Section 8._Timaeus

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.

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?

SOCRATES: To be sure I will: the chief theme of my yesterday’s

discourse was the State—how constituted and of what citizens

composed it would seem likely to be most perfect.

TIMAEUS: Yes, Socrates; and what you said of it was very much to

our mind.

SOCRATES: Did we not begin by separating the husbandmen and the

artisans from the class of defenders of the State?

TIMAEUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And when we had given to each one that single

employment and particular art which was suited to his nature, we

spoke of those who were intended to be our warriors, and said

that they were to be guardians of the city against attacks from

within as well as from without, and to have no other employment;

they were to be merciful in judging their subjects, of whom they

were by nature friends, but fierce to their enemies, when they

came across them in battle.

TIMAEUS: Exactly.

SOCRATES: We said, if I am not mistaken, that the guardians

should be gifted with a temperament in a high degree both

passionate and philosophical; and that then they would be as they

ought to be, gentle to their friends and fierce with their

enemies.

TIMAEUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And what did we say of their education? Were they not

to be trained in gymnastic, and music, and all other sorts of

knowledge which were proper for them?

TIMAEUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: And being thus trained they were not to consider gold

or silver or anything else to be their own private property; they

were to be like hired troops, receiving pay for keeping guard

from those who were protected by them—the pay was to be no more

than would suffice for men of simple life; and they were to spend

in common, and to live together in the continual practice of

virtue, which was to be their sole pursuit.

TIMAEUS: That was also said.

SOCRATES: Neither did we forget the women; of whom we declared,

that their natures should be assimilated and brought into harmony

with those of the men, and that common pursuits should be

assigned to them both in time of war and in their ordinary life.

TIMAEUS: That, again, was as you say.

SOCRATES: And what about the procreation of children? Or rather

was not the proposal too singular to be forgotten? for all wives

and children were to be in common, to the intent that no one

should ever know his own child, but they were to imagine that

they were all one family; those who were within a suitable limit

of age were to be brothers and sisters, those who were of an

elder generation parents and grandparents, and those of a

younger, children and grandchildren.

TIMAEUS: Yes, and the proposal is easy to remember, as you say.

SOCRATES: And do you also remember how, with a view of securing

as far as we could the best breed, we said that the chief

magistrates, male and female, should contrive secretly, by the

use of certain lots, so to arrange the nuptial meeting, that the

bad of either sex and the good of either sex might pair with

their like; and there was to be no quarrelling on this account,

for they would imagine that the union was a mere accident, and

was to be attributed to the lot?

TIMAEUS: I remember.

SOCRATES: And you remember how we said that the children of the

good parents were to be educated, and the children of the bad

secretly dispersed among the inferior citizens; and while they

were all growing up the rulers were to be on the look-out, and to

bring up from below in their turn those who were worthy, and

those among themselves who were unworthy were to take the places

of those who came up?

TIMAEUS: True.

SOCRATES: Then have I now given you all the heads of our

yesterday’s discussion? Or is there anything more, my dear

Timaeus, which has been omitted?

TIMAEUS: Nothing, Socrates; it was just as you have said.

SOCRATES: I should like, before proceeding further, to tell you

how I feel about the State which we have described. I might

compare myself to a person who, on beholding beautiful animals

either created by the painter’s art, or, better still, alive but

at rest, is seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or

engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear

suited; this is my feeling about the State which we have been

describing. There are conflicts which all cities undergo, and I

should like to hear some one tell of our own city carrying on a

struggle against her neighbours, and how she went out to war in a

becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her

actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other

cities a result worthy of her training and education. Now I,

Critias and Hermocrates, am conscious that I myself should never

be able to celebrate the city and her citizens in a befitting

manner, and I am not surprised at my own incapacity; to me the

wonder is rather that the poets present as well as past are no

better—not that I mean to depreciate them; but every one can see

that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and

most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while

that which is beyond the range of a man’s education he finds hard

to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent

in language. I am aware that the Sophists have plenty of brave

words and fair conceits, but I am afraid that being only

wanderers from one city to another, and having never had

habitations of their own, they may fail in their conception of

philosophers and statesmen, and may not know what they do and say

in time of war, when they are fighting or holding parley with

their enemies. And thus people of your class are the only ones

remaining who are fitted by nature and education to take part at

once both in politics and philosophy. Here is Timaeus, of Locris

in Italy, a city which has admirable laws, and who is himself in

wealth and rank the equal of any of his fellow-citizens; he has

held the most important and honourable offices in his own state,

and, as I believe, has scaled the heights of all philosophy; and

here is Critias, whom every Athenian knows to be no novice in the

matters of which we are speaking; and as to Hermocrates, I am

assured by many witnesses that his genius and education qualify

him to take part in any speculation of the kind. And therefore

yesterday when I saw that you wanted me to describe the formation

of the State, I readily assented, being very well aware, that, if

you only would, none were better qualified to carry the

discussion further, and that when you had engaged our city in a

suitable war, you of all men living could best exhibit her

playing a fitting part. When I had completed my task, I in return

imposed this other task upon you. You conferred together and

agreed to entertain me to-day, as I had entertained you, with a

feast of discourse. Here am I in festive array, and no man can be