Plato’s account of the soul is partly mythical or figurative, and
partly literal. Not that either he or we can draw a line between
them, or say, ‘This is poetry, this is philosophy’; for the
transition from the one to the other is imperceptible. Neither
must we expect to find in him absolute consistency. He is apt to
pass from one level or stage of thought to another without always
making it apparent that he is changing his ground. In such
passages we have to interpret his meaning by the general spirit
of his writings. To reconcile his inconsistencies would be
contrary to the first principles of criticism and fatal to any
true understanding of him.
There is a further difficulty in explaining this part of the
Timaeus—the natural order of thought is inverted. We begin with
the most abstract, and proceed from the abstract to the concrete.
We are searching into things which are upon the utmost limit of
human intelligence, and then of a sudden we fall rather heavily
to the earth. There are no intermediate steps which lead from one
to the other. But the abstract is a vacant form to us until
brought into relation with man and nature. God and the world are
mere names, like the Being of the Eleatics, unless some human
qualities are added on to them. Yet the negation has a kind of
unknown meaning to us. The priority of God and of the world,
which he is imagined to have created, to all other existences,
gives a solemn awe to them. And as in other systems of theology
and philosophy, that of which we know least has the greatest
interest to us.
There is no use in attempting to define or explain the first God
in the Platonic system, who has sometimes been thought to answer
to God the Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the
Church seemed to recognize ‘the firstborn of every creature.’ Nor
need we discuss at length how far Plato agrees in the later
Jewish idea of creation, according to which God made the world
out of nothing. For his original conception of matter as
something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover
in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described,
even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act,
but as a work or process which occupied six days. There is a
chaos in both, and it would be untrue to say that the Greek, any
more than the Hebrew, had any definite belief in the eternal
existence of matter. The beginning of things vanished into the
distance. The real creation began, not with matter, but with
ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God took of the same
and the other, of the divided and undivided, of the finite and
infinite, and made essence, and out of the three combined created
the soul of the world. To the soul he added a body formed out of
the four elements. The general meaning of these words is that God
imparted determinations of thought, or, as we might say, gave law
and variety to the material universe. The elements are moving in
a disorderly manner before the work of creation begins; and there
is an eternal pattern of the world, which, like the ‘idea of
good,’ is not the Creator himself, but not separable from him.
The pattern too, though eternal, is a creation, a world of
thought prior to the world of sense, which may be compared to the
wisdom of God in the book of Ecclesiasticus, or to the ‘God in
the form of a globe’ of the old Eleatic philosophers. The
visible, which already exists, is fashioned in the likeness of
this eternal pattern. On the other hand, there is no truth of
which Plato is more firmly convinced than of the priority of the
soul to the body, both in the universe and in man. So
inconsistent are the forms in which he describes the works which
no tongue can utter—his language, as he himself says, partaking
of his own uncertainty about the things of which he is speaking.
We may remark in passing, that the Platonic compared with the
Jewish description of the process of creation has less of freedom
or spontaneity. The Creator in Plato is still subject to a
remnant of necessity which he cannot wholly overcome. When his
work is accomplished he remains in his own nature. Plato is more
sensible than the Hebrew prophet of the existence of evil, which
he seeks to put as far as possible out of the way of God. And he
can only suppose this to be accomplished by God retiring into
himself and committing the lesser works of creation to inferior
powers. (Compare, however, Laws for another solution of the
difficulty.)
Nor can we attach any intelligible meaning to his words when he
speaks of the visible being in the image of the invisible. For
how can that which is divided be like that which is undivided? Or
that which is changing be the copy of that which is unchanging?
All the old difficulties about the ideas come back upon us in an
altered form. We can imagine two worlds, one of which is the mere
double of the other, or one of which is an imperfect copy of the
other, or one of which is the vanishing ideal of the other; but
we cannot imagine an intellectual world which has no qualities—‘a
thing in itself’—a point which has no parts or magnitude, which
is nowhere, and nothing. This cannot be the archetype according
to which God made the world, and is in reality, whether in Plato
or in Kant, a mere negative residuum of human thought.
There is another aspect of the same difficulty which appears to
have no satisfactory solution. In what relation does the
archetype stand to the Creator himself? For the idea or pattern
of the world is not the thought of God, but a separate,
self-existent nature, of which creation is the copy. We can only
reply, (1) that to the mind of Plato subject and object were not
yet distinguished; (2) that he supposes the process of creation
to take place in accordance with his own theory of ideas; and as
we cannot give a consistent account of the one, neither can we of
the other. He means (3) to say that the creation of the world is
not a material process of working with legs and arms, but ideal
and intellectual; according to his own fine expression, ‘the
thought of God made the God that was to be.’ He means (4) to draw
an absolute distinction between the invisible or unchangeable
which is or is the place of mind or being, and the world of sense
or becoming which is visible and changing. He means (5) that the
idea of the world is prior to the world, just as the other ideas
are prior to sensible objects; and like them may be regarded as
eternal and self-existent, and also, like the IDEA of good, may
be viewed apart from the divine mind.
There are several other questions which we might ask and which
can receive no answer, or at least only an answer of the same
kind as the preceding. How can matter be conceived to exist
without form? Or, how can the essences or forms of things be
distinguished from the eternal ideas, or essence itself from the
soul? Or, how could there have been motion in the chaos when as
yet time was not? Or, how did chaos come into existence, if not
by the will of the Creator? Or, how could there have been a time
when the world was not, if time was not? Or, how could the
Creator have taken portions of an indivisible same? Or, how could
space or anything else have been eternal when time is only
created? Or, how could the surfaces of geometrical figures have
formed solids? We must reply again that we cannot follow Plato in
all his inconsistencies, but that the gaps of thought are
probably more apparent to us than to him. He would, perhaps, have
said that ‘the first things are known only to God and to him of
men whom God loves.’ How often have the gaps in Theology been
concealed from the eye of faith! And we may say that only by an
effort of metaphysical imagination can we hope to understand
Plato from his own point of view; we must not ask for
consistency. Everywhere we find traces of the Platonic theory of
knowledge expressed in an objective form, which by us has to be
translated into the subjective, before we can attach any meaning
to it. And this theory is exhibited in so many different points
of view, that we cannot with any certainty interpret one dialogue
by another; e.g. the Timaeus by the Parmenides or Phaedrus or
Philebus.
The soul of the world may also be conceived as the
personification of the numbers and figures in which the heavenly
bodies move. Imagine these as in a Pythagorean dream, stripped of
qualitative difference and reduced to mathematical abstractions.
They too conform to the principle of the same, and may be
compared with the modern conception of laws of nature. They are
in space, but not in time, and they are the makers of time. They
are represented as constantly thinking of the same; for thought
in the view of Plato is equivalent to truth or law, and need not
imply a human consciousness, a conception which is familiar
enough to us, but has no place, hardly even a name, in ancient
Greek philosophy. To this principle of the same is opposed the
principle of the other—the principle of irregularity and
disorder, of necessity and chance, which is only partially
impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We may observe by
the way, that the principle of the other, which is the principle
of plurality and variation in the Timaeus, has nothing in common
with the ‘other’ of the Sophist, which is the principle of
determination.) The element of the same dominates to a certain
extent over the other—the fixed stars keep the ‘wanderers’ of the
inner circle in their courses, and a similar principle of
fixedness or order appears to regulate the bodily constitution of
man. But there still remains a rebellious seed of evil derived
from the original chaos, which is the source of disorder in the
world, and of vice and disease in man.
But what did Plato mean by essence, (Greek), which is the
intermediate nature compounded of the Same and the Other, and out
of which, together with these two, the soul of the world is
created? It is difficult to explain a process of thought so
strange and unaccustomed to us, in which modern distinctions run
into one another and are lost sight of. First, let us consider
once more the meaning of the Same and the Other. The Same is the
unchanging and indivisible, the heaven of the fixed stars,
partaking of the divine nature, which, having law in itself,
gives law to all besides and is the element of order and
permanence in man and on the earth. It is the rational principle,
mind regarded as a work, as creation—not as the creator. The old
tradition of Parmenides and of the Eleatic Being, the foundation
of so much in the philosophy of Greece and of the world, was
lingering in Plato’s mind. The Other is the variable or changing
element, the residuum of disorder or chaos, which cannot be
reduced to order, nor altogether banished, the source of evil,
seen in the errors of man and also in the wanderings of the
planets, a necessity which protrudes through nature. Of this too
there was a shadow in the Eleatic philosophy in the realm of
opinion, which, like a mist, seemed to darken the purity of truth
in itself.—So far the words of Plato may perhaps find an
intelligible meaning. But when he goes on to speak of the Essence
which is compounded out of both, the track becomes fainter and we
can only follow him with hesitating steps. But still we find a
trace reappearing of the teaching of Anaxagoras: ‘All was
confusion, and then mind came and arranged things.’ We have
already remarked that Plato was not acquainted with the modern
distinction of subject and object, and therefore he sometimes
confuses mind and the things of mind—(Greek) and (Greek). By
(Greek) he clearly means some conception of the intelligible and
the intelligent; it belongs to the class of (Greek). Matter,
being, the Same, the eternal,—for any of these terms, being
almost vacant of meaning, is equally suitable to express
indefinite existence,—are compared or united with the Other or
Diverse, and out of the union or comparison is elicited the idea
of intelligence, the ‘One in many,’ brighter than any Promethean
fire (Phil.), which co-existing with them and so forming a new
existence, is or becomes the intelligible world...So we may
perhaps venture to paraphrase or interpret or put into other
words the parable in which Plato has wrapped up his conception of
the creation of the world. The explanation may help to fill up
with figures of speech the void of knowledge.
The entire compound was divided by the Creator in certain
proportions and reunited; it was then cut into two strips, which
were bent into an inner circle and an outer, both moving with an
uniform motion around a centre, the outer circle containing the
fixed, the inner the wandering stars. The soul of the world was
diffused everywhere from the centre to the circumference. To this
God gave a body, consisting at first of fire and earth, and
afterwards receiving an addition of air and water; because solid
bodies, like the world, are always connected by two middle terms
and not by one. The world was made in the form of a globe, and
all the material elements were exhausted in the work of creation.
The proportions in which the soul of the world as well as the
human soul is divided answer to a series of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4,
9, 8, 27, composed of the two Pythagorean progressions 1, 2, 4, 8
and 1, 3, 9, 27, of which the number 1 represents a point, 2 and
3 lines, 4 and 8, 9 and 27 the squares and cubes respectively of
2 and 3. This series, of which the intervals are afterwards
filled up, probably represents (1) the diatonic scale according
to the Pythagoreans and Plato; (2) the order and distances of the
heavenly bodies; and (3) may possibly contain an allusion to the
music of the spheres, which is referred to in the myth at the end
of the Republic. The meaning of the words that ‘solid bodies are
always connected by two middle terms’ or mean proportionals has
been much disputed. The most received explanation is that of
Martin, who supposes that Plato is only speaking of surfaces and
solids compounded of prime numbers (i.e. of numbers not made up
of two factors, or, in other words, only measurable by unity).
The square of any such number represents a surface, the cube a
solid. The squares of any two such numbers (e.g. 2 squared, 3
squared = 4, 9), have always a single mean proportional (e.g. 4
and 9 have the single mean 6), whereas the cubes of primes (e.g.
3 cubed and 5 cubed) have always two mean proportionals (e.g.
27:45:75:125). But to this explanation of Martin’s it may be
objected, (1) that Plato nowhere says that his proportion is to
be limited to prime numbers; (2) that the limitation of surfaces
to squares is also not to be found in his words; nor (3) is there
any evidence to show that the distinction of prime from other
numbers was known to him. What Plato chiefly intends to express
is that a solid requires a stronger bond than a surface; and that
the double bond which is given by two means is stronger than the
single bond given by one. Having reflected on the singular
numerical phenomena of the existence of one mean proportional
between two square numbers are rather perhaps only between the
two lowest squares; and of two mean proportionals between two
cubes, perhaps again confining his attention to the two lowest
cubes, he finds in the latter symbol an expression of the
relation of the elements, as in the former an image of the
combination of two surfaces. Between fire and earth, the two
extremes, he remarks that there are introduced, not one, but two
elements, air and water, which are compared to the two mean
proportionals between two cube numbers. The vagueness of his
language does not allow us to determine whether anything more
than this was intended by him.
Leaving the further explanation of details, which the reader will
find discussed at length in Boeckh and Martin, we may now return
to the main argument: Why did God make the world? Like man, he
must have a purpose; and his purpose is the diffusion of that
goodness or good which he himself is. The term ‘goodness’ is not
to be understood in this passage as meaning benevolence or love,
in the Christian sense of the term, but rather law, order,
harmony, like the idea of good in the Republic. The ancient
mythologers, and even the Hebrew prophets, had spoken of the
jealousy of God; and the Greek had imagined that there was a
Nemesis always attending the prosperity of mortals. But Plato
delights to think of God as the author of order in his works,
who, like a father, lives over again in his children, and can
never have too much of good or friendship among his creatures.
Only, as there is a certain remnant of evil inherent in matter
which he cannot get rid of, he detaches himself from them and
leaves them to themselves, that he may be guiltless of their
faults and sufferings.
Between the ideal and the sensible Plato interposes the two
natures of time and space. Time is conceived by him to be only
the shadow or image of eternity which ever is and never has been
or will be, but is described in a figure only as past or future.
This is one of the great thoughts of early philosophy, which are
still as difficult to our minds as they were to the early
thinkers; or perhaps more difficult, because we more distinctly
see the consequences which are involved in such an hypothesis.
All the objections which may be urged against Kant’s doctrine of
the ideality of space and time at once press upon us. If time is
unreal, then all which is contained in time is unreal—the
succession of human thoughts as well as the flux of sensations;
there is no connecting link between (Greek) and (Greek). Yet, on
the other hand, we are conscious that knowledge is independent of
time, that truth is not a thing of yesterday or tomorrow, but an
‘eternal now.’ To the ‘spectator of all time and all existence’
the universe remains at rest. The truths of geometry and
arithmetic in all their combinations are always the same. The
generations of men, like the leaves of the forest, come and go,
but the mathematical laws by which the world is governed remain,
and seem as if they could never change. The ever-present image of
space is transferred to time—succession is conceived as
extension. (We remark that Plato does away with the above and
below in space, as he has done away with the absolute existence
of past and future.) The course of time, unless regularly marked
by divisions of number, partakes of the indefiniteness of the
Heraclitean flux. By such reflections we may conceive the Greek
to have attained the metaphysical conception of eternity, which
to the Hebrew was gained by meditation on the Divine Being. No
one saw that this objective was really a subjective, and involved
the subjectivity of all knowledge. ‘Non in tempore sed cum
tempore finxit Deus mundum,’ says St. Augustine, repeating a
thought derived from the Timaeus, but apparently unconscious of
the results to which his doctrine would have led.
The contradictions involved in the conception of time or motion,
like the infinitesimal in space, were a source of perplexity to
the mind of the Greek, who was driven to find a point of view
above or beyond them. They had sprung up in the decline of the
Eleatic philosophy and were very familiar to Plato, as we gather
from the Parmenides. The consciousness of them had led the great
Eleatic philosopher to describe the nature of God or Being under
negatives. He sings of ‘Being unbegotten and imperishable,
unmoved and never-ending, which never was nor will be, but always
is, one and continuous, which cannot spring from any other; for
it cannot be said or imagined not to be.’ The idea of eternity
was for a great part a negation. There are regions of speculation
in which the negative is hardly separable from the positive, and
even seems to pass into it. Not only Buddhism, but Greek as well
as Christian philosophy, show that it is quite possible that the
human mind should retain an enthusiasm for mere negations. In
different ages and countries there have been forms of light in
which nothing could be discerned and which have nevertheless
exercised a life-giving and illumining power. For the higher
intelligence of man seems to require, not only something above
sense, but above knowledge, which can only be described as Mind
or Being or Truth or God or the unchangeable and eternal element,
in the expression of which all predicates fail and fall short.
Eternity or the eternal is not merely the unlimited in time but
the truest of all Being, the most real of all realities, the most
certain of all knowledge, which we nevertheless only see through
a glass darkly. The passionate earnestness of Parmenides
contrasts with the vacuity of the thought which he is revolving
in his mind.
Space is said by Plato to be the ‘containing vessel or nurse of
generation.’ Reflecting on the simplest kinds of external
objects, which to the ancients were the four elements, he was led
to a more general notion of a substance, more or less like
themselves, out of which they were fashioned. He would not have
them too precisely distinguished. Thus seems to have arisen the
first dim perception of (Greek) or matter, which has played so
great a part in the metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle and his
followers. But besides the material out of which the elements are
made, there is also a space in which they are contained. There
arises thus a second nature which the senses are incapable of
discerning and which can hardly be referred to the intelligible
class. For it is and it is not, it is nowhere when filled, it is
nothing when empty. Hence it is said to be discerned by a kind of
spurious or analogous reason, partaking so feebly of existence as
to be hardly perceivable, yet always reappearing as the
containing mother or nurse of all things. It had not that sort of
consistency to Plato which has been given to it in modern times
by geometry and metaphysics. Neither of the Greek words by which
it is described are so purely abstract as the English word
‘space’ or the Latin ‘spatium.’ Neither Plato nor any other Greek
would have spoken of (Greek) or (Greek) in the same manner as we
speak of ‘time’ and ‘space.’
Yet space is also of a very permanent or even eternal nature; and
Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than
of the unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must
necessarily exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed
to fancy that even if space were annihilated time might still
survive. He admits indeed that our knowledge of space is of a
dreamy kind, and is given by a spurious reason without the help
of sense. (Compare the hypotheses and images of Rep.) It is true
that it does not attain to the clearness of ideas. But like them
it seems to remain, even if all the objects contained in it are
supposed to have vanished away. Hence it was natural for Plato to
conceive of it as eternal. We must remember further that in his
attempt to realize either space or matter the two abstract ideas
of weight and extension, which are familiar to us, had never
passed before his mind.
Thus far God, working according to an eternal pattern, out of his
goodness has created the same, the other, and the essence
(compare the three principles of the Philebus—the finite, the
infinite, and the union of the two), and out of them has formed
the outer circle of the fixed stars and the inner circle of the
planets, divided according to certain musical intervals; he has
also created time, the moving image of eternity, and space,
existing by a sort of necessity and hardly distinguishable from
matter. The matter out of which the world is formed is not
absolutely void, but retains in the chaos certain germs or traces
of the elements. These Plato, like Empedocles, supposed to be
four in number—fire, air, earth, and water. They were at first
mixed together; but already in the chaos, before God fashioned
them by form and number, the greater masses of the elements had
an appointed place. Into the confusion (Greek) which preceded
Plato does not attempt further to penetrate. They are called
elements, but they are so far from being elements (Greek) or
letters in the higher sense that they are not even syllables or
first compounds. The real elements are two triangles, the
rectangular isosceles which has but one form, and the most
beautiful of the many forms of scalene, which is half of an
equilateral triangle. By the combination of these triangles which
exist in an infinite variety of sizes, the surfaces of the four
elements are constructed.
That there were only five regular solids was already known to the
ancients, and out of the surfaces which he has formed Plato
proceeds to generate the four first of the five. He perhaps
forgets that he is only putting together surfaces and has not
provided for their transformation into solids. The first solid is
a regular pyramid, of which the base and sides are formed by four
equilateral or twenty-four scalene triangles. Each of the four
solid angles in this figure is a little larger than the largest
of obtuse angles. The second solid is composed of the same
triangles, which unite as eight equilateral triangles, and make
one solid angle out of four plane angles—six of these angles form
a regular octahedron. The third solid is a regular icosahedron,
having twenty triangular equilateral bases, and therefore 120
rectangular scalene triangles. The fourth regular solid, or cube,
is formed by the combination of four isosceles triangles into one
square and of six squares into a cube. The fifth regular solid,
or dodecahedron, cannot be formed by a combination of either of
these triangles, but each of its faces may be regarded as
composed of thirty triangles of another kind. Probably Plato
notices this as the only remaining regular polyhedron, which from
its approximation to a globe, and possibly because, as Plutarch
remarks, it is composed of 12 x 30 = 360 scalene triangles
(Platon. Quaest.), representing thus the signs and degrees of the
Zodiac, as well as the months and days of the year, God may be
said to have ‘used in the delineation of the universe.’ According
to Plato earth was composed of cubes, fire of regular pyramids,
air of regular octahedrons, water of regular icosahedrons. The
stability of the last three increases with the number of their
sides.
The elements are supposed to pass into one another, but we must
remember that these transformations are not the transformations
of real solids, but of imaginary geometrical figures; in other
words, we are composing and decomposing the faces of substances
and not the substances themselves—it is a house of cards which we
are pulling to pieces and putting together again (compare however
Laws). Yet perhaps Plato may regard these sides or faces as only
the forms which are impressed on pre-existent matter. It is
remarkable that he should speak of each of these solids as a
possible world in itself, though upon the whole he inclines to
the opinion that they form one world and not five. To suppose
that there is an infinite number of worlds, as Democritus
(Hippolyt. Ref. Haer. I.) had said, would be, as he satirically
observes, ‘the characteristic of a very indefinite and ignorant
mind.’
The twenty triangular faces of an icosahedron form the faces or
sides of two regular octahedrons and of a regular pyramid (20 = 8
x 2 + 4); and therefore, according to Plato, a particle of water
when decomposed is supposed to give two particles of air and one
of fire. So because an octahedron gives the sides of two pyramids
(8 = 4 x 2), a particle of air is resolved into two particles of
fire.
The transformation is effected by the superior power or number of
the conquering elements. The manner of the change is (1) a
separation of portions of the elements from the masses in which
they are collected; (2) a resolution of them into their original
triangles; and (3) a reunion of them in new forms. Plato himself
proposes the question, Why does motion continue at all when the
elements are settled in their places? He answers that although
the force of attraction is continually drawing similar elements
to the same spot, still the revolution of the universe exercises
a condensing power, and thrusts them again out of their natural
places. Thus want of uniformity, the condition of motion, is
produced. In all such disturbances of matter there is an
alternative for the weaker element: it may escape to its kindred,
or take the form of the stronger—becoming denser, if it be
denser, or rarer if rarer. This is true of fire, air, and water,
which, being composed of similar triangles, are interchangeable;
earth, however, which has triangles peculiar to itself, is
capable of dissolution, but not of change. Of the interchangeable
elements, fire, the rarest, can only become a denser, and water,
the densest, only a rarer: but air may become a denser or a
rarer. No single particle of the elements is visible, but only
the aggregates of them are seen. The subordinate species depend,
not upon differences of form in the original triangles, but upon
differences of size. The obvious physical phenomena from which
Plato has gathered his views of the relations of the elements
seem to be the effect of fire upon air, water, and earth, and the
effect of water upon earth. The particles are supposed by him to
be in a perpetual process of circulation caused by inequality.
This process of circulation does not admit of a vacuum, as he
tells us in his strange account of respiration.
Of the phenomena of light and heavy he speaks afterwards, when
treating of sensation, but they may be more conveniently
considered by us in this place. They are not, he says, to be
explained by ‘above’ and ‘below,’ which in the universal globe
have no existence, but by the attraction of similars towards the
great masses of similar substances; fire to fire, air to air,
water to water, earth to earth. Plato’s doctrine of attraction
implies not only (1) the attraction of similar elements to one
another, but also (2) of smaller bodies to larger ones. Had he
confined himself to the latter he would have arrived, though,
perhaps, without any further result or any sense of the greatness
of the discovery, at the modern doctrine of gravitation. He does
not observe that water has an equal tendency towards both water
and earth. So easily did the most obvious facts which were
inconsistent with his theories escape him.
The general physical doctrines of the Timaeus may be summed up as
follows: (1) Plato supposes the greater masses of the elements to
have been already settled in their places at the creation: (2)
they are four in number, and are formed of rectangular triangles
variously combined into regular solid figures: (3) three of them,
fire, air, and water, admit of transformation into one another;
the fourth, earth, cannot be similarly transformed: (4) different
sizes of the same triangles form the lesser species of each
element: (5) there is an attraction of like to like—smaller
masses of the same kind being drawn towards greater: (6) there is
no void, but the particles of matter are ever pushing one another
round and round (Greek). Like the atomists, Plato attributes the
differences between the elements to differences in geometrical
figures. But he does not explain the process by which surfaces
become solids; and he characteristically ridicules Democritus for
not seeing that the worlds are finite and not infinite.