Timaeus — Plato

Ajiaiysis 90-92. ' 379 which are not of earthly origin, to our kindred ; for the head Timaeus. i$ nearest to heaven. He who is intent upon the gratification analysis. of his desires and cherishes the mortal soul, has all his ideas mortal, and is himself mortal in the truest sense.

But he who seeks after knowledge and exercises the divine part of himself in godly and immortal thoughts, attains to truth and immortality, as far as is possible to man, and also to happiness, while he is training up within him the divine principle and indwelling power of order. There is only one way in which one person can benefit another ; and that is by assigning to him his proper nurture and motion.

To the motions of the soul answer the motions of the universe, and by the study of these the individual is restored to his original nature. Thus we have finished the discussion of the universe, which, according to our original intention, has now been brought down to the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something should be briefly said about other animals : first of women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men.

And 91 when they degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another in the following manner : — The outlet for liquids they connected with the living principle of the spinal marrow, which the man has the desire to emit into the fruitful womb of the woman ; this is like a fertile field in which the seed is quickened and matured, and at last brought to light.

When this desire is unsatisfied the man is over-mastered by the power of the generative organs, and the woman is subjected to disorders from the obstruction of the passages of the breath, until the two meet and pluck the fruit of the tree. The race of birds was created out of innocent, light-minded men, who thought to pursue the study of the heavens by sight; these were transformed into birds, and grew feathers instead of hair.

The race of wild animals were men who had no philosophy, and never looked up to heaven or used the courses of the head, but followed only the influences of passion. Naturally they turned to their kindred earth, and put their forelegs to the ground, 92 3^nd their heads were crushed into strange oblong forms. Some of them have four feet, and some of them more than four, — the latter, who are the more senseless, drawing closer to their native

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Analysis 92.

Timaeus. element; the most senseless of all have no limbs and trail their Analysis. whole body on the ground. Tiie fourth kind are the inhabitants of the waters ; these are made out of the most senseless and ignorant and impure of men, whom God placed in the uttermost parts of the world in return for their utter ignorance, and caused them to respire water instead of the pure element of air. Such are the laws by which animals pass into one another. And so the world received animals, mortal and immortal, and was fulfilled with them, and became a visible God, comprehending the visible, made in the image of the Intellectual, being the one perfect only-begotten heaven.

Introduction.

§2. Nature in the aspect which she presented to a Greek 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 appeared 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 out of all 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 the 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

FrojH mythology to philosophy.

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