 Section 2 of the Introduction to Timaeus This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by David Houston. Timaeus by Blado Translated by Benjamin Joett Introduction and Analysis Section 2 Nature, in the aspect which he presented to a great philosopher of the fourth century before Christ, is not easily reproduced to modern eyes. The associations of mythology and poetry have to be added, and the unconscious influence of science has to be subtracted, before we can behold the heavens or the earth as they appear to the Greek. The philosopher himself was a child, and also a man, a child in the range of his attainments, but also a great intelligence having an insight into nature, and often anticipations of the truth. He was full of original thoughts, and yet liable to be imposed upon by the most obvious fallacies. He occasionally confused numbers with ideas, and atoms with numbers. His a priori notions were all out of proportion to his experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which nature worked for him, he sometimes accepted, but he never tried experiments for himself, which would either prove or disprove his theories. His knowledge was unequal. While in some branches, such as medicine and astronomy, he had made considerable proficiency. There were others, such as chemistry, electricity, mechanics, of which the very names were unknown to him. He was a natural enemy of mythology, and yet mythological ideas still retained their hold over him. He was endeavouring to form a conception of principles, but these principles or ideas were regarded by him as real powers or entities, to which the world had been subjected. He was always tended to argue from what was near to what was remote, from what was known to what was unknown, from man to the universe, and back again from the universe to man. While he was arranging the world, he was arranging the forms of thought in his own mind, and the light from within and the light from without often crossed and helped to confuse one another. He might be compared to a builder engaged in some great design, who could only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with common tools, or to some poet or musician, like Tinnicus, Ion 534d, obliged to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord or of the flute. The Hesiotic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought intermediate between mythology and philosophy, and had a great influence on the beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing behind them. They were to physical science what the poems of Homer were to early Greek history. They made them think of the world as a whole. They carried the mind back into the infinity of past time. This suggested the first observation of the effects of fire and water on the Earth's surface. To the ancient physics, they stood much in the same relation which geology does to modern science. But the Greek was not, like the inquirer of the last generation, confined to a period of 6,000 years. He was able to speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the production of physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which had existed time out of mind. Statesman 302a, Laws III, 676. Laws are forms of art and music which had lasted, not in word only, but in very truth for 10,000 years, Laws II, 656e, compare also 7, 799a. He was aware of the natural phenomena like the Delta of the Nile might have slowly accumulated in long periods of time, compare Herodotus 2, 5, 10. But he seems to have supposed that the course of events was recurring rather than progressive. To this he was probably led by the fixedness of Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were other civilizations in the world more ancient than that of Hellas. The ancient philosophers found in mythology many ideas which, if not originally derived from nature, were easily transferred to her, such for example as love or hate, corresponding to attraction or repulsion, or the conception of necessity allied both to the regularity and irregularity of nature, or of the chance, the nameless or unknown cause, or of justice symbolizing the law of compensation, or of the fates and furies typifying the fixed order or the extraordinary convulsions of nature. Their own interpretations of Homer and the poets were supposed by them to be the original meaning. Musing in themselves on the phenomena of nature, they were relieved at being able to utter the thoughts of their hearts and figures of speech which to them were not figures and were already consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the Orphic poets moved in a region of half personification in which the meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster conceptions of chaos, arabus, aether, knight, and the like, the first rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The gods themselves, especially the greater gods such as Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Athene, are universals as well as individuals. They were gradually becoming lost in a common conception of mind or god. They continue to exist for the purposes of ritual or of art, but for the 6th century onwards or even earlier, there arose and gained strength in the minds of men the notion of one god, greatest among gods and men, who is all sight, all hearing, all knowing, xenophonies. Under the influence of such ideas, perhaps also deriving from the traditions of their own or of other nations scraps of medicine and astronomy, men came to the observation of nature. The Greek philosopher looked at the blue circle of the heavens and a flashed upon him that all things were one, the tumult of sense abated, and the mind found repose in a thought which former generations had been striving to realize. The first expression of this was some element, rarefied by degrees into a pure abstraction and purged from any tincture of sense. Soon and in a world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, which to the eye of the philosopher looking inward seemed to pale before them, retaining only a faint and precarious existence. At the same time, the minds of men parted in the two great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and of those who saw only a principle of rest in nature and in themselves. They were born Heraclitians or Alliatics, as there have been in later generations born Aristotelians or Platonists. Like some philosophers in modern times who are accused of making a theory first and finding their facts afterwards, the advocates of either opinion never thought of applying either to themselves or to the adversaries of criterion effect. They were mastered by their ideas and not masters of them. Like the Heraclitian fanatics who Plato had ridiculed in the Theatratus 179e 180, they were incapable of giving a reason of the faith that was in them, and had all the animosities of religious sect. Yet doubtless, there was some first impression derived from external nature, which, as a mythology, so also in philosophy, worked upon the minds of the first thinkers. Though incapable of induction or generalization in the modern sense, they caught inspiration from the external world, the most general facts or appearances of nature, circle of the universe, the nutritive power of water, the air which is the breath of life, the destructive force of fire, the seeming regularity of the greater part of nature and the irregularity of a remnant, the recurrence of day and night and of the seasons, the solid earth, and the impalpable ether were always present to them. The great source of error, and also the beginning of truth to them, was reducing from analogy. They could see resemblances, but not differences, and they were incapable of distinguishing illustration from argument. Analogy in modern times only points the way, and is immediately verified by experiment. The dreams and visions, which pass through the philosopher's mind of resemblances between different classes of substances, or between the animal and vegetable world, are put into the refiner's fire and the dross and other elements which adhere to them are purged away. But the contemporary of Plato and Socrates was incapable of resisting the power of any analogy which occurred to him, and was drawn into any consequences which seemed to follow. He had no methods of difference or of concomitant variations, by the use of which he could distinguish the accidental from the essential. He could not isolate phenomena, and he was helpless against the influence of any word which had an equivocal or double sense. Yet without this crude use of analogy, the ancient physical philosopher would have stood still. He could not have made even one guess among many without comparison. The course of natural phenomena would have passed unheeded before his eyes, like fair sights or musical sounds before the eyes and ears of an animal. Even the fetishism of the savage is the beginning of reasoning. The assumption of the most fanciful of causes indicates a higher mental state than the absence of all inquiry about them. The tendency to argue from the higher to the lower, from man to the world, has led to many errors, but has also had an elevating influence on philosophy. The conception of the world as a whole, a person, an animal, has been the source of hasty generalizations. Yet this general grasp of nature led also to a spirit of comprehensiveness in early philosophy, which has not increased, but rather diminished, as the fields of knowledge have become more divided. The modern physicist confines himself to one or perhaps two branches of science. But he comparatively seldom rises above his own department, and often falls under the narrowing influence which any single branch, when pursued to the exclusion of every other, has over the mind. Language, too, exercised a spell over the beginnings of physical philosophy, leading to error and sometimes to truth. For many thoughts were suggested by the double meanings of words, compare Stoicism, syllabae, musique, harmonia, cosmos, and the accidental distinctions of words sometimes led the ancient philosopher to make corresponding differences in things, compare Blisthai, Epithemian, Phobos, Deos, Eidos, Eistrune. If they are the same, why have they different names, or if they are different, why have they the same name? Is an argument not easily answered in the infancy of knowledge. The modern philosopher has always been taught the lesson which he still and perfectly learns that he must disengage himself from the influence of words, nor are their wanting in Plato, who was himself too often the victim of them, impressive admonitions that we should regard not words but things, compare Statesman 261e. But upon the whole, the ancients, though not entirely domine about them, were much more subject to the influence of words than the moderates. They had no clear divisions of colors or substances, even the four elements were undefined, the fields of knowledge were not parted off. They were bringing order out of disorder, having a small grain of experience mingled in a confused heap of a priori notions, and yet probably, their first impressions, the illusions and mirages of their fancy, created a greater intellectual activity and made a nearer approach to the truth than any patient investigation of isolated facts, for which the time had not yet come, could have accomplished. There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers were subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogue seems to be struggling, the tendency to mere abstractions, not perceiving that pure abstraction is only negation, they thought that the greater the abstraction, the greater the truth. Behind any pair of ideas, a new idea which comprehended them, the tritose and throbus, as it was technically termed, began at once to appear. Two are truer than three, one than two, the words being or unity or essence or good, become sacred to them. They did not see that they had a word only, and in one sense the most unmeaning of words. They did not understand that the content of notions is an inverse proportion to their universality. The element which is the most widely diffused is also the thinnest, for in the language of the common logic, the greater the extension, the less the comprehension. But this vacant idea of a whole without parts, of a subject without predicates, a rest without motion, has also been the most fruitful of all ideas. It is the beginning of a prairie thought, and indeed of thinking at all. Men were led to conceive it, not by a love of hasty generalization, but by a divine instinct, a dialectical enthusiasm in which the human faculties seem to yearn for enlargement. We know that being is only the verb of existence, the copula, the most general symbol of relation, the first and most meagre of abstractions, but some of the ancient philosophers, this little word appeared to attain divine proportions and to comprehend all truth. Being or essence, and similar words, represented to them a supreme or divine being, in which they thought that they found the containing and continuing principle of the universe. In a few years the human mind was people with abstractions, a new world was called into existence to give law and order to the old, but between them there was still a gulf, and no one could pass from one to the other. Number and figure were the greatest instruments of thought which were possessed by the Greek philosopher, having the same power over the mind which was exerted by abstract ideas, they were also capable of practical application. Many curious, and to the earlier thinker, mysterious properties of them came to light when they were compared with one another. They admitted of infinite multiplication and construction, in Pythagorean triangles or in proportions of one, two, four, eight, and one, three, nine, 27, or compounds of them, the laws of the world seemed to be more than half revealed. They were also capable of infinite subdivision, a wonder and also a puzzle to the ancient thinker. Compare Republic 7, 525e. They were not, like being or essence, mere vacant abstractions, but admitted of progress and growth, while at the same time they confirmed a higher sentiment of the mind that there was order in the universe, and so there began to be a real sympathy between the world within and the world without. The numbers and figures which were present to the mind's eye became invisible to the eye of sense, the truth of nature was mathematics, the other properties of objects seemed to reappear only in the light of number. Law and morality also found a natural expression in number and figure. Instruments of such power and elasticity could not fail to be a most gracious assistance to the first efforts of human intelligence. There was another reason why numbers had so great an influence over the minds of early thinkers. They were verified by experience. Every use of them, even the most trivial, assured men of their truth. They were everywhere to be found, in the least things in the greatest light. One, two, three. Catched on the fingers was a trivial matter, Republic 7, 522c. A little instrument out of which to create a world, but from these and by the help of these all our knowledge of nature has been developed. They were the measure of all things, and seemed to give law to all things. Nature was rescued from chaos and confusion by the power, the notes of music, the motions and the stars, the forms of atoms, the evolution and recurrence of days, months, years, the military divisions of an army, the civil divisions of a state seemed to afford a present witness of them. What would have become of man or of the world if deprived of number, Republic 7, 522c. The mystery of number and the mystery of music were akin. There was a music of rhythm and a harmonious motion everywhere, until the real connection which existed between music and number, a fanciful or imaginary relation was super added. There was a music of the spheres as well as of the notes of the liar. If in all things seen there was number and figure, why should they not also pervade the unseen world, with which by their wonderful and unchangeable nature they seemed to hold communion. Two other points strike us in the use which the ancient philosophers made of numbers. First, they applied to external nature the relations of them which they found in their own minds, and where nature seemed to be at variance with number, as for example in the case of fractions, they protested against it. Republic 7, 525, Aristotle, Metaphysics 16. Having long meditated on the properties of 1, 2, 4, 8, or 1, 3, 9, 27, or of 3, 4, 5, they discovered in the many curious correspondences and were disposed to find in them the secret of the universe. Secondly, they applied number and figure equally to those parts of physics such as astronomy or mechanics, in which the modern philosopher expects to find them, and to those in which he would never think of looking for them, such as physiology and psychology. For these sciences were not yet divided, and there was nothing really irrational in arguing that the same laws which regulated the heavenly bodies were partially applied to the airing limbs or brain of man. Astrology was the form which the lively fancy of ancient thinkers almost necessarily gave to astronomy. The observation of the lower principle, that is mechanics, is always seen in the higher, that is in the phenomena of life, further tended to perplex them. Plato's doctrine of the same and the other ruling the courses of the heavens and of the human body is not a mere vagary, but is a natural result of the state of knowledge and thought at which he had arrived. When in modern times we contemplate the heavens, a certain amount of scientific truth imperceptibly blends even with the cursory glance of an unscientific person. He knows that the earth is revolving around the sun, and not the sun around the earth. He does not imagine the earth to be the center of the universe, and he has some conception of chemistry and the cognate sciences. A very different aspect of nature would have been present to the mind of the early Greek philosopher. He would have beheld the earth as a surface only, not mere however faintly in a glass of science, but indissolubly connected with some theory of one, two, or more elements. He would have seen the world pervaded by number and figure, animated by a principle of motion, imminent in a principle of rest. He would have tried to construct the universe on a quantitative principle, seeming to find an endless combination of geometric figures or an infinite variety of their sizes, a sufficient account of the multiplicity of phenomena. To these a primary speculations he would add a rude conception of matter and his own immediate experiences of health and disease. His cosmos would necessarily be imperfect and unequal, being the first attempt to impress form and order on the primeval chaos of human knowledge. He would see all things as in a dream. The ancient physical philosophers have been charged by Dr. Wewell and others with wasting their fine intelligences in wrong methods of inquiry, and their progress in moral and political philosophy has been sometimes contrasted with their supposed failure in physical investigations. They have plenty of ideas, says Dr. Wewell, and perhaps plenty of facts, but their ideas did not accurately represent the facts with which they were acquainted. This is a very crude and misleading way of describing ancient science. It is a mistake of an uneducated person, uneducated that is, in the higher sense, the word. He imagines everyone else has to be like himself and explains every other age by his own. No doubt the ancients often fell into strange and fanciful errors. The time had died had arrived for the slower and sureer path of the modern inductive philosophy, but it remains to be shown that they could have done more in their age and country, or that the contributions which they made to the sciences with which they were acquainted are not as great upon the whole as those made by their successors. There is no single step in astronomy as great as that of the nameless Pythagorean who first conceived the world to be a body moving around the sun in space. There is no truer or more comprehensive principle than the application of mathematics alike to the heavenly bodies and to the particles of matter. The ancients had all the instruments which would have enabled them to correct or verify their anticipations, and their opportunities of observation were limited. Plato probably did more for physical science by asserting the supremacy of mathematics than Aristotle or his disciples by their collections of facts. When the thinkers of modern times, following Bacon, under value or despair to the speculations of ancient philosophers, they seem wholly to forget the conditions of the world and of the human mind under which they carried on their investigations. When we accuse them of being under the influence of words, do we suppose that we are all together free from this illusion? When we remark that Greek physics soon became stationary or extinct, may we not observe also that there have been, and may be again, periods in the history of modern philosophy which have been barren and unproductive, we might as well maintain that Greek art was not real or great because it had nil simileot secundum, as they say that Greek physics were a failure because they admire no subsequent progress. The charge of premature generalization which is often urged against ancient philosophers is really an anachronism, for they can hardly be said to have generalized at all. They may be said more truly to have cleared up and defined by the help of experience, ideas which they already possess. The beginnings of thought about nature must always have this character. A true method is the result of many ages of experiment and observation, and is ever going on and enlarging with the progress of science and knowledge. At first men personify nature, then they form impressions of nature. At last they conceive measure or laws of nature. They pass out of mythology and into philosophy. Early science is not a process of discovery in the modern sense, but rather a process of correcting by observation, and to a certain extent only, the first impressions of nature which mankind, when they began to think, had received from poetry or language or unintelligent sense. Of all scientific truths the greatest and simplest is the uniformity of nature. This was expressed by the ancients in many ways, as fate or necessity or measure or limit. Unexpected events, of which the cause was unknown to them, they attributed to chance, compare, to citities, one, one-forty. But their conception of nature was never that of law interrupted by exceptions, a somewhat unfortunate metaphysical invention of modern times, which is a variance with facts and has failed to satisfy the requirements of thought. End of section two. Section three of the introduction to Temes. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Philippa. Temes by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Joatt. Introduction and Analysis. Section three. 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 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 Temes. 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 Aliatics, unless some human qualities are added 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, 30a, 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 Iliatic 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, 29c, 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, compare 35a. 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, compare 42d. 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 10903 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, 28. 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, one, that to the mind of Plato subject and object were not yet distinguished, two, 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 be of the other. He means, three, 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 thirty-four a. He means, four, 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, five, 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, for example the Timaeus by the Parmenides or Fidrus of 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 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 to 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, 36C, and a similar principle of fixedness or order appears to regulate the bodily constitution of man, 89A, 90D, 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, usia, 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 the sides, 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 Eliactic 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 Eliactic 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, Nus and Noeta. By Ussia he clearly means some conception of the intelligible and the intelligent. It belongs to the class of Noeta. 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, compared by Libas sixteen C, which coexisting 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 a uniform motion around the 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—one, two, three, four, nine, eight, twenty-seven—composed of the two Pythagorean progressions—one, two, four, eight, and one, three, nine, twenty-seven—of which the number one represents a point, two and three lines, four and eight, nine and twenty-seven—the squares and cubes, respectively—of two and three. This series, of which the intervals are afterwards filled up, probably represents, one, the diatonic scale, according to the Pythagoreans and Plato, two, the order and distances of the heavenly bodies, and three 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., two squared, three squared, four, nine, have always a single mean proportional, e.g., four and nine, have the single mean six. Whereas the cubes of primes, e.g., three cubed and five cubed, have always two mean proportionals, e.g., twenty-seven to forty-five to seventy-five to one hundred and twenty-five. But to this explanation of Martin's it may be objected, one, that Plato nowhere says that his proportion is to be limited to prime numbers, two, that the limitation of surfaces to squares is also not to be found in his words, nor three, 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, or 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 Book 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 mythologists 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 imposes the two natures of time and space. Time is conceived by him to be only the shadow or image of eternity, whichever 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 a 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 phenomena and ontah. 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 metathysical 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 intempore sed kum tempore finxit deus mundum, C. 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 Eliatic philosophy, and were very familiar to Plato, as we gather from the Parmenides. The consciousness of them had led the great Eliatic 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 illuminating 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 hile, 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, for taking 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 Kronos Kytopos, or Chora, 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, compared to hypotheses and images of Republic 6.511. It is true that it does not attain to the clearness of ideas, but like them it seems to remain, even if 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, compared the three principles of the Vilebus, 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 in pedacles, 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, migma, which preceded, Plato does not attempt further to penetrate. They are called elements, but they are so far from being elements, stoicaea, 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 is 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 24 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 plain angles. Six of these angles form a regular octahedron. The third solid is a regular icosahedron, having 20 triangular equilateral bases, and therefore 120 rectangular scalene triangles. The fourth regular solid, or cube, is formed by the combination of four icosahedron 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 30 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 times 30 equals 360 scalene triangles, platonic questions five, 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 the house of cards which we are pulling to pieces and putting together again. Compare, however, laws 10, 8, 9, 4, A. 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 democracies, Hippolytus, refutation of all heresies, 113, had said, would be, as he satirically observes, the characteristic of a very indefinite and ignorant mind, 55cd. The twenty triangular faces of an icosahedron form the faces or sides of two regular octahedrons and of a regular pyramid, 20 equals 8 by 2 plus 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 equals 4 times 2, a particle of air is resolved into two particles of fire. The transformation is affected by the superior power or number of the conquering elements. The manner of the change is, one, a separation of portions of the elements from the masses in which they are collected, two, a resolution of them into their original triangles, and three, 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, 57D in following. 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, 56D following. 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 view 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, 78B. 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, 62D, but by the attraction of similars toward 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 one, the attraction of similar elements to one another, but also two 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 Tamaeus 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, periosis. 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. End of section 3. Section 4 of the introduction to Timaeus. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Timaeus by Plato, translated by Benjamin Jewett. Introduction and Analysis Section 4. Astronomy of Plato was based on the two principles of the same and the other, which God combined in the creation of the world. The soul, which is compounded of the same, the other and the essence, is diffused from the center to the circumference of the heavens. We speak of a soul of the universe, but more truly regarded, the universe of the Timaeus is a soul governed by mind, and holding in solution a residuum of matter or evil, which the author of the world is unable to expel, and of which Plato cannot tell us the origin. The creation in Plato's sense is really the creation of order, and the first step in giving order is the division of the heavens into an inner and outer circle of the other and the same, of the divisible and the indivisible, answering to the two spheres of the planets and of the world beyond them, all together moving around the earth, which is their center. To us, there is a difficulty in apprehending how that which is at rest can also be in motion, or that which is indivisible exists in space. But the whole description is so ideal and imaginative that we can hardly venture to attribute to many of Plato's words in the Timaeus any more meaning than to his mythical account of the heavens in the Republic and in the Freitas. Compare his denial of the blasphemous opinion that there are planets or wandering stars, all alike move in circles. Laws 7, 8, 21, 2. The stars are the habitation of the souls of men, from which they come and to which they return. In attributing to the fixed stars only the most perfect motion, that which is on the same spot or circling around the same, he might perhaps have said that to the spectator of all time and all existence, to borrow once more his own grand expression, or viewed in the language of Spinoza, subspecies eternitas, they were still at rest but appeared to move in order to teach men the periods of time. Although absolutely in motion they are relatively at rest, or we may conceive of them as resting, or the space in which they contain, or the whole anima Monday revolves. The universe revolves around a center once in 24 hours, but the orbit of the fixed stars takes a different direction from those of the planets. The outer and inner sphere cross one another and meet again at a point opposite to that of their first contact, the first moving in a circle from left to right along the side of a parallelogram which is supposed to be inscribed in it, the second also moving in a circle along the diagonal of the same parallelogram from right to left, or in other words the first describing the path of the equator, the second the path of the ecliptic. The motion of the second is controlled by the first, and hence the oblique line in which the planets are supposed to move becomes a spiral. The motion of the same is said to be undivided, whereas the inner motion is split into seven unequal orbits, the intervals between them being in the ratio of two and three, three of either the sun moving in the opposite direction to Mercury and Venus, but with equal swiftness the remaining four moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter with unequal swiftness to the former three and to one another. Thus arises the following progression, Moon 1, Sun 2, Venus 3, Mercury 4, Mars 8, Jupiter 9, Saturn 27. This series of numbers is the compound of the two Pythagorean ratios, having the same intervals but not in the same order as the mixture which was originally divided in forming the soul of the world. Plato was struck by the phenomenon of Mercury, Venus and the Sun appearing to overtake and be overtaken by one another. The true reason of this, namely that they lie within the circle of the Earth's orbit, was unknown to him, and the reason which he gives that the two former move in an opposite direction to the latter is far from explaining the appearance of them in the heavens. All the planets, including the sun, are carried round in the daily motion of the circle of the fixed stars, and they have a second or oblique motion which gives the explanation of the different lengths of the sun's course in different parts of the Earth. The fixed stars have also two movements, a forward movement in their orbit which is common to the whole circle, and a movement on the same spot around an axis, which Plato calls the movement of thought about the same. In this latter respect they are more perfect than the wandering stars, as Plato himself terms them into Mayas, though in the laws he condemns the appellation as blasphemous. The revolution of the world around Earth, which is accomplished in a single day and night, is described as being the most perfect or intelligent. Yet Plato also speaks of an annus magnus, or cyclic year, in which periods wonderful for their complexity are found to coincide in a perfect number, i.e. a number which equals the sum of its factors, as 6 equals 1 plus 2 plus 3. This, although not literally contradictory, is in spirit irrecursionable with the perfect revolution of 24 hours. The same remark may be applied to the complexity of the appearance and oculations of the stars, which if the outer heaven is supposed to be moving around the centre once in 24 hours, must be confined to the effects produced by the seven planets. Plato seems to confuse the actual observation of the heavens with his desire to find in the mathematical perfection. The same spirit is carried yet further by him in the passage already quoted from the laws, in which he affirms their wandering to be an appearance only, which a little knowledge of mathematics would enable men to correct. We have now to consider the much discussed question of the rotational immobility of the Earth. Plato's doctrine on this subject is contained in the following words. The Earth, which is our nurse, compacted or revolving around the pole, which is extended through the universe, he made to be the guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods that are in the interior of heaven, 40 B.C. There is an unfortunate doubt in this passage about the meaning of the word Illuminen, which is translated either compacted or revolving, and is equally capable of both explanations. A doubt too may be erased as to whether the words Artificer of Day and Night are consistent with the mere passive causation of them, caused by the immobility of the Earth in the midst of the circling universe. We must admit further that Aristotle attributed to Plato the doctrine of the rotation of the Earth on its axis. On the other hand, it has been urged that if the Earth goes round with the outer heaven and sun in 24 hours, there is no way of accounting for the alternation of day and night, since the equal motion of the Earth and sun would have the effect of absolute immobility. To which it may be replied that Plato never says that the Earth goes round with the outer heaven and sun. Although the whole question depends on the relation of Earth and sun, their movements are nowhere precisely described. But if we suppose that this to groat, that the diurnal rotation of the Earth on its axis and the revolution of the sun and outer heaven precisely coincide, it would be difficult to imagine that Plato was unaware of the consequence. Although he was ignorant of many things which are familiar to us, and often confused in his ideas where we have become clear, we have no right to attribute to him a childish want of reasoning about very simple facts, or an inability to understand the necessary and obvious deductions from geometrical figures or movements. Of the causes of day and night, the pre-Socratic philosophers, and especially the Pythagoreans, gave varied accounts, and therefore the question can hardly be imagined to have escaped him. On the other hand, it may be urged that the further step, however simple and obvious, is just what Plato often seems to be ignorant of, and that as there is no limit to his insight, there is also no limit to the blindness which sometimes obscures his intelligent. Compare the construction of solids out of surfaces in his account of the creation of the world, or the attraction of similars to similars. Further Mr. Groat supposes not that Helalomon reels revolving, or that this is the sense in which Aristotle understood the word, but that the rotation of the earth is necessarily implied in its adherence to the Cosmical axis. But Alpha, if as Mr. Groat assumes, Plato did not see the rotation of the earth on its axis, and of the sun and outer heavens round the earth, and equal times was inconsistent with the alternation of day and night. Neither need we suppose that he would have seen that the immobility of the earth to be inconsistent with the rotation of the axis. And beta, what proof is there that the axis revolves at all? The comparison of the two passages quoted by Mr. Groat see page 19 of his pamphlet on the rotation of the earth from Aristotle to Cello Book III, Chapter 13, and Neo Grafiticae, and Chapter 14, Hemias Messon, clearly shows, although this is a matter of minor importance, that Aristotle, as Procleus and Simplicius supposed, understood Ilistheo in the Tameas to mean revolving. For the second passage, in which the motion on an axis is expressed and mentioned, refers to the first, but this would be unmeaning unless in the first passage meant rotation on an axis. The immobility of the earth is more in accordance with Plato's other writing than the opposite hypothesis, for in the Phaedo the earth is described as a center of the world, and is not said to be in motion. In the Republic the pilgrims appear to be looking out from the earth upon the motions of the heavenly bodies. In the Freedeth Hestia, who remains immovable in the house of use while the other gods go in position, is called the first and eldest of the gods, and is probably the symbol of the earth. The silence of Plato in these and in some other passages compare laws x893b, in which he might be expected to speak of the rotation of the earth, is more favorable to the doctrine of his immobility than to the opposite. If he had meant to say that the earth revolves on its axis, he would have said so in distinct words, and have explained the relation of its movements to those of other heavenly bodies. The meanings of the word Artificer of day and night is literally true according to Plato's view, for the alternation of day and night is not produced by the motion of the heavens alone, or by the immobility of the earth alone, but by both together, and that which has the inherent force or energy to remain at rest while all other bodies are moving, may be truly said to act equally with them. We should not lay too much stress on Aristotle, or the writer, Decadio, having adopted the other interpretations of the words, although Alexander of Aphroditeus thinks that he could not have been ignorant either of the doctrine of Plato, or of the sense which he intended to give to the word Illamenon. For the citations of Plato and Aristotle are frequently misinterpreted by him, and he seems hardly ever to have had in his mind the connection in which they occur. In this case the illusion is very slight, and there is no reason to suppose that the eternal revolution of the heavens was present to his mind. Hence we need not attribute to him the error from which we are defending Plato. At the weighing once against another all his complicated probabilities. The final conclusion at which we arrive is that there is nearly as much to be said on one side of the question as on the other, and that we are not perfectly certain whether, as Bach and the majority of commentators ancient as well as modern are inclined to believe, Plato thought that the earth was at rest in the centre of the universe, or, as as Aristotle and Mr. Groot suppose, that it revolved on its axis. Whether we assume the earth to be stationary in the centre of the universe, or to revolve with the heavens, no explanation is given of the variation in the length of days and nights at different times of the year. The relations of the earth and heavens are so indistinct in Atamaeus, and so figurative in the Phaedo, Phaedrus and Republic, that we must give up any hope of ascertaining how they were imagined by Plato, if he had any fixed or scientific conception of them at all. The soul of the world is framed on the analogy of the soul of man and many traces of anthropomorphism blend with Plato's highest flights of idealism. The heavenly bodies are endowed with thought, the principles of the same and other exist in the universe, as well as in the human mind. The soul of man is made out of the remains of the elements which had been used in creating the soul of the world. These remains, however, are diluted to the third degree. By this, Plato expresses the measure of the difference between the soul human and divine. The human soul, like the Cosmical, is framed before the body, as the mind is before the soul of Aether, 30b. This is the order of the divine work, and the finer parts of the body, which are more akin to the soul, such as the spinal marrow, are prior to the bones and flesh. The brain, the containing vessel of the divine part of the soul, is nearly in the form of a globe, which is the image of the gods, who are the stars and of the universe. There is, however, an inconsistency in Plato's manner of conceiving the soul of man. He cannot get rid of the element of necessity, which is allowed to enter. He does not, like Kant, attempt to vindicate for man a freedom out of space and time, but he acknowledges him to be subject to the influence of external causes, and leaves hardly any place for freedom of the will. The lusts of man are caused by their bodily constitution, 86C, though they may be increased by bad education and bad laws, which implies that they may be decreased by good education and good laws. He appears to have an inkling of the truth, that to the higher nature of man evil is involuntary. This is mixed up with the view, which, while apparently agreeing with it, is in reality the opposite of it, that vice is due to physical causes. 86D, in the timeios as well as in the laws, he also regards vices and crimes as simply involuntary. They are diseases, analogous to the diseases of the body, and arising out of the same causes. If we draw together the opposite poles of Plato's system, we find that, like Spinoza, he combines idealism with fatalism. 86C, the soul of a man is divided by him into three parts, answering roughly to the charioteer and steeds of the fiatrus, and to the logos, tumours, and epitomia of the Republic and Nicomachian Ethics. First, there is the immortal nature of which the brain is the seed, and which is akin to the soul of the universe. This alone thinks and knows, and is the ruler of the whole. Secondly, there is the higher mortal soul, which, though liable to perturbations of her own, takes the side of reason against the lower appetites. The seed of this is the heart, in which courage, anger, and all the nobler affections are supposed to reside. There the veins all meet, it is their centre or house of God, when they carry the orders of the thinking being to the extremities of his kingdom. There is also a third or appetitive soul, which receives the commands of the immortal part, not immediately but mediately, through the liver, which reflects on its surface the admonitions and threats of the reason. The liver is imagined by Plato to be a smooth and bright substance, having a store of sweetness and also of bitterness, which reason freely uses in the execution of her mandates. In this region, as ancient superstition told, we are to be found intimations of the future. But Plato is careful to observe that although such knowledge is given to the inferior parts of man, it requires to be interpreted by the superior. Reason and not enthusiasm is the true guide of man. He is only inspired when he is demanded by some distemper or possession. The ancient saying that only a man in his senses can judge his own actions is approved by modern philosophy too. The same irony which appears in Plato's remark, that the men of old time must surely have known the gods, who were their ancestors, and we should believe them as custom requires, is also manifest in his account of divination. The appetitive soul is seated in the belly, and there imprisoned like a wild beast, far away from the council chamber, as Plato graphically calls the head, in order that the animal passions may not interfere with the deliberations of reason. Though the soul is said by him to be prior to the body, yet we cannot help seeing that it is constructed on the model of the body, the threefold division into the rational, passionate and appetitive corresponding to the head, heart and belly. The human soul differs from the soul of the world in this respect, that it is enveloped and finds its expression in matter, whereas the soul of the world is not only enveloped or diffused in matter, but is the element in which matter moves. The breath of man is within him, but the air or ether of heaven is the element which surrounds him and all things. Pleasure and pain are attributed in the Timaeus to the suddenness of our sensations, the first being a sudden restoration, the second a sudden violation of nature, compare Philebus 31D. The sensations became conscious to us, when they are exceptional. Sight is not attended either by pleasure or pain, but hunger and the appeasing of hunger are pleasant and painful, because they are extraordinary. I shall not attempt to connect the physiological speculations of Plato, either with ancient or modern medicine. What light I can throw upon them will be derived from the comparison of them with his general system. There is no principle so apparent in the physics of the Timaeus or in ancient physics generally, a set of continuity. The world is conceived of as a whole, and the elements are formed into and out of one another. The varieties of substances and processes are hardly known or noticed. And in a similar manner the human body is conceived of as a whole, and the different substances of which, to a superficial observer, it appears to be composed, the blood, flesh, sinews, like the elements out of which they are formed, are supposed to pass into one another in regular order, while the infinite complexity of the human frame remains unobserved. And diseases arise from the opposite process, when the natural proportions of the four elements are disturbed, and the secondary substances which are formed out of them, namely blood, flesh, sinews, are generated in an inverse order. Plato found heat and air within the human frame, and the blood circulating in every part. He assumes in language almost unintelligible to us that a network of fire and air envelopes the greater part of the body. This outer net contains two lesser nets, one corresponding to the stomach, the other to the lungs, and the entrance to the letter is forked, or divided into two passages, which lead to the nostrils and to the mouth. In the process of respiration the external net is said to find a way in and out of the pores of the skin, while the interior of it and the lesser nets move alternately into each other. The whole description is figurative as Plato himself implies, 79d, when he speaks of a fountain of fire which we compare to the network of a creel. He really means by this what we should describe as a state of heat or temperature in the interior of the body. The fountain of fire or heat is also in a figure the circulation of the blood. The passage is partly imagination, partly fact. He has a singular theory of respiration for which he accounts solely by the movement of the air in and out of the body. He does not attribute any part of the process to the action of the body itself. The air has a double ingress and a double exit through the mouth or nostrils and through the skin. When exhaled through the mouth or nostrils it leaves a vacuum which is filled up by other air finding a way in through the pores. This air being thrust out of its place by the exhalation from the mouth and nostrils. There is also a corresponding process of inhalation through the mouth or nostrils and of exhalation through the pores. The inhalation through the pores appears to take place nearly at the same time as the exhalation through the mouth and conversely. The internal fire is in either case the propelling cause outwards, the inhaled air, when heated by it, having a natural tendency to move out of the body to the place of fire while the impossibility of a vacuum is the propelling cause inwards. Thus we see that this singular theory is dependent on two principles largely employed by Plotto in explaining the operations of nature, the impossibility of a vacuum and the attraction of like to like. To these there has to be added a third principle which is the condition of the action of the other two, the interpenetration of particles in proportion to their density or rarity. It is this which enables fire and air to permeate the flesh. Plotto's account of digestion and the circulation of the blood is closely connected with his theory of respiration. Digestion is supposed to be affected by the action of the internal fire which in the process of respiration moves into the stomach and menses the food. As the fire returns to its place it takes with it the minced food or blood and in this way the veins are replenished. Plotto does not inquire how the blood is separated from the fire keys. Of the anatomy and functions of the body he knew very little, e.g. of the uses of the nerves in conveying motion and sensation which he supposed to be communicated by the bones and veins. He was also ignorant of the distinction between veins and arteries. The latter term he applies to the vessels which conduct air from the mouth to the lungs. He supposes the lung to be hollow and bloodless. The spinal marrow he conceives to be the seed of generation. He confuses the parts of the body with the states of the body. The network of fire and air is spoken of as a bodily organ. He has absolutely no idea of the phenomena of respiration which he attributes to a law of equalization in nature. The air which is breathed out displacing other air which finds a way in. He is wholly unacquainted with the process of digestion. Except the general divisions into the spleen, the liver, the belly and the lungs and the obvious distinction of flesh, bones and the limbs of the body we find nothing that reminds us of anatomical facts. But we find much which is derived from his theory of the universe and transferred to man as there is much also in his theory of the universe which is suggested by man. The microcosm of the human body is the lesser image of the macrocosm. The courses of the same and the other affect both. They are made of the same elements and therefore in the same proportions. Both are intelligent natures and due with the power of self-motion and the same equipoise is maintained in both. The animal is a sort of world to the particles of the blood which circulate in it. All the four elements entered into the original composition of the human frame. The bone was formed out of smooth earth, liquids of various kinds passed to and throw. The network of fire and air irrigates the veins. Infancy in childhood is the chaos or first turbid flux of sense prior to the establishment of order. The intervals of time which may be observed in some intermittent fevers correspond to the density of the elements. The spinal marrow, including the brain, is formed out of the finest sorts of triangles and is the connecting link between body and mind. Health is only to be preserved by imitating the motions of the world in space which is the mother and nurse of generation. The work of digestion is carried on by the superior sharpness of the triangles forming the substance of the human body to those which are introduced into it in the shape of food. The freshest and the cutest forms of triangles are those that are found in children but they become more obtuse with advancing years and when they finally wear out and fall to pieces old age and death supreme. As in the republic Plotto is still the enemy of the projective treatment of physicians, which except in extreme cases no man of sense will ever adopt. For as he adds with an insight into the truth every disease is akin to the nature of the living being and is only irritated by stimulants. He is of opinion that nature should be left to herself and is inclined to think that physicians are in vain. Compare Laws 6761c where he says that warm baths would be more beneficial to the limbs of the aged drastic than the prescriptions of a not overrized doctor. If he seems to be extreme in his condemnation of medicine and to rely too much on diet and exercise he might appeal to nearly all the best physicians of our own age in support of his opinions, who often speak to their patients of the worthlessness of drugs. For we ourselves are skeptical about medicine and very unwilling to submit to the projective treatment of physicians. May we not claim for Plotto an anticipation of modern ideas as about some questions of astronomy and physics, so also about medicine. As in the Charmides 1567 he tells us that the body cannot be cured without the soul so in the Timaeus he strongly asserts the sympathy of soul and body and the fact of either is the occasion of the greatest discord and disproportion in the other. Here too may be a presentment that in the medicine of the future the interdependence of mind and body will be more fully recognized and that the influence of the one over the other may be exerted in a manner which is not no thought possible. End of Section 6. Section 7 of the introduction to Timaeus. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Timaeus by Plotto translated by Benjamin Jovet. Introduction and Analysis. Section 7. In Plotto's explanation of sensation we are struck by the fact that he has not the same distinct conception of organs of sense which is familiar to ourselves. The senses are not instruments but rather passages through which external objects strike upon the mind. The eye is the aperture through which the stream of vision passes. The ear is the aperture through which the vibrations of sound pass. But that the complex structure of the eye or the ear is in any sense the cause of sight and hearing he seems hardly to be aware. The process of sight is the most complicated. Compare Republic 6, 500, 7, 508 and consists of three elements. The light which is supposed to reside within the eye, the light of the sun and the light emitted from external objects. When the light of the eye meets the light of the sun and both together meet the light issuing from an external object, this is the simple act of sight. When the particles of light which proceed from the object are exactly equal to the particles of the visual array which meets them from within, then the body is transparent. If they are larger and contract the visual array, a black color is produced. If they are smaller and dilated, a white. Other phenomena are produced by the variety and motion of light. A sudden flash of fire at once elicits light and moisture from the eye and causes a bright color. A more subdued light on mingling with the moisture of the eye produces red color. Out of these elements all other colors are derived. All of them are combinations of bright and red with white and black. Plato himself tells us that he does not know in what proportions they combine and he is of opinion that such knowledge is granted to the gods only. To have seen the affinity of them to each other and their connection with light is not a bad basis for a theory of colors. We must remember that they were not distinctly defined to his as they are to our eyes. He saw them not as they are divided in the prism or artificially manufactured for the painter's use, but as they exist in nature blended and confused with one another. We can hardly agree with him when he tells us that smells do not admit of kinds. He seems to think that no definite qualities can attach to bodies, which are in a state of transition or evaporation. He also makes a supple observation that smells must be denser than air, so thinner than water, because when there is an obstruction to the breathing air can penetrate but not smell. The affections peculiar to the tongue are various kinds and, like many other affections, are caused by contraction and dilation. Some of them are produced by rough, others by obsturgent, others by inflammatory substances. These act upon the testing instruments of the tongue and produce a more or less disagreeable sensation, while other particles congenial to the tongue soften and harmonize them. The instruments of taste reach from the tongue to the heart. Blotto has a lively sense of the manner in which sensation and motion are communicated from one part of the body to the other, though he confuses the affections with the organs. Hearing is a blow which passes through the ear and ends in the region of the liver, being transmitted by means of the air, the brain and the blood to the soul. The swifter sound is acute, the sound which moves slowly is grave. A great body of sound is loud, the opposite is low. This chord is produced by the swifter and slower motions of two sounds, and is converted into harmony when the swifter motions begin to pause and are overtaken by the slower. The general phenomena of sensation are partly internal, but the more violent are caused by conflict with external objects. Proceeding by a method of superficial observation, Blotto remarks that the more sensitive parts of the human frame are those which are least covered by flesh, as is in the case with the head and the elbows. Man, if his head had been covered with a thicker pulp of flesh, might have been a longer-lived animal than he is, but could not have had as quick perceptions. On the other hand, the tongue is one of the most sensitive of organs, but then this is made not to be a covering to the bones which contains a marrow or source of life, but with an express purpose and in a separate mass. 75a. End of Section 7. Section 8, Part 1 of the Introduction to Tamaeus. This is a LibriVox recording, while LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Patty Cunningham. Tamaeus by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Joett. Introduction and Analysis, Section 8, Part 1. We have now to consider how far in any of these speculations Plato approximated to the discoveries of modern science. The modern physical philosopher is apt to dwell exclusively on the absurdities of ancient ideas about science, on the haphazard fancies and a priori assumptions of ancient teachers on their confusion of facts and ideas, on their inconsistency and blindness to the most obvious phenomena. He measures them not by what preceded them, but by what has followed them. He does not consider that ancient physical philosophy was not a free inquiry, 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 eras 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 generalisers, which since the days of Bacon we have been apt to suppose them. The thoughts of men widen to receive experience. At first they seem to know all things as in a dream. After a while they look at them closely and hold them in their hands. They began 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, one, that the nebular theory was the received belief of several of the early physicists. Two, that the development of animals out of fishes who came to land, and of men out of animals, was held by Annex Amanda in the 6th century before Christ. Compare Plutarch, Symposaics, 8, Question 8, 4. Diplocitus, Philosophorum, V, 19, 1. 3. That even by fallolus 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 an exegorus. Also they knew, or thought, 5. That there was a sex in planets 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 favorable view of the speculations of the Tamaeus. 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 inquiry, 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 a 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 cooperative causes, which originally appears in the Timaeus, has likewise survived to our own day, and has been a great peacemaker between theology and science. Plato also approaches, very near to our doctrine, of the primary and secondary qualities of matter, 61ff. 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 colors, would forget the difference of the human and divine natures, 68d. Their indefiniteness is probably the reason why he singles them out as especially incapable of being tested by experiment. Compare the saying, Vanaxagoras, Sextus, Outlines of Pyronism, I33, that since snow is made of water and water is black, snow ought to be black. The greatest divination of the ancients was a 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. A now a favorite 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 equipois. 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 the earth, water, and air had settled down to their places, and he imagined fire, or the exterior ether, 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 proportion to a 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, 79e, 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.