Timaeus — Plato

Plato's doctrine of equipoise. 419 instances, they applied them everywhere ; and in the complexity, Timacus. of which they were capable, found the explanation of the equally introduccomplex 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.

And now a favourite 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 equipoise. 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. ( I ) The law of gravitation, according to Plato, is a law, not only

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Attraction: the circulation of the blood.

Timaeiis. iNTRODaC- TION.

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 earth, water, and air had settled down to their places, and he imagined fire or the exterior aether 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 proportioned to the 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' (79 E), 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.

A further study of the Timaeus suggests some after-thoughts which may be conveniently brought together in this place. The topics which I propose briefly to reconsider are {a) the relation of the Timaeus to the other dialogues of Plato and to the previous philosophy ; {b) the nature of God and of creation ; {c) the morality of the Timaeus : — • (^) The Timaeus is more imaginative and less scientific than any other of the Platonic dialogues. It is conjectural astronomy, conjectural natural philosophy, conjectural medicine. The writer himself is constantly repeating that he is speaking what is probable only. The dialogue is put into the mouth of Timaeus, a

The relation of the Timaeus to the other dialogues.

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Introduction.