Timaeus
any of them, though he is unable to unite them in a consistent
whole.
Lastly, Plato, though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not
Oriental in spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is
not seeking in vain to get rid of matter or to find absorption in
the divine nature, or in the Soul of the universe. And therefore
we are not surprised to find that his philosophy in the Timaeus
returns at last to a worship of the heavens, and that to him, as
to other Greeks, nature, though containing a remnant of evil, is
still glorious and divine. He takes away or drops the veil of
mythology, and presents her to us in what appears to him to be
the form-fairer and truer far—of mathematical figures. It is this
element in the Timaeus, no less than its affinity to certain
Pythagorean speculations, which gives it a character not wholly
in accordance with the other dialogues of Plato.
(b) The Timaeus contains an assertion perhaps more distinct than
is found in any of the other dialogues (Rep.; Laws) of the
goodness of God. ‘He was good himself, and he fashioned the good
everywhere.’ He was not ‘a jealous God,’ and therefore he desired
that all other things should be equally good. He is the IDEA of
good who has now become a person, and speaks and is spoken of as
God. Yet his personality 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.
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 The supreme God is withdrawn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.).
As in the Statesman, 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 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. All
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 adjust the balance between the two elements of it. The
difficulty which Plato feels, is that which all of us feel, and
which is 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
self-inflicted. And here, like Plato (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. For we too
hastily said that Plato in the Timaeus regarded all ‘vices and
crimes as involuntary.’ But the fact is that he is inconsistent
with himself; in one and the same passage 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 the variable
principle in himself into harmony with the principle of the same.
The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea of
‘law.’ To feel habitually that he is part of the order of the
universe, is one of the highest ethical motives of which man is
capable. 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 are conveyed to the bodily organs.
But this perhaps, to use once more expressions of his own, ‘is
part of another subject’ or ‘may be more suitably discussed on
some other occasion.’
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.
One more aspect of the Timaeus remains to be considered—the
mythological or geographical. Is it not a wonderful thing that a
few pages of one of Plato’s dialogues have grown into a great
legend, not confined to Greece only, but spreading far and wide
over the nations of Europe and reaching even to Egypt and Asia?
Like the tale of Troy, or the legend of the Ten Tribes (Ewald,
Hist. of Isr.), which perhaps originated in a few verses of II
Esdras, it has become famous, because it has coincided with a
great historical fact. Like the romance of King Arthur, which has
had so great a charm, it has found a way over the seas from one
country and language to another. It inspired the navigators of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it foreshadowed the
discovery of America. It realized the fiction so natural to the
human mind, because it answered the enquiry about the origin of
the arts, that there had somewhere existed an ancient primitive
civilization. It might find a place wherever men chose to look
for it; in North, South, East, or West; in the Islands of the
Blest; before the entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar, in Sweden
or in Palestine. It mattered little whether the description in
Plato agreed with the locality assigned to it or not. It was a
legend so adapted to the human mind that it made a habitation for
itself in any country. It was an island in the clouds, which
might be seen anywhere by the eye of faith. It was a subject
especially congenial to the ponderous industry of certain French
and Swedish writers, who delighted in heaping up learning of all
sorts but were incapable of using it.
M. Martin has written a valuable dissertation on the opinions
entertained respecting the Island of Atlantis in ancient and
modern times. It is a curious chapter in the history of the human
mind. The tale of Atlantis is the fabric of a vision, but it has
never ceased to interest mankind. It was variously regarded by
the ancients themselves. The stronger heads among them, like
Strabo and Longinus, were as little disposed to believe in the
truth of it as the modern reader in Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe.
On the other hand there is no kind or degree of absurdity or
fancy in which the more foolish writers, both of antiquity and of
modern times, have not indulged respecting it. The
Neo-Platonists, loyal to their master, like some commentators on
the Christian Scriptures, sought to give an allegorical meaning
to what they also believed to be an historical fact. It was as if
some one in our own day were to convert the poems of Homer into
an allegory of the Christian religion, at the same time
maintaining them to be an exact and veritable history. In the
Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten until
revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia
of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although
probably neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by
the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the
early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind,
seeking for Utopias or inventing them, was glad to escape out of
the dulness of the present into the romance of the past or some
ideal of the future. The later forms of such narratives contained
features taken from the Edda, as well as from the Old and New
Testament; also from the tales of missionaries and the
experiences of travellers and of colonists.
The various opinions respecting the Island of Atlantis have no
interest for us except in so far as they illustrate the
extravagances of which men are capable. But this is a real
interest and a serious lesson, if we remember that now as