Timaeus — Plato

world has been subjected. He was always tending to argue from Timaeus. what was near to what was remote, from what was known to Intkoducwhat 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, Uke Tynnichus (Ion 534 D), obliged to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord or of the flute.

The Hesiodic 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 men think of the world as a whole ; they carried the mind back into the infinity of past time ; they 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 enquirer of the last generation, confined to a period of six thousand 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 (Statesm. 302 A; Laws iii. 676), laws or forms of art and music which had lasted, ' not in word only, but in very truth, for ten thousand years' (Laws ii. 656 E; cp. also vii.

799 A) ; he was aware that natural phenomena like the Delta of the Nile might have slowly accumulated in long periods of time (cp. Hdt. ii. 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 2to the regularity and irregularity of nature ; or of 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 in 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, Erebus, Aether, Night, 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 continued to exist for the purposes of ritual or of art ; but from the sixth 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 was all sight, all hearing, all knowing' (Xenophanes).

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 it flashed upon him that all things were one; the tumult of sense abated, and the mind found repose in the 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 an inner 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 into 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 ; there were born Heracliteans or Eleatics, as there have been in later ages born Aristotelians or Platonists. Like some philosophers in 3modern times, who are accused of making a theory first and Timaeus. finding their facts afterwards, the advocates of either opinion iNTRonecnever thought of applying either to themselves or to their adver- ^'°^ saries the criterion of fact. They were mastered by their ideas and not masters of them.

Like the Heraclitean fanatics whom Plato has ridiculed in the Theaetetus (179 E, 180), they were incapable of giving a reason of the faith that was in them, and had all the animosities of a religious sect. Yet, doubtless, there was some first impression derived from external nature, which, as in 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 an inspiration from the external world.

The most general facts or appearances of nature, the 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 aether, were always present to them.

The great source of error and also the beginning of truth to them was reasoning 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 resem-. blances 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,