Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/219

Rh PLATO 209 less a pioneer of knowledge, 1 while the special sciences of ethics and psychology had been carried from infancy to adolescence in a single lifetime. VII. Timseus, Critias, _Hermocrates. As the Sophistes and Politicus were written in continuation of the Thes&tetiis, so, at some uncertain time, Plato conceived the design of writing a great trilogy, for which the ideal state depicted in the Republic should be the point of departure. The grand outline there sketched by Socrates was now to be tilled up by Critias and Hermocrates. The form set up by reasoning should be made alive, the &quot; airy burghers &quot; should be seen &quot; making history.&quot; As a prelude to this magnificent celebration, Timseus, the Pythagorean philo sopher, who is present at the Panathensea, is invited to discourse of the origin of all things, and to bring down the glorious theme to the creation of man. What should have followed this, but is only commenced in the fragment of the Critias, would have been the story, not of a fall, but of the triumph of reason in humanity. In the Philebus (59 A, comp. 62 D) Plato speaks with a touch of contempt of the life-long investigation of nature, as being concerned only with this visible universe, and immersed in the study of phenomena, whether past, present, or to come, which admit of no stability and there fore of no certainty. &quot; These things have no absolute first principle, and can never be the objects of reason and true science.&quot; Yet even this lower knowledge is there admitted as an element of that life which is the habitation of the good. And there are not wanting signs in his later dialogues that Plato s imagination had again been strongly drawn towards those physical studies which, as the Pheedo shows, had fascinated him in youth. That nature and the world proceed &quot;according to God and not according to chance &quot; is the belief of the Eleatic stranger, to which he perceives that Thetetetus will be irresistibly drawn as he grows older. In the midst of dialectical abstractions, the pro cesses of actual production (yeve creis) have been increas ingly borne in mind. And the myth in the Politicus turns on cosmological conceptions which, although differing from those in the Timxtis, and more accordant with Plato s bitterest mood, yet throw a new light on the deeper current of his thoughts. In the same passage (272 C) there occurs the first clear anticipation of an interrogatio iiaturae. The impulse in this new direction, if not originated, was manifestly reinforced, through closer intercourse with the Pythagorean school. And the choice of Timasus 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 Pytha gorean doctrine. It is important to observe, however, that not only the Timeeus, 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 &quot; mytho logical lie,&quot; conceived in the spirit of the Republic, and in the form of a fictitious narrative. And, therefore, when Timseus 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 investiga tions of Galileo or Copernicus, except that all physical See Jowett, Introd. to the Timasus. 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 specu lative philosopher. As Parmenides, after demonstrating the nonentity of Timoeus, 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 &quot; reason of the best,&quot; as in the Pheedo, or &quot; the idea of good,&quot; as in the Republic. But both his abstract idealism and his absolute optimism were by this time considerably modified, and, although not confounding &quot; causes with con ditions,&quot; as he once accused Anaxagoras of doing, he yet assigns more scope to &quot; second causes &quot; than he would then have been willing to attribute to them. This partly comes of ripening experience and a deepening sense of the per sistency of evil, and partly from the feeling which seems to have grown upon him in later life of the distance between God and man. Timfeus begins by assuming (1) that the universe being corporeal is caused and had a beginning, and (2) that its mysterious author made it after an everlasting pattern. Yet, being bodily and visible, it can only be made the subject, humanly speaking, of probable discourse. Thus much being premised, he proceeds to unfold (A) the work of mind in creation, (B) the effects of necessity, including the general and specific attributes of bodies, (C) the principles of physiology, and (D) an outline of pathology and medicine. To give a full account of such a comprehensive treatise is beyond the scope of this article, and the Timasus, however great and interesting, has been well described as an out-building of the great fabric of original Platonism. A very few scattered observations are all that there is space for here. (A) 1. In the mythology of the Timseus some of the conceptions which attained logical clearness in the Sophist and Philebus resume an ontological form. Thus, in compounding the soul-stuff of the universe, the father of all takes of the continuous and discrete and fuses them into an essence (the composite being of the Philebus). Again he takes of the same and other (cornp. the Sophist), over coming their inherent repugnance by his sovereign act. 2. The notion of an economy or reservation in Plato has been often exaggerated and misapplied. But it is difficult to acquit him of intentional obscurity in speaking of the creation of the Earth. It is clear, though Plato does not say so, that she is meant to have been created together with the Heaven and together with Time, and so before the other &quot;gods within the heaven,&quot; i.e., the sun and moon and five planets, and it is a plausible supposition that she is the &quot;artificer of day and night&quot; by interposing her bulk to the sun s rays. If the word flo/j.fvr) in p. 40 implies motion (as Aristotle thought -), it cannot be, as Grote supposed, a motion consentaneous with that of the outer sphere, but either some far slower motion, perhaps assumed in ordej to account for the shifting of the seasons, or an equal retrograde motion which is supposed to neutralize in her case the &quot; motion of the same. &quot; She clings to the centre, as her natural abode. And the diurnal motion of the heavens is due not to any mechanical force but to the soul of the world extending from the centre to the poles and comprehending all. 3. Immortality is in the Timseus dependent on the will of the Eternal. And the sublime idea of eternity is here first formulated. 4. The phenomena of vision and hearing are included among the works of reason, because the final cause of these higher senses is to give men perception of number, through contemplation of the measures of time. (B) 1. It has been commonly said that the four elements of the Tim&us are geometrical figures, without content. This is not true. For what purpose does Plato introduce, &quot; besides the archetype and z Aristotle, however, uses flovu.fvn, a different word. XIX. - 27