Timaeus
soul and have the name of sensations. Uniting with the
ever-flowing current, they shake the courses of the soul,
stopping the revolution of the same and twisting in all sorts of
ways the nature of the other, and the harmonical ratios of twos
and threes and the mean terms which connect them, until the
circles are bent and disordered and their motion becomes
irregular. You may imagine a position of the body in which the
head is resting upon the ground, and the legs are in the air, and
the top is bottom and the left right. And something similar
happens when the disordered motions of the soul come into contact
with any external thing; they say the same or the other in a
manner which is the very opposite of the truth, and they are
false and foolish, and have no guiding principle in them. And
when external impressions enter in, they are really conquered,
though they seem to conquer.
By reason of these affections the soul is at first without
intelligence, but as time goes on the stream of nutriment abates,
and the courses of the soul regain their proper motion, and
apprehend the same and the other rightly, and become rational.
The soul of him who has education is whole and perfect and
escapes the worst disease, but, if a man’s education be
neglected, he walks lamely through life and returns good for
nothing to the world below. This, however, is an after-stage—at
present, we are only concerned with the creation of the body and
soul.
The two divine courses were encased by the gods in a sphere which
is called the head, and is the god and lord of us. And to this
they gave the body to be a vehicle, and the members to be
instruments, having the power of flexion and extension. Such was
the origin of legs and arms. In the next place, the gods gave a
forward motion to the human body, because the front part of man
was the more honourable and had authority. And they put in a face
in which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the
providence of the soul. They first contrived the eyes, into which
they conveyed a light akin to the light of day, making it flow
through the pupils. When the light of the eye is surrounded by
the light of day, then like falls upon like, and they unite and
form one body which conveys to the soul the motions of visible
objects. But when the visual ray goes forth into the darkness,
then unlike falls upon unlike—the eye no longer sees, and we go
to sleep. The fire or light, when kept in by the eyelids,
equalizes the inward motions, and there is rest accompanied by
few dreams; only when the greater motions remain they engender in
us corresponding visions of the night. And now we shall be able
to understand the nature of reflections in mirrors. The fires
from within and from without meet about the smooth and bright
surface of the mirror; and because they meet in a manner contrary
to the usual mode, the right and left sides of the object are
transposed. In a concave mirror the top and bottom are inverted,
but this is no transposition.
These are the second causes which God used as his ministers in
fashioning the world. They are thought by many to be the prime
causes, but they are not so; for they are destitute of mind and
reason, and the lover of mind will not allow that there are any
prime causes other than the rational and invisible ones—these he
investigates first, and afterwards the causes of things which are
moved by others, and which work by chance and without order. Of
the second or concurrent causes of sight I have already spoken,
and I will now speak of the higher purpose of God in giving us
eyes. Sight is the source of the greatest benefits to us; for if
our eyes had never seen the sun, stars, and heavens, the words
which we have spoken would not have been uttered. The sight of
them and their revolutions has given us the knowledge of number
and time, the power of enquiry, and philosophy, which is the
great blessing of human life; not to speak of the lesser benefits
which even the vulgar can appreciate. God gave us the faculty of
sight that we might behold the order of the heavens and create a
corresponding order in our own erring minds. To the like end the
gifts of speech and hearing were bestowed upon us; not for the
sake of irrational pleasure, but in order that we might harmonize
the courses of the soul by sympathy with the harmony of sound,
and cure ourselves of our irregular and graceless ways.
Thus far we have spoken of the works of mind; and there are other
works done from necessity, which we must now place beside them;
for the creation is made up of both, mind persuading necessity as
far as possible to work out good. Before the heavens there
existed fire, air, water, earth, which we suppose men to know,
though no one has explained their nature, and we erroneously
maintain them to be the letters or elements of the whole,
although they cannot reasonably be compared even to syllables or
first compounds. I am not now speaking of the first principles of
things, because I cannot discover them by our present mode of
enquiry. But as I observed the rule of probability at first, I
will begin anew, seeking by the grace of God to observe it still.
In our former discussion I distinguished two kinds of being—the
unchanging or invisible, and the visible or changing. But now a
third kind is required, which I shall call the receptacle or
nurse of generation. There is a difficulty in arriving at an
exact notion of this third kind, because the four elements
themselves are of inexact natures and easily pass into one
another, and are too transient to be detained by any one name;
wherefore we are compelled to speak of water or fire, not as
substances, but as qualities. They may be compared to images made
of gold, which are continually assuming new forms. Somebody asks
what they are; if you do not know, the safest answer is to reply
that they are gold. In like manner there is a universal nature
out of which all things are made, and which is like none of them;
but they enter into and pass out of her, and are made after
patterns of the true in a wonderful and inexplicable manner. The
containing principle may be likened to a mother, the source or
spring to a father, the intermediate nature to a child; and we
may also remark that the matter which receives every variety of
form must be formless, like the inodorous liquids which are
prepared to receive scents, or the smooth and soft materials on
which figures are impressed. In the same way space or matter is
neither earth nor fire nor air nor water, but an invisible and
formless being which receives all things, and in an
incomprehensible manner partakes of the intelligible. But we may
say, speaking generally, that fire is that part of this nature
which is inflamed, water that which is moistened, and the like.
Let me ask a question in which a great principle is involved: Is
there an essence of fire and the other elements, or are there
only fires visible to sense? I answer in a word: If mind is one
thing and true opinion another, then there are self-existent
essences; but if mind is the same with opinion, then the visible
and corporeal is most real. But they are not the same, and they
have a different origin and nature. The one comes to us by
instruction, the other by persuasion, the one is rational, the
other is irrational; the one is movable by persuasion, the other
immovable; the one is possessed by every man, the other by the
gods and by very few men. And we must acknowledge that as there
are two kinds of knowledge, so there are two kinds of being
corresponding to them; the one uncreated, indestructible,
immovable, which is seen by intelligence only; the other created,
which is always becoming in place and vanishing out of place, and
is apprehended by opinion and sense. There is also a third
nature—that of space, which is indestructible, and is perceived
by a kind of spurious reason without the help of sense. This is
presented to us in a dreamy manner, and yet is said to be
necessary, for we say that all things must be somewhere in space.
For they are the images of other things and must therefore have a
separate existence and exist in something (i.e. in space). But
true reason assures us that while two things (i.e. the idea and
the image) are different they cannot inhere in one another, so as
to be one and two at the same time.
To sum up: Being and generation and space, these three, existed
before the heavens, and the nurse or vessel of generation,
moistened by water and inflamed by fire, and taking the forms of
air and earth, assumed various shapes. By the motion of the
vessel, the elements were divided, and like grain winnowed by
fans, the close and heavy particles settled in one place, the
light and airy ones in another. At first they were without reason
and measure, and had only certain faint traces of themselves,
until God fashioned them by figure and number. In this, as in
every other part of creation, I suppose God to have made things,
as far as was possible, fair and good, out of things not fair and
good.
And now I will explain to you the generation of the world by a
method with which your scientific training will have made you
familiar. Fire, air, earth, and water are bodies and therefore
solids, and solids are contained in planes, and plane rectilinear
figures are made up of triangles. Of triangles there are two
kinds; one having the opposite sides equal (isosceles), the other
with unequal sides (scalene). These we may fairly assume to be
the original elements of fire and the other bodies; what
principles are prior to these God only knows, and he of men whom
God loves. Next, we must determine what are the four most
beautiful figures which are unlike one another and yet sometimes
capable of resolution into one another...Of the two kinds of
triangles the equal-sided has but one form, the unequal-sided has
an infinite variety of forms; and there is none more beautiful
than that which forms the half of an equilateral triangle. Let us
then choose two triangles; one, the isosceles, the other, that
form of scalene which has the square of the longer side three
times as great as the square of the lesser side; and affirm that,
out of these, fire and the other elements have been constructed.
I was wrong in imagining that all the four elements could be
generated into and out of one another. For as they are formed,
three of them from the triangle which has the sides unequal, the
fourth from the triangle which has equal sides, three can be
resolved into one another, but the fourth cannot be resolved into
them nor they into it. So much for their passage into one
another: I must now speak of their construction. From the
triangle of which the hypotenuse is twice the lesser side the