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 his thoughts. In the same passage (272 C) there occurs the first clear anticipation of an interrogatio naturae.

The impulse in this new direction, if not originated, was manifestly reinforced, through closer intercourse with the Pythagorean school. And the choice of Timaeus the Pythagorean as chief speaker is an acknowledgment of this obvious tendency. If in the course of the dialogue there occur ideas apparently borrowed from the Atomists, whom Plato persistently ignored, this fact ought probably to be referred to some early reaction of Atomic on Pythagorean doctrine. It is important to observe, however, that not only the Timaeus, but the unfinished whole of which it forms the introduction, is professedly an imaginative creation. For the legend of prehistoric Athens and of Atlantis, whereof Critias was to relate what belonged to internal policy and Hermocrates the conduct of the war, would have been no other than a prose poem, a “mythological lie,” conceived in the spirit of the Republic, and in the form of a fictitious narrative. And, therefore, when Timaeus professes to give only a probable account of shadowy truths, he must be taken at his word, and not criticized in too exacting a spirit. His descriptions have much the same relation to the natural philosophy of Plato's time that Milton's cosmology has to the serious investigations of Galileo or Copernicus—except that all physical speculation hitherto partook in some measure of this half-mythological character, and that Plato's mind, although working in an unfamiliar region, is still that of a speculative philosopher.

As Parmenides, after demonstrating the nonentity of growth and decay, was yet impelled to give some account of this non-existent and unintelligible phenomenal world, so Plato, although warned off by Socrates, must needs attempt to give a probable and comprehensive description of the visible universe and its creation. In doing so he acknowledges an imperfect truth in theories which his dialectic had previously set aside. In examining the earlier philosophers he has already transgressed the limits prescribed by Socrates, and the effort to connect ideas has made him more and more conscious of the gap between the ideal and the actual. He cannot rest until he has done his utmost to fill up the chasm—calling in the help of imagination where reason fails him. His dominant thought is still that of a deduction from the “reason of the best,” as in the Phaedo, or “the idea of good,” as in the Republic. But both his abstract idealism and his absolute optimism were by this time considerably modified, and, although not confounding “causes with conditions,” as he once accused Anaxagoras of doing, he yet assigns more scope to “second causes” than he would then have been willing to attribute to them. This partly comes of ripening experience and a deepening sense of the persistency of evil, and partly from the feeling—which seems to have grown upon him in later life—of the distance between God and man.

VIII. The Laws.—The two series of dialogues, the dialectical and the imaginative—Sophistes, Politicus, Philosophus—Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates—were left incomplete. For Plato had concentrated his declining powers, in the evening of