribute to the ancients hasty
generalizations and delusions of language, that physical
philosophy and metaphysical too have been guilty of similar
fallacies in quite recent times. We by no means distinguish
clearly between mind and body, between ideas and facts. Have not
many discussions arisen about the Atomic theory in which a point
has been confused with a material atom? Have not the natures of
things been explained by imaginary entities, such as life or
phlogiston, which exist in the mind only? Has not disease been
regarded, like sin, sometimes as a negative and necessary,
sometimes as a positive or malignant principle? The ‘idols’ of
Bacon are nearly as common now as ever; they are inherent in the
human mind, and when they have the most complete dominion over
us, we are least able to perceive them. We recognize them in the
ancients, but we fail to see them in ourselves.

Such reflections, although this is not the place in which to
dwell upon them at length, lead us to take a favourable view of
the speculations of the Timaeus. We should consider not how much
Plato actually knew, but how far he has contributed to the
general ideas of physics, or supplied the notions which, whether
true or false, have stimulated the minds of later generations in
the path of discovery. Some of them may seem old-fashioned, but
may nevertheless have had a great influence in promoting system
and assisting enquiry, while in others we hear the latest word of
physical or metaphysical philosophy. There is also an
intermediate class, in which Plato falls short of the truths of
modern science, though he is not wholly unacquainted with them.
(1) To the first class belongs the teleological theory of
creation. Whether all things in the world can be explained as the
result of natural laws, or whether we must not admit of
tendencies and marks of design also, has been a question much
disputed of late years. Even if all phenomena are the result of
natural forces, we must admit that there are many things in
heaven and earth which are as well expressed under the image of
mind or design as under any other. At any rate, the language of
Plato has been the language of natural theology down to our own
time, nor can any description of the world wholly dispense with
it. The notion of first and second or co-operative causes, which
originally appears in the Timaeus, has likewise survived to our
own day, and has been a great peace-maker between theology and
science. Plato also approaches very near to our doctrine of the
primary and secondary qualities of matter. (2) Another popular
notion which is found in the Timaeus, is the feebleness of the
human intellect—‘God knows the original qualities of things; man
can only hope to attain to probability.’ We speak in almost the
same words of human intelligence, but not in the same manner of
the uncertainty of our knowledge of nature. The reason is that
the latter is assured to us by experiment, and is not contrasted
with the certainty of ideal or mathematical knowledge. But the
ancient philosopher never experimented: in the Timaeus Plato
seems to have thought that there would be impiety in making the
attempt; he, for example, who tried experiments in colours would
‘forget the difference of the human and divine natures.’ Their
indefiniteness is probably the reason why he singles them out, as
especially incapable of being tested by experiment. (Compare the
saying of Anaxagoras—Sext. Pyrrh.—that since snow is made of
water and water is black, snow ought to be black.)

The greatest ‘divination’ of the ancients was the supremacy which
they assigned to mathematics in all the realms of nature; for in
all of them there is a foundation of mechanics. Even physiology
partakes of figure and number; and Plato is not wrong in
attributing them to the human frame, but in the omission to
observe how little could be explained by them. Thus we may remark
in passing that the most fanciful of ancient philosophies is also
the most nearly verified in fact. The fortunate guess that the
world is a sum of numbers and figures has been the most fruitful
of anticipations. The ‘diatonic’ scale of the Pythagoreans and
Plato suggested to Kepler that the secret of the distances of the
planets from one another was to be found in mathematical
proportions. The doctrine that the heavenly bodies all move in a
circle is known by us to be erroneous; but without such an error
how could the human mind have comprehended the heavens?
Astronomy, even in modern times, has made far greater progress by
the high a priori road than could have been attained by any
other. Yet, strictly speaking—and the remark applies to ancient
physics generally—this high a priori road was based upon a
posteriori grounds. For there were no facts of which the ancients
were so well assured by experience as facts of number. Having
observed that they held good in a few instances, they applied
them everywhere; and in the complexity, of which they were
capable, found the explanation of the equally complex phenomena
of the universe. They seemed to see them in the least things as
well as in the greatest; in atoms, as well as in suns and stars;
in the human body as well as in external nature. And now a
favourite speculation of modern chemistry is the explanation of
qualitative difference by quantitative, which is at present
verified to a certain extent and may hereafter be of far more
universal application. What is this but the atoms of Democritus
and the triangles of Plato? The ancients should not be wholly
deprived of the credit of their guesses because they were unable
to prove them. May they not have had, like the animals, an
instinct of something more than they knew?

Besides general notions we seem to find in the Timaeus some more
precise approximations to the discoveries of modern physical
science. First, the doctrine of equipoise. Plato affirms, almost
in so many words, that nature abhors a vacuum. Whenever a
particle is displaced, the rest push and thrust one another until
equality is restored. We must remember that these ideas were not
derived from any definite experiment, but were the original
reflections of man, fresh from the first observation of nature.
The latest word of modern philosophy is continuity and
development, but to Plato this is the beginning and foundation of
science; there is nothing that he is so strongly persuaded of as
that the world is one, and that all the various existences which
are contained in it are only the transformations of the same soul
of the world acting on the same matter. He would have readily
admitted that out of the protoplasm all things were formed by the
gradual process of creation; but he would have insisted that mind
and intelligence—not meaning by this, however, a conscious mind
or person—were prior to them, and could alone have created them.
Into the workings of this eternal mind or intelligence he does
not enter further; nor would there have been any use in
attempting to investigate the things which no eye has seen nor
any human language can express.

Lastly, there remain two points in which he seems to touch great
discoveries of modern times—the law of gravitation, and the
circulation of the blood.

(1) The law of gravitation, according to Plato, is a law, not
only of the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, but of
similar bodies to similar, having a magnetic power as well as a
principle of gravitation. He observed that earth, water, and air
had settled down to their places, and he imagined fire or the
exterior aether to have a place beyond air. When air seemed to go
upwards and fire to pierce through air—when water and earth fell
downward, they were seeking their native elements. He did not
remark that his own explanation did not suit all phenomena; and
the simpler explanation, which assigns to bodies degrees of
heaviness and lightness proportioned to the mass and distance of
the bodies which attract them, never occurred to him. Yet the
affinities of similar substances have some effect upon the
composition of the world, and of this Plato may be thought to
have had an anticipation. He may be described as confusing the
attraction of gravitation with the attraction of cohesion. The
influence of such affinities and the chemical action of one body
upon another in long periods of time have become a recognized
principle of geology.

(2) Plato is perfectly aware—and he could hardly be ignorant—that
blood is a fluid in constant motion. He also knew that blood is
partly a solid substance consisting of several elements, which,
as he might have observed in the use of ‘cupping-glasses’,
decompose and die, when no longer in motion. But the specific
discovery that the blood flows out on one side of the heart
through the arteries and returns through the veins on the other,
which is commonly called the circulation of the blood, was
absolutely unknown to him.

A further study of the Timaeus suggests some after-thoughts which
may be conveniently brought together in this place. The topics
which I propose briefly to reconsider are (a) the relation of the
Timaeus to the other dialogues of Plato and to the previous
philosophy; (b) the nature of God and of creation (c) the
morality of the Timaeus:—

(a) The Timaeus is more imaginative and less scientific than any
other of the Platonic dialogues. It is conjectural astronomy,
conjectural natural philosophy, conjectural medicine. The writer
himself is constantly repeating that he is speaking what is
probable only. The dialogue is put into the mouth of Timaeus, a
Pythagorean philosopher, and therefore here, as in the
Parmenides, we are in doubt how far Plato is expressing his own
sentiments. Hence the connexion with the other dialogues is
comparatively slight. We may fill up the lacunae of the Timaeus
by the help of the Republic or Phaedrus: we may identify the same
and other with the (Greek) of the Philebus. We may find in the
Laws or in the Statesman parallels with the account of creation
and of the first origin of man. It would be possible to frame a
scheme in which all these various elements might have a place.
But such a mode of proceeding would be unsatisfactory, because we
have no reason to suppose that Plato intended his scattered
thoughts to be collected in a system. There is a common spirit in
his writings, and there are certain general principles, such as
the opposition of the sensible and intellectual, and the priority
of mind, which run through all of them; but he has no definite
forms of words in which he consistently expresses himself. While
the determinations of human thought are in process of creation he
is necessarily tentative and uncertain. And there is least of
definiteness, whenever either in describing the beginning or the
end of the world, he has recourse to myths. These are not the
fixed modes in which spiritual truths are revealed to him, but
the efforts of imagination, by which at different times and in
various manners he seeks to embody his conceptions. The clouds of
mythology are still resting upon him, and he has not yet pierced
‘to the heaven of the fixed stars’ which is beyond them. It is
safer then to admit the inconsistencies of the Timaeus, or to
endeavour to fill up what is wanting from our own imagination,
inspired by a study of the dialogue, than to refer to other
Platonic writings,—and still less should we refer to the
successors of Plato,—for the elucidation of it.

More light is thrown upon the Timaeus by a comparison of the
previous philosophies. For the physical science of the ancients
was traditional, descending through many generations of Ionian
and Pythagorean philosophers. Plato does not look out upon the
heavens and describe what he sees in them, but he builds upon the
foundations of others, adding something out of the ‘depths of his
own self-consciousness.’ Socrates had already spoken of God the
creator, who made all things for the best. While he ridiculed the
superficial explanations of phenomena which were current in his
age, he recognised the marks both of benevolence and of design in
the frame of man and in the world. The apparatus of winds and
waters is contemptuously rejected by him in the Phaedo, but he
thinks that there is a power greater than that of any Atlas in
the ‘Best’ (Phaedo; Arist. Met.). Plato, following his master,
affirms this principle of the best, but he acknowledges that the
best is limited by the conditions of matter. In the generation
before Socrates, Anaxagoras had brought together ‘Chaos’ and
‘Mind’; and these are connected by Plato in the Timaeus, but in
accordance with his own mode of thinking he has interposed
between them the idea or pattern according to which mind worked.
The circular impulse (Greek) of the one philosopher answers to
the circular movement (Greek) of the other. But unlike
Anaxagoras, Plato made the sun and stars living beings and not
masses of earth or metal. The Pythagoreans again had framed a
world out of numbers, which they constructed into figures. Plato
adopted their speculations and improved upon them by a more exact
knowledge of geometry. The Atomists too made the world, if not
out of geometrical figures, at least out of different forms of
atoms, and these atoms resembled the triangles of Plato in being
too small to be visible. But though the physiology of the Timaeus
is partly borrowed from them, they are either ignored by Plato or
referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with
more favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number
applied to the distances of the planets reappear in the Timaeus.
It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth
century B.C., there were already some who, like Plato, made the
earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same
and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The four
elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices of the
Timaeus may also be compared with his (Greek). The passage of one
element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the
Ionian philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not
after the manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he
borrows from others are fused and transformed by his own genius.
On the other hand we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or
Eleatic speculation. He does not imagine the world of sense to be
made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary
within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the
principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the
world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an
existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on
the will of the creator. Instead of maintaining the doctrine that
the void has a necessary place in the existence of the world, he
rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum, as
in the Sophist he also denies the reality of not-being (Aristot.
Metaph.). But though in these respects he differs from them, he
is deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he
differs from them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the
‘generous depth’ of Parmenides (Theaet.).

There is a similarity between the Timaeus and the fragments of
Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to
create a suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is
known to us from the Phaedo of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher
residing at Thebes in the latter half of the fifth century B.C.,
after the dispersion of the original Pythagorean society. He was
the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who became disciples of
Socrates. We have hardly any other information about him. The
story that Plato had purchased three books of his writings from a
relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful way in
which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was
supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar
gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and
the Phaedo. That there really existed in antiquity a work passing
under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of
this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in
Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the Timaeus, as
well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus. When the writer says (Stob.
Eclog.) that all things are either finite (definite) or infinite
(indefinite), or a union of the two, and that this antithesis and
synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are reminded of the
Philebus. When he calls the centre of the world (Greek), we have
a parallel to the Phaedrus. His distinction between the world of
order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the
world of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and
the earth, approximates to Plato’s sphere of the Same and of the
Other. Like Plato (Tim.), he denied the above and below in space,
and said that all things were the same in relation to a centre.
He speaks also of the world as one and indestructible: ‘for
neither from within nor from without does it admit of
destruction’ (Tim). He mentions ten heavenly bodies, including
the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (Greek), and in
the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which
they are moving—this is hidden from the earth by the
counter-earth. Of neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes
the earth the centre of his system. Philolaus magnifies the
virtues of particular numbers, especially of the number 10 (Stob.
Eclog.), and descants upon odd and even numbers, after the manner
of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy of remark that these
mystical fancies are nowhere to be found in the writings of
Plato, although the importance of number as a form and also an
instrument of thought is ever present to his mind. Both Philolaus
and Plato agree in making the world move in certain numerical
ratios according to a musical scale: though Bockh is of opinion
that the two scales, of Philolaus and of the Timaeus, do not
correspond...We appear not to be sufficiently acquainted with the
early Pythagoreans to know how far the statements contained in
these fragments corresponded with their doctrines; and we
therefore cannot pronounce, either in favour of the genuineness
of the fragments, with Bockh and Zeller, or, with Valentine Rose
and Schaarschmidt, against them. But it is clear that they throw
but little light upon the Timaeus, and that their resemblance to
it has been exaggerated.

That there is a degree of confusion and indistinctness in Plato’s
account both of man and of the universe has been already
acknowledged. We cannot tell (nor could Plato himself have told)
where the figure or myth ends and the philosophical truth begins;
we cannot explain (nor could Plato himself have explained to us)
the relation of the ideas to appearance, of which one is the copy
of the other, and yet of all things in the world they are the
most opposed and unlike. This opposition is presented to us in
many forms, as the antithesis of the one and many, of the finite
and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the
unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the
divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative
mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many
aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomena—they
easily pass into one another; and sometimes the two members of
the relation differ in kind, sometimes only in degree. As in
Aristotle’s matter and form the connexion between them is really
inseparable; for if we attempt to separate them they become
devoid of content and therefore indistinguishable; there is no
difference between the idea of which nothing can be predicated,
and the chaos or matter which has no perceptible
qualities—between Being in the abstract and Nothing. Yet we are
frequently told that the one class of them is the reality and the
other appearance; and one is often spoken of as the double or
reflection of the other. For Plato never clearly saw that both
elements had an equal place in mind and in nature; and hence,
especially when we argue from isolated passages in his writings,
or attempt to draw what appear to us to be the natural inferences
from them, we are full of perplexity. There is a similar
confusion about necessity and free-will, and about the state of
the soul after death. Also he sometimes supposes that God is
immanent in the world, sometimes that he is transcendent. And
having no distinction of objective and subjective, he passes
imperceptibly from one to the other; from intelligence to soul,
from eternity to time. These contradictions may be softened or
concealed by a judicious use of language, but they cannot be
wholly got rid of. That an age of intellectual transition must
also be one of inconsistency; that the creative is opposed to the
critical or defining habit of mind or time, has been often
repeated by us. But, as Plato would say, ‘there is no harm in
repeating twice or thrice’ (Laws) what is important for the
understanding of a great author.

It has not, however, been observed, that the confusion partly
arises out of the elements of opposing philosophies which are
preserved in him. He holds these in solution, he brings them into
relation with one another, but he does not perfectly harmonize
them. They are part of his own mind, and he is incapable of
placing himself outside of them and criticizing them. They grow
as he grows; they are a kind of composition with which his own
philosophy is overlaid. In early life he fancies that he has
mastered them: but he is also mastered by them; and in language
(Sophist) which may be compared with the hesitating tone of the
Timaeus, he confesses in his later years that they are full of
obscurity to him. He attributes new meanings to the words of
Parmenides and Heracleitus; but at times the old Eleatic
philosophy appears to go beyond him; then the world of phenomena
disappears, but the doctrine of ideas is also reduced to
nothingness. All of them are nearer to one another than they
themselves supposed, and nearer to him than he supposed. All of
them are antagonistic to sense and have an affinity to number and
measure and a presentiment of ideas. Even in Plato they still
retain their contentious or controversial character, which was
developed by the growth of dialectic. He is never able to
reconcile the first causes of the pre-Socratic philosophers with
the final causes of Socrates himself. There is no intelligible
account of the relation of numbers to the universal ideas, or of
universals to the idea of good. He found them all three, in the
Pythagorean philosophy and in the teaching of Socrates and of the
Megarians respectively; and, because they all furnished modes of
explaining and arranging phenomena, he is unwilling to give up
any of them, though he is unable to unite them in a consistent
whole.

Lastly, Plato, though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not
Oriental in spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is
not seeking in vain to get rid of matter or to find absorption in
the divine nature, or in the Soul of the universe. And therefore
we are not surprised to find that his philosophy in the Timaeus
returns at last to a worship of the heavens, and that to him, as
to other Greeks, nature, though containing a remnant of evil, is
still glorious and divine. He takes away or drops the veil of
mythology, and presents her to us in what appears to him to be
the form-fairer and truer far—of mathematical figures. It is this
element in the Timaeus, no less than its affinity to certain
Pythagorean speculations, which gives it a character not wholly
in accordance with the other dialogues of Plato.

(b) The Timaeus contains an assertion perhaps more distinct than
is found in any of the other dialogues (Rep.; Laws) of the
goodness of God. ‘He was good himself, and he fashioned the good
everywhere.’ He was not ‘a jealous God,’ and therefore he desired
that all other things should be equally good. He is the IDEA of
good who has now become a person, and speaks and is spoken of as
God. Yet his personality seems to appear only in the act of
creation. In so far as he works with his eye fixed upon an
eternal pattern he is like the human artificer in the Republic.
Here the theory of Platonic ideas intrudes upon us. God, like
man, is supposed to have an ideal of which Plato is unable to
tell us the origin. He may be said, in the language of modern
philosophy, to resolve the divine mind into subject and object.

The first work of creation is perfected, the second begins under
the direction of inferior ministers. The supreme God is withdrawn
from the world and returns to his own accustomed nature (Tim.).
As in the Statesman, he retires to his place of view. So early
did the Epicurean doctrine take possession of the Greek mind, and
so natural is it to the heart of man, when he has once passed out
of the stage of mythology into that of rational religion. For he
sees the marks of design in the world; but he no longer sees or
fancies that he sees God walking in the garden or haunting stream
or mountain. He feels also that he must put God as far as
possible out of the way of evil, and therefore he banishes him
from an evil world. Plato is sensible of the difficulty; and he
often shows that he is desirous of justifying the ways of God to
man. Yet on the other hand, in the Tenth Book of the Laws he
passes a censure on those who say that the Gods have no care of
human things.

The creation of the world is the impression of order on a
previously existing chaos. The formula of Anaxagoras—‘all things
were in chaos or confusion, and then mind came and disposed
them’—is a summary of the first part of the Timaeus. It is true
that of a chaos without differences no idea could be formed. All
was not mixed but one; and therefore it was not difficult for the
later Platonists to draw inferences by which they were enabled to
reconcile the narrative of the Timaeus with the Mosaic account of
the creation. Neither when we speak of mind or intelligence, do
we seem to get much further in our conception than circular
motion, which was deemed to be the most perfect. Plato, like
Anaxagoras, while commencing his theory of the universe with
ideas of mind and of the best, is compelled in the execution of
his design to condescend to the crudest physics.

(c) The morality of the Timaeus is singular, and it is difficult
to adjust the balance between the two elements of it. The
difficulty which Plato feels, is that which all of us feel, and
which is increased in our own day by the progress of physical
science, how the responsibility of man is to be reconciled with
his dependence on natural causes. And sometimes, like other men,
he is more impressed by one aspect of human life, sometimes by
the other. In the Republic he represents man as freely choosing
his own lot in a state prior to birth—a conception which, if
taken literally, would still leave him subject to the dominion of
necessity in his after life; in the Statesman he supposes the
human race to be preserved in the world only by a divine
interposition; while in the Timaeus the supreme God commissions
the inferior deities to avert from him all but self-inflicted
evils—words which imply that all the evils of men are really
self-inflicted. And here, like Plato (the insertion of a note in
the text of an ancient writer is a literary curiosity worthy of
remark), we may take occasion to correct an error. For we too
hastily said that Plato in the Timaeus regarded all ‘vices and
crimes as involuntary.’ But the fact is that he is inconsistent
with himself; in one and the same passage vice is attributed to
the relaxation of the bodily frame, and yet we are exhorted to
avoid it and pursue virtue. It is also admitted that good and
evil conduct are to be attributed respectively to good and evil
laws and institutions. These cannot be given by individuals to
themselves; and therefore human actions, in so far as they are
dependent upon them, are regarded by Plato as involuntary rather
than voluntary. Like other writers on this subject, he is unable
to escape from some degree of self-contradiction. He had learned
from Socrates that vice is ignorance, and suddenly the doctrine
seems to him to be confirmed by observing how much of the good
and bad in human character depends on the bodily constitution. So
in modern times the speculative doctrine of necessity has often
been supported by physical facts.

The Timaeus also contains an anticipation of the stoical life
according to nature. Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate
his erring life according to them. He is to partake of the repose
of nature and of the order of nature, to bring the variable
principle in himself into harmony with the principle of the same.
The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea of
‘law.’ To feel habitually that he is part of the order of the
universe, is one of the highest ethical motives of which man is
capable. Something like this is what Plato means when he speaks
of the soul ‘moving about the same in unchanging thought of the
same.’ He does not explain how man is acted upon by the lesser
influences of custom or of opinion; or how the commands of the
soul watching in the citadel are conveyed to the bodily organs.
But this perhaps, to use once more expressions of his own, ‘is
part of another subject’ or ‘may be more suitably discussed on
some other occasion.’

There is no difficulty, by the help of Aristotle and later
writers, in criticizing the Timaeus of Plato, in pointing out the
inconsistencies of the work, in dwelling on the ignorance of
anatomy displayed by the author, in showing the fancifulness or
unmeaningness of some of his reasons. But the Timaeus still
remains the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the
world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to
us.

One more aspect of the Timaeus remains to be considered—the
mythological or geographical. Is it not a wonderful thing that a
few pages of one of Plato’s dialogues have grown into a great
legend, not confined to Greece only, but spreading far and wide
over the nations of Europe and reaching even to Egypt and Asia?
Like the tale of Troy, or the legend of the Ten Tribes (Ewald,
Hist. of Isr.), which perhaps originated in a few verses of II
Esdras, it has become famous, because it has coincided with a
great historical fact. Like the romance of King Arthur, which has
had so great a charm, it has found a way over the seas from one
country and language to another. It inspired the navigators of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it foreshadowed the
discovery of America. It realized the fiction so natural to the
human mind, because it answered the enquiry about the origin of
the arts, that there had somewhere existed an ancient primitive
civilization. It might find a place wherever men chose to look
for it; in North, South, East, or West; in the Islands of the
Blest; before the entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar, in Sweden
or in Palestine. It mattered little whether the description in
Plato agreed with the locality assigned to it or not. It was a
legend so adapted to the human mind that it made a habitation for
itself in any country. It was an island in the clouds, which
might be seen anywhere by the eye of faith. It was a subject
especially congenial to the ponderous industry of certain French
and Swedish writers, who delighted in heaping up learning of all
sorts but were incapable of using it.

M. Martin has written a valuable dissertation on the opinions
entertained respecting the Island of Atlantis in ancient and
modern times. It is a curious chapter in the history of the human
mind. The tale of Atlantis is the fabric of a vision, but it has
never ceased to interest mankind. It was variously regarded by
the ancients themselves. The stronger heads among them, like
Strabo and Longinus, were as little disposed to believe in the
truth of it as the modern reader in Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe.
On the other hand there is no kind or degree of absurdity or
fancy in which the more foolish writers, both of antiquity and of
modern times, have not indulged respecting it. The
Neo-Platonists, loyal to their master, like some commentators on
the Christian Scriptures, sought to give an allegorical meaning
to what they also believed to be an historical fact. It was as if
some one in our own day were to convert the poems of Homer into
an allegory of the Christian religion, at the same time
maintaining them to be an exact and veritable history. In the
Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten until
revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia
of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although
probably neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by
the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the
early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind,
seeking for Utopias or inventing them, was glad to escape out of
the dulness of the present into the romance of the past or some
ideal of the future. The later forms of such narratives contained
features taken from the Edda, as well as from the Old and New
Testament; also from the tales of missionaries and the
experiences of travellers and of colonists.

The various opinions respecting the Island of Atlantis have no
interest for us except in so far as they illustrate the
extravagances of which men are capable. But this is a real
interest and a serious lesson, if we remember that now as
formerly the human mind is liable to be imposed upon by the
illusions of the past, which are ever assuming some new form.

When we have shaken off the rubbish of ages, there remain one or
two questions of which the investigation has a permanent value:—

1. Did Plato derive the legend of Atlantis from an Egyptian
source? It may be replied that there is no such legend in any
writer previous to Plato; neither in Homer, nor in Pindar, nor in
Herodotus is there any mention of an Island of Atlantis, nor any
reference to it in Aristotle, nor any citation of an earlier
writer by a later one in which it is to be found. Nor have any
traces been discovered hitherto in Egyptian monuments of a
connexion between Greece and Egypt older than the eighth or ninth
century B.C. It is true that Proclus, writing in the fifth
century after Christ, tells us of stones and columns in Egypt on
which the history of the Island of Atlantis was engraved. The
statement may be false—there are similar tales about columns set
up ‘by the Canaanites whom Joshua drove out’ (Procop.); but even
if true, it would only show that the legend, 800 years after the
time of Plato, had been transferred to Egypt, and inscribed, not,
like other forgeries, in books, but on stone. Probably in the
Alexandrian age, when Egypt had ceased to have a history and
began to appropriate the legends of other nations, many such
monuments were to be found of events which had become famous in
that or other countries. The oldest witness to the story is said
to be Crantor, a Stoic philosopher who lived a generation later
than Plato, and therefore may have borrowed it from him. The
statement is found in Proclus; but we require better assurance
than Proclus can give us before we accept this or any other
statement which he makes.

Secondly, passing from the external to the internal evidence, we
may remark that the story is far more likely to have been
invented by Plato than to have been brought by Solon from Egypt.
That is another part of his legend which Plato also seeks to
impose upon us. The verisimilitude which he has given to the tale
is a further reason for suspecting it; for he could easily
‘invent Egyptian or any other tales’ (Phaedrus). Are not the
words, ‘The truth of the story is a great advantage,’ if we read
between the lines, an indication of the fiction? It is only a
legend that Solon went to Egypt, and if he did he could not have
conversed with Egyptian priests or have read records in their
temples. The truth is that the introduction is a mosaic work of
small touches which, partly by their minuteness, and also by
their seeming probability, win the confidence of the reader. Who
would desire better evidence than that of Critias, who had heard
the narrative in youth when the memory is strongest at the age of
ten from his grandfather Critias, an old man of ninety, who in
turn had heard it from Solon himself? Is not the famous
expression—‘You Hellenes are ever children and there is no
knowledge among you hoary with age,’ really a compliment to the
Athenians who are described in these words as ‘ever young’? And
is the thought expressed in them to be attributed to the learning
of the Egyptian priest, and not rather to the genius of Plato? Or
when the Egyptian says—‘Hereafter at our leisure we will take up
the written documents and examine in detail the exact truth about
these things’—what is this but a literary trick by which Plato
sets off his narrative? Could any war between Athens and the
Island of Atlantis have really coincided with the struggle
between the Greeks and Persians, as is sufficiently hinted though
not expressly stated in the narrative of Plato? And whence came
the tradition to Egypt? or in what does the story consist except
in the war between the two rival powers and the submersion of
both of them? And how was the tale transferred to the poem of
Solon? ‘It is not improbable,’ says Mr. Grote, ‘that Solon did
leave an unfinished Egyptian poem’ (Plato). But are probabilities
for which there is not a tittle of evidence, and which are
without any parallel, to be deemed worthy of attention by the
critic? How came the poem of Solon to disappear in antiquity? or
why did Plato, if the whole narrative was known to him, break off
almost at the beginning of it?

While therefore admiring the diligence and erudition of M.
Martin, we cannot for a moment suppose that the tale was told to
Solon by an Egyptian priest, nor can we believe that Solon wrote
a poem upon the theme which was thus suggested to him—a poem
which disappeared in antiquity; or that the Island of Atlantis or
the antediluvian Athens ever had any existence except in the
imagination of Plato. Martin is of opinion that Plato would have
been terrified if he could have foreseen the endless fancies to
which his Island of Atlantis has given occasion. Rather he would
have been infinitely amused if he could have known that his gift
of invention would have deceived M. Martin himself into the
belief that the tradition was brought from Egypt by Solon and
made the subject of a poem by him. M. Martin may also be gently
censured for citing without sufficient discrimination ancient
authors having very different degrees of authority and value.

2. It is an interesting and not unimportant question which is
touched upon by Martin, whether the Atlantis of Plato in any
degree held out a guiding light to the early navigators. He is
inclined to think that there is no real connexion between them.
But surely the discovery of the New World was preceded by a
prophetic anticipation of it, which, like the hope of a Messiah,
was entering into the hearts of men? And this hope was nursed by
ancient tradition, which had found expression from time to time
in the celebrated lines of Seneca and in many other places. This
tradition was sustained by the great authority of Plato, and
therefore the legend of the Island of Atlantis, though not
closely connected with the voyages of the early navigators, may
be truly said to have contributed indirectly to the great
discovery.

The Timaeus of Plato, like the Protagoras and several portions of
the Phaedrus and Republic, was translated by Cicero into Latin.
About a fourth, comprehending with lacunae the first portion of
the dialogue, is preserved in several MSS. These generally agree,
and therefore may be supposed to be derived from a single
original. The version is very faithful, and is a remarkable
monument of Cicero’s skill in managing the difficult and
intractable Greek. In his treatise De Natura Deorum, he also
refers to the Timaeus, which, speaking in the person of Velleius
the Epicurean, he severely criticises.

The commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus is a wonderful monument
of the silliness and prolixity of the Alexandrian Age. It extends
to about thirty pages of the book, and is thirty times the length
of the original. It is surprising that this voluminous work
should have found a translator (Thomas Taylor, a kindred spirit,
who was himself a Neo-Platonist, after the fashion, not of the
fifth or sixteenth, but of the nineteenth century A.D.). The
commentary is of little or no value, either in a philosophical or
philological point of view. The writer is unable to explain
particular passages in any precise manner, and he is equally
incapable of grasping the whole. He does not take words in their
simple meaning or sentences in their natural connexion. He is
thinking, not of the context in Plato, but of the contemporary
Pythagorean philosophers and their wordy strife. He finds nothing
in the text which he does not bring to it. He is full of
Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus, of misapplied logic, of
misunderstood grammar, and of the Orphic theology.

Although such a work can contribute little or nothing to the
understanding of Plato, it throws an interesting light on the
Alexandrian times; it realizes how a philosophy made up of words
only may create a deep and widespread enthusiasm, how the forms
of logic and rhetoric may usurp the place of reason and truth,
how all philosophies grow faded and discoloured, and are patched
and made up again like worn-out garments, and retain only a
second-hand existence. He who would study this degeneracy of
philosophy and of the Greek mind in the original cannot do better
than devote a few of his days and nights to the commentary of
Proclus on the Timaeus.

A very different account must be given of the short work entitled
‘Timaeus Locrus,’ which is a brief but clear analysis of the
Timaeus of Plato, omitting the introduction or dialogue and
making a few small additions. It does not allude to the original
from which it is taken; it is quite free from mysticism and
Neo-Platonism. In length it does not exceed a fifth part of the
Timaeus. It is written in the Doric dialect, and contains several
words which do not occur in classical Greek. No other indication
of its date, except this uncertain one of language, appears in
it. In several places the writer has simplified the language of
Plato, in a few others he has embellished and exaggerated it. He
generally preserves the thought of the original, but does not
copy the words. On the whole this little tract faithfully
reflects the meaning and spirit of the Timaeus.

From the garden of the Timaeus, as from the other dialogues of
Plato, we may still gather a few flowers and present them at
parting to the reader. There is nothing in Plato grander and
simpler than the conversation between Solon and the Egyptian
priest, in which the youthfulness of Hellas is contrasted with
the antiquity of Egypt. Here are to be found the famous words, ‘O
Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is not an
old man among you’—which may be compared to the lively saying of
Hegel, that ‘Greek history began with the youth Achilles and left
off with the youth Alexander.’ The numerous arts of
verisimilitude by which Plato insinuates into the mind of the
reader the truth of his narrative have been already referred to.
Here occur a sentence or two not wanting in Platonic irony
(Greek—a word to the wise). ‘To know or tell the origin of the
other divinities is beyond us, and we must accept the traditions
of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring
of the Gods—that is what they say—and they must surely have known
their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the children of
the Gods? Although they give no probable or certain proofs,
still, as they declare that they are speaking of what took place
in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them.’
‘Our creators well knew that women and other animals would some
day be framed out of men, and they further knew that many animals
would require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they
fashioned in men at their first creation the rudiments of nails.’
Or once more, let us reflect on two serious passages in which the
order of the world is supposed to find a place in the human soul
and to infuse harmony into it. ‘The soul, when touching anything
that has essence, whether dispersed in parts or undivided, is
stirred through all her powers to declare the sameness or
difference of that thing and some other; and to what individuals
are related, and by what affected, and in what way and how and
when, both in the world of generation and in the world of
immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal truth,
whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same,—in
voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the
self-moved,—when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible
world, and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly
imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise
opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when reason is
concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving
smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are
necessarily perfected;’ where, proceeding in a similar path of
contemplation, he supposes the inward and the outer world
mutually to imply each other. ‘God invented and gave us sight to
the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the
heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence
which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and
that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of
reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and
regulate our own vagaries.’ Or let us weigh carefully some other
profound thoughts, such as the following. ‘He who neglects
education walks lame to the end of his life, and returns
imperfect and good for nothing to the world below.’ ‘The father
and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if
we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.’
‘Let me tell you then why the Creator made this world of
generation. He was good, and the good can never have jealousy of
anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all
things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the
truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall
do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired
that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this
was attainable.’ This is the leading thought in the Timaeus, just
as the IDEA of Good is the leading thought of the Republic, the
one expression describing the personal, the other the impersonal
Good or God, differing in form rather than in substance, and both
equally implying to the mind of Plato a divine reality. The
slight touch, perhaps ironical, contained in the words, ‘as we
shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men,’ is very
characteristic of Plato.

TIMAEUS.

PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates.

SOCRATES: One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the
fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my
entertainers to-day?

TIMAEUS: He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not
willingly have been absent from this gathering.

SOCRATES: Then, if he is not coming, you and the two others must
supply his place.

TIMAEUS: Certainly, and we will do all that we can; having been
handsomely entertained by you yesterday, those of us who remain
should be only too glad to return your hospitality.

SOCRATES: Do you remember what were the points of which I
required you to speak?

TIMAEUS: We remember some of them, and you will be here to remind
us of anything which we have forgotten: or rather, if we are not
troubling you, will you briefly recapitulate the whole, and then
the particulars will be more firmly fixed in our memories?