Timaeus — Plato

person, and speaks and is spoken of as God. Yet his personality Timaeus seems to appear only in the act of creation. In so far as he works with his eye fixed upon an eternal pattern he is like the human artificer in the Republic (vi. 501 B ; x. 597). Here the theory of Platonic ideas intrudes upon us. God, like man, is supposed to have an ideal of which Plato is unable to tell us the origin.

He may be said, in the language of modern philosophy, to resolve the divine mind into subject and object. The first work of creation is perfected, the second begins under the direction of inferior ministers. The supreme God is withdrawn from the world and returns to his own accustomed nature (Tim. 42 E). As in the Statesman (272 E), he retires to his place of view.

So early did the Epicurean doctrine take possession of the Greek mind, and so natural is it to the heart of man, when he has once passed out of the stage of mythology into that of rational religion. For he sees the marks of design in the world ; but he no longer sees or fancies that he sees God walking in the garden or haunting stream or mountain.

He feels also that he must put God as far as possible out of the way of evil, and therefore he banishes him from an evil world. Plato is sensible of the difficulty; and he often shows that he is desirous of justifying the ways of God to man. Yet on the other hand, in the Tenth Book of the Laws (899, 900 ff.) he passes a censure on those who say that the Gods have no care of human things.

The creation of the world is the impression of order on a previously existing chaos. The formula of Anaxagoras — ' all things were in chaos or confusion, and then mind came and disposed them ' — is a summary of the first part of the Timaeus. It is true that of a chaos without differences no idea could be formed.

AU was not mixed but one ; and therefore it was not difficult for the later Platonists to draw inferences by which they were enabled to reconcile the narrative of the Timaeus with the Mosaic account of the creation. Neither when we speak of mind or intelligence, do we seem to get much further in our conception than circular motion, which was deemed to be the most perfect.

Plato, like Anaxagoras, while commencing his theory of the universe with ideas of mind and of the best, is compelled in the execution of his design to condescend to the crudest physics. {c) The morality of the Timaeus is singular, and it is difficult to

428 The involuntariness of vice. Timaeiis. adjust thc balance between the two elements of it. The difficulty Introduc- which Plato feels, is that which all of us feel, and which is TioN. increased in our own day by the progress of physical science, how the responsibility of man is to be reconciled with his dependence on natural causes. ' And sometimes, like other men, he is more impressed by one aspect of human life, sometimes by the other.

In the Republic he represents man as freely choosing his own lot in a state prior to birth — a conception which, if taken literally, would still leave him subject to the dominion of necessity in his after life ; in the Statesman he supposes the human race to be preserved in the world only by a divine interposition ; while in the Timaeus the supreme God commissions the inferior deities to avert from him all but self-inflicted evils — words which imply that all the evils of men are really selfinflicted.

And here, like Plato ($4 B ; — the insertion of a note in the text of an ancient writer is a literary • curiosity worthy of remark), we may take occasion to correct an error which occurred at p. 408. For there we too hastily said that Plato in the Timaeus regarded all 'vices and crimes ns involuntary.

But the fact is that he is inconsistent with himself; in one and the same passage (86) vice is attributed to the relaxation of the bodily frame, and yet we are exhorted to avoid it and pursue virtue. It is also admitted that good and evil conduct are to be attributed respectively to good and evil laws and institutions.

These cannot be given by individuals to themselves ; and therefore human actions, in so far as they are dependent upon them, are regarded by Plato as involuntary rather than voluntary. Like other writers on this subject, he is unable to escape from some degree of self-contradiction.

He had learned from Socrates that vice is ignorance, and suddenly the doctrine seems to him to be confirmed by observing how much of the good and bad in human character depends on the bodily constitution. So in modern times the speculative doctrine of necessity has often been supported by physical facts. The Timaeus also contains an anticipation of the stoical life according to nature.

Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate his erring life according to them. He is to partake of the repose of nature and of the order of nature, to bring thc variable principle in himself into harmony with the principle of thc same. The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea

The legend of Atlantis.

p. 429

of Maw.' To feci habitually that he is part of the order of the Timaeus. universe, is one of the highest ethical motives of which man is Introduccapable. Something like this is what Plato means when he ^^^^' speaks of the soul ' moving about the same in unchanging thought of the same.' He does not explain how man is acted upon by the lesser influences of custom or of opinion ; or how the commands of the soul watching in the citadel arc conveyed to the bodily organs. But this perhaps, to use once more expressions of his own, * is part of another subject ' (87 B) or * may be more suitably discussed on some other occasion ' (38 B). There is no difficulty, by the help of Aristotle and later writers, in criticizing the Timaeus of Plato, in pointing out the inconsistencies of the work, in dwelling on the ignorance of anatomy displayed by the author, in showing the fancifulness or unmeaningness of some of his reasons. But the Timaeus still remains the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to us.