Timaeus — Plato

nomenon 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 Boeckh 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 mythologers, 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 interposes the two natures of time and space. Time is conceived by him to be only the shadow or image of eternity which ever 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 an hypothesis. All the

The contradictions of Time and Space.

p. 397

objections which may be urged against Kant's doctrine of the ideaUty 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 (paivo/ueva and dvra.

Yet, on the other hand, we are conscious that knowledge is independent of time, that truth is not a thing of yesterday or to-morrow, 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 metaphysical 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 in tempore sed cum tempore finxit Deus mundum,' says St. 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 Eleatic philosophy and were very familiar to Plato, as we gather from the Parmenides. The consciousness of them had led the great Eleatic 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