Timaeus | Page 5

transition from the ideal to

the actual state. In some passages we are uncertain whether we are reading a description
of astronomical facts or contemplating processes of the human mind, or of that divine
mind (Phil.) which in Plato is hardly separable from it. The characteristics of man are
transferred to the world-animal, as for example when intelligence and knowledge are said
to be perfected by the circle of the Same, and true opinion by the circle of the Other; and
conversely the motions of the world-animal reappear in man; its amorphous state
continues in the child, and in both disorder and chaos are gradually succeeded by stability
and order. It is not however to passages like these that Plato is referring when he speaks
of the uncertainty of his subject, but rather to the composition of bodies, to the relations
of colours, the nature of diseases, and the like, about which he truly feels the lamentable
ignorance prevailing in his own age.
We are led by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the centre or inmost shrine of
the edifice, but as a detached building in a different style, framed, not after the Socratic,
but after some Pythagorean model. As in the Cratylus and Parmenides, we are uncertain
whether Plato is expressing his own opinions, or appropriating and perhaps improving the
philosophical speculations of others. In all three dialogues he is exerting his dramatic and
imitative power; in the Cratylus mingling a satirical and humorous purpose with true
principles of language; in the Parmenides overthrowing Megarianism by a sort of
ultra-Megarianism, which discovers contradictions in the one as great as those which
have been previously shown to exist in the ideas. There is a similar uncertainty about the
Timaeus; in the first part he scales the heights of transcendentalism, in the latter part he
treats in a bald and superficial manner of the functions and diseases of the human frame.
He uses the thoughts and almost the words of Parmenides when he discourses of being
and of essence, adopting from old religion into philosophy the conception of God, and
from the Megarians the IDEA of good. He agrees with Empedocles and the Atomists in
attributing the greater differences of kinds to the figures of the elements and their
movements into and out of one another. With Heracleitus, he acknowledges the perpetual
flux; like Anaxagoras, he asserts the predominance of mind, although admitting an
element of necessity which reason is incapable of subduing; like the Pythagoreans he
supposes the mystery of the world to be contained in number. Many, if not all the
elements of the Pre-Socratic philosophy are included in the Timaeus. It is a composite or
eclectic work of imagination, in which Plato, without naming them, gathers up into a kind
of system the various elements of philosophy which preceded him.
If we allow for the difference of subject, and for some growth in Plato's own mind, the
discrepancy between the Timaeus and the other dialogues will not appear to be great. It is
probable that the relation of the ideas to God or of God to the world was differently
conceived by him at different times of his life. In all his later dialogues we observe a
tendency in him to personify mind or God, and he therefore naturally inclines to view
creation as the work of design. The creator is like a human artist who frames in his mind
a plan which he executes by the help of his servants. Thus the language of philosophy
which speaks of first and second causes is crossed by another sort of phraseology: 'God
made the world because he was good, and the demons ministered to him.' The Timaeus is
cast in a more theological and less philosophical mould than the other dialogues, but the
same general spirit is apparent; there is the same dualism or opposition between the ideal
and actual--the soul is prior to the body, the intelligible and unseen to the visible and
corporeal. There is the same distinction between knowledge and opinion which occurs in

the Theaetetus and Republic, the same enmity to the poets, the same combination of
music and gymnastics. The doctrine of transmigration is still held by him, as in the
Phaedrus and Republic; and the soul has a view of the heavens in a prior state of being.
The ideas also remain, but they have become types in nature, forms of men, animals,
birds, fishes. And the attribution of evil to physical causes accords with the doctrine
which he maintains in the Laws respecting the involuntariness of vice.
The style and plan of the Timaeus differ greatly from that of any other of the Platonic
dialogues. The language is weighty, abrupt, and in some passages sublime. But Plato has
not the same