Timaeus
the frame of man and in the world. The apparatus of winds and
waters is contemptuously rejected by him in the Phaedo, but he
thinks that there is a power greater than that of any Atlas in
the ‘Best’ (Phaedo; Arist. Met.). Plato, following his master,
affirms this principle of the best, but he acknowledges that the
best is limited by the conditions of matter. In the generation
before Socrates, Anaxagoras had brought together ‘Chaos’ and
‘Mind’; and these are connected by Plato in the Timaeus, but in
accordance with his own mode of thinking he has interposed
between them the idea or pattern according to which mind worked.
The circular impulse (Greek) of the one philosopher answers to
the circular movement (Greek) of the other. But unlike
Anaxagoras, Plato made the sun and stars living beings and not
masses of earth or metal. The Pythagoreans again had framed a
world out of numbers, which they constructed into figures. Plato
adopted their speculations and improved upon them by a more exact
knowledge of geometry. The Atomists too made the world, if not
out of geometrical figures, at least out of different forms of
atoms, and these atoms resembled the triangles of Plato in being
too small to be visible. But though the physiology of the Timaeus
is partly borrowed from them, they are either ignored by Plato or
referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with
more favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number
applied to the distances of the planets reappear in the Timaeus.
It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth
century B.C., there were already some who, like Plato, made the
earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same
and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The four
elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices of the
Timaeus may also be compared with his (Greek). The passage of one
element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the
Ionian philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not
after the manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he
borrows from others are fused and transformed by his own genius.
On the other hand we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or
Eleatic speculation. He does not imagine the world of sense to be
made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary
within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the
principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the
world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an
existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on
the will of the creator. Instead of maintaining the doctrine that
the void has a necessary place in the existence of the world, he
rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum, as
in the Sophist he also denies the reality of not-being (Aristot.
Metaph.). But though in these respects he differs from them, he
is deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he
differs from them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the
‘generous depth’ of Parmenides (Theaet.).
There is a similarity between the Timaeus and the fragments of
Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to
create a suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is
known to us from the Phaedo of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher
residing at Thebes in the latter half of the fifth century B.C.,
after the dispersion of the original Pythagorean society. He was
the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who became disciples of
Socrates. We have hardly any other information about him. The
story that Plato had purchased three books of his writings from a
relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful way in
which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was
supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar
gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and
the Phaedo. That there really existed in antiquity a work passing
under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of
this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in
Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the Timaeus, as
well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus. When the writer says (Stob.
Eclog.) that all things are either finite (definite) or infinite
(indefinite), or a union of the two, and that this antithesis and
synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are reminded of the
Philebus. When he calls the centre of the world (Greek), we have
a parallel to the Phaedrus. His distinction between the world of
order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the
world of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and
the earth, approximates to Plato’s sphere of the Same and of the
Other. Like Plato (Tim.), he denied the above and below in space,
and said that all things were the same in relation to a centre.
He speaks also of the world as one and indestructible: ‘for
neither from within nor from without does it admit of
destruction’ (Tim). He mentions ten heavenly bodies, including
the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (Greek), and in
the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which
they are moving—this is hidden from the earth by the
counter-earth. Of neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes
the earth the centre of his system. Philolaus magnifies the
virtues of particular numbers, especially of the number 10 (Stob.
Eclog.), and descants upon odd and even numbers, after the manner
of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy of remark that these
mystical fancies are nowhere to be found in the writings of
Plato, although the importance of number as a form and also an
instrument of thought is ever present to his mind. Both Philolaus
and Plato agree in making the world move in certain numerical
ratios according to a musical scale: though Bockh is of opinion
that the two scales, of Philolaus and of the Timaeus, do not
correspond...We appear not to be sufficiently acquainted with the
early Pythagoreans to know how far the statements contained in
these fragments corresponded with their doctrines; and we
therefore cannot pronounce, either in favour of the genuineness
of the fragments, with Bockh and Zeller, or, with Valentine Rose
and Schaarschmidt, against them. But it is clear that they throw
but little light upon the Timaeus, and that their resemblance to
it has been exaggerated.
That there is a degree of confusion and indistinctness in Plato’s
account both of man and of the universe has been already
acknowledged. We cannot tell (nor could Plato himself have told)
where the figure or myth ends and the philosophical truth begins;
we cannot explain (nor could Plato himself have explained to us)
the relation of the ideas to appearance, of which one is the copy
of the other, and yet of all things in the world they are the
most opposed and unlike. This opposition is presented to us in
many forms, as the antithesis of the one and many, of the finite
and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the
unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the
divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative
mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many
aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomena—they
easily pass into one another; and sometimes the two members of
the relation differ in kind, sometimes only in degree. As in
Aristotle’s matter and form the connexion between them is really
inseparable; for if we attempt to separate them they become
devoid of content and therefore indistinguishable; there is no
difference between the idea of which nothing can be predicated,
and the chaos or matter which has no perceptible
qualities—between Being in the abstract and Nothing. Yet we are
frequently told that the one class of them is the reality and the
other appearance; and one is often spoken of as the double or
reflection of the other. For Plato never clearly saw that both
elements had an equal place in mind and in nature; and hence,
especially when we argue from isolated passages in his writings,
or attempt to draw what appear to us to be the natural inferences
from them, we are full of perplexity. There is a similar
confusion about necessity and free-will, and about the state of
the soul after death. Also he sometimes supposes that God is
immanent in the world, sometimes that he is transcendent. And
having no distinction of objective and subjective, he passes
imperceptibly from one to the other; from intelligence to soul,
from eternity to time. These contradictions may be softened or
concealed by a judicious use of language, but they cannot be
wholly got rid of. That an age of intellectual transition must
also be one of inconsistency; that the creative is opposed to the
critical or defining habit of mind or time, has been often
repeated by us. But, as Plato would say, ‘there is no harm in
repeating twice or thrice’ (Laws) what is important for the
understanding of a great author.
It has not, however, been observed, that the confusion partly
arises out of the elements of opposing philosophies which are
preserved in him. He holds these in solution, he brings them into
relation with one another, but he does not perfectly harmonize
them. They are part of his own mind, and he is incapable of
placing himself outside of them and criticizing them. They grow
as he grows; they are a kind of composition with which his own
philosophy is overlaid. In early life he fancies that he has
mastered them: but he is also mastered by them; and in language
(Sophist) which may be compared with the hesitating tone of the
Timaeus, he confesses in his later years that they are full of
obscurity to him. He attributes new meanings to the words of
Parmenides and Heracleitus; but at times the old Eleatic
philosophy appears to go beyond him; then the world of phenomena
disappears, but the doctrine of ideas is also reduced to
nothingness. All of them are nearer to one another than they
themselves supposed, and nearer to him than he supposed. All of
them are antagonistic to sense and have an affinity to number and
measure and a presentiment of ideas. Even in Plato they still
retain their contentious or controversial character, which was
developed by the growth of dialectic. He is never able to
reconcile the first causes of the pre-Socratic philosophers with
the final causes of Socrates himself. There is no intelligible
account of the relation of numbers to the universal ideas, or of
universals to the idea of good. He found them all three, in the
Pythagorean philosophy and in the teaching of Socrates and of the
Megarians respectively; and, because they all furnished modes of
explaining and arranging phenomena, he is unwilling to give up