Timaeus
may nevertheless have had a great influence in promoting system
and assisting enquiry, while in others we hear the latest word of
physical or metaphysical philosophy. There is also an
intermediate class, in which Plato falls short of the truths of
modern science, though he is not wholly unacquainted with them.
(1) To the first class belongs the teleological theory of
creation. Whether all things in the world can be explained as the
result of natural laws, or whether we must not admit of
tendencies and marks of design also, has been a question much
disputed of late years. Even if all phenomena are the result of
natural forces, we must admit that there are many things in
heaven and earth which are as well expressed under the image of
mind or design as under any other. At any rate, the language of
Plato has been the language of natural theology down to our own
time, nor can any description of the world wholly dispense with
it. The notion of first and second or co-operative causes, which
originally appears in the Timaeus, has likewise survived to our
own day, and has been a great peace-maker between theology and
science. Plato also approaches very near to our doctrine of the
primary and secondary qualities of matter. (2) Another popular
notion which is found in the Timaeus, is the feebleness of the
human intellect—‘God knows the original qualities of things; man
can only hope to attain to probability.’ We speak in almost the
same words of human intelligence, but not in the same manner of
the uncertainty of our knowledge of nature. The reason is that
the latter is assured to us by experiment, and is not contrasted
with the certainty of ideal or mathematical knowledge. But the
ancient philosopher never experimented: in the Timaeus Plato
seems to have thought that there would be impiety in making the
attempt; he, for example, who tried experiments in colours would
‘forget the difference of the human and divine natures.’ Their
indefiniteness is probably the reason why he singles them out, as
especially incapable of being tested by experiment. (Compare the
saying of Anaxagoras—Sext. Pyrrh.—that since snow is made of
water and water is black, snow ought to be black.)
The greatest ‘divination’ of the ancients was the supremacy which
they assigned to mathematics in all the realms of nature; for in
all of them there is a foundation of mechanics. Even physiology
partakes of figure and number; and Plato is not wrong in
attributing them to the human frame, but in the omission to
observe how little could be explained by them. Thus we may remark
in passing that the most fanciful of ancient philosophies is also
the most nearly verified in fact. The fortunate guess that the
world is a sum of numbers and figures has been the most fruitful
of anticipations. The ‘diatonic’ scale of the Pythagoreans and
Plato suggested to Kepler that the secret of the distances of the
planets from one another was to be found in mathematical
proportions. The doctrine that the heavenly bodies all move in a
circle is known by us to be erroneous; but without such an error
how could the human mind have comprehended the heavens?
Astronomy, even in modern times, has made far greater progress by
the high a priori road than could have been attained by any
other. Yet, strictly speaking—and the remark applies to ancient
physics generally—this high a priori road was based upon a
posteriori grounds. For there were no facts of which the ancients
were so well assured by experience as facts of number. Having
observed that they held good in a few instances, they applied
them everywhere; and in the complexity, of which they were
capable, found the explanation of the equally complex 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.
(1) The law of gravitation, according to Plato, is a law, not
only 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’,
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:—
(a) 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
Pythagorean philosopher, and therefore here, as in the
Parmenides, we are in doubt how far Plato is expressing his own
sentiments. Hence the connexion with the other dialogues is
comparatively slight. We may fill up the lacunae of the Timaeus
by the help of the Republic or Phaedrus: we may identify the same
and other with the (Greek) of the Philebus. We may find in the
Laws or in the Statesman parallels with the account of creation
and of the first origin of man. It would be possible to frame a
scheme in which all these various elements might have a place.
But such a mode of proceeding would be unsatisfactory, because we
have no reason to suppose that Plato intended his scattered
thoughts to be collected in a system. There is a common spirit in
his writings, and there are certain general principles, such as
the opposition of the sensible and intellectual, and the priority
of mind, which run through all of them; but he has no definite
forms of words in which he consistently expresses himself. While
the determinations of human thought are in process of creation he
is necessarily tentative and uncertain. And there is least of
definiteness, whenever either in describing the beginning or the
end of the world, he has recourse to myths. These are not the
fixed modes in which spiritual truths are revealed to him, but
the efforts of imagination, by which at different times and in
various manners he seeks to embody his conceptions. The clouds of
mythology are still resting upon him, and he has not yet pierced
‘to the heaven of the fixed stars’ which is beyond them. It is
safer then to admit the inconsistencies of the Timaeus, or to
endeavour to fill up what is wanting from our own imagination,
inspired by a study of the dialogue, than to refer to other
Platonic writings,—and still less should we refer to the
successors of Plato,—for the elucidation of it.
More light is thrown upon the Timaeus by a comparison of the
previous philosophies. For the physical science of the ancients
was traditional, descending through many generations of Ionian
and Pythagorean philosophers. Plato does not look out upon the
heavens and describe what he sees in them, but he builds upon the
foundations of others, adding something out of the ‘depths of his
own self-consciousness.’ Socrates had already spoken of God the
creator, who made all things for the best. While he ridiculed the
superficial explanations of phenomena which were current in his
age, he recognised the marks both of benevolence and of design in