Timaeus — Plato

do ye then interweave the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget hving creatures, and give them food, and make them to grow, and receive them again in death. Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he had previously mingled the soul of the universe he poured the remains of the elements, and mingled them in much the same manner; they were not, however, pure as before, but diluted to the second and third degree.

And having made it he divided the whole mixture into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each soul to a star ; and having there placed them as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and declared to them the laws of destiny, according to which their first birth would be one and the same for all, — no one .should suffer a disadvantage at .his hands ; they were to be sown in the instruments of time severally adapted to them, and to come forth the most re- 42 ligious of animals; and as human nature was of two kinds, the superior race would hereafter be called man.

Now, when they should be implanted in bodies by necessity, and be always gaining or losing some part of their bodily substance, then in the first place it would be necessary that they should all have in them one and the same faculty of sensation, arising out of irresistible impres.sions ; in the second place, they mu.st have love, in which pleasure and pain mingle ; also fear and anger, and the feelings which are akin or opposite to them ; if they conquered these they would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them, unrighteously.

He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence.

But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the Hke within him, and overcame by the help of re.-ison the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state. / Having given all these laws to his creatures, that he might be guiltless of

Timaeus. TlMAhlLS.

He ni.ikes the human soul of the same elements as the universal; and having distributed it into souls equal in number to the stars, sets one soul in each star and reveals to them their future life on the planets, when they will have mortal bodies.

Those who then live well will return from the planets to their original star ; those who live badly will take a lower form at their next birth.

p. 462

The construction of the human frame.

Timaeus. TiMAEUS.

The created gods provide for the human soul bodies compounded of earth, air, fire and water.

The courses of the soul, when placed in them, are so disturbed by the ebbing and flowing stream of nutriment and by external sensations, that the revolution of the same is stopped.

future evil in any of them, the creator sowed some of them in the earth, and some in the moon, and some in the other instruments of time ; and when he had sown them he committed to the younger gods the fashioning of their mortal bodies, and desired them to furnish what was still lacking to the human soul, and having made all the suitable additions, to rule over them, and to pilot the mortal animal in the best and wisest manner which they could, and avert from him all buX self-inflicted evils. : When the creator had made all these ordinances he remained in his own accustomed nature, and his children heard and were obedient to their father's word, and^ receiving from him the immortal principle of a mortal creature, in imitation of .their own creator they borrowed portions of fire, and earth, and water, and air from the world, which were hereafter to be restored — these they took and welded them together, not with the indissoluble chains by which they w^ere themselves bound, but with little pegs too small to be visible, making up out of all the four elements each separate body, and fastening the courses of the immortal soul in a body which was in a state of perpetual influx and efllux. .

Now these courses, detained as in a vast river, neither overcame nor were overcome ; but were hurrying and hurried to and fro, so that the whole animal was moved and progressed, irregularly however and irrationally and anyhow/ in all the six directions of motion, wandering backwards and forwards, and right and left, and up and down, and in all the six directions.

For great as was the advancing and retiring flood which provided nourishment, the aft'ections produced by external contact caused still greater tumult — when the body of any one met and came into collision with some external fire, or with the solid earth or the gliding waters, or was caught in the tempest borne on the air, and the motions produced by any of these impulses were carried through the body to the soul.

All such motions have consequently received the general name of * sensations,' which they still retain. And they did in fact at that time create a very great and mighty movement ; uniting with the ever-flowing stream in stirring up and violently shaking the courses of the soul, they completely stopped the revolution of the same by their