Timaeus
body. When on the other hand the body, though wasted, still holds
out, then the bile is expelled, like an exile from a factious
state, causing associating diarrhoeas and dysenteries and similar
disorders. The body which is diseased from the effects of fire is
in a continual fever; when air is the agent, the fever is
quotidian; when water, the fever intermits a day; when earth,
which is the most sluggish element, the fever intermits three
days and is with difficulty shaken off.
Of mental disorders there are two sorts, one madness, the other
ignorance, and they may be justly attributed to disease.
Excessive pleasures or pains are among the greatest diseases, and
deprive men of their senses. When the seed about the spinal
marrow is too abundant, the body has too great pleasures and
pains; and during a great part of his life he who is the subject
of them is more or less mad. He is often thought bad, but this is
a mistake; for the truth is that the intemperance of lust is due
to the fluidity of the marrow produced by the loose consistency
of the bones. And this is true of vice in general, which is
commonly regarded as disgraceful, whereas it is really
involuntary and arises from a bad habit of the body and evil
education. In like manner the soul is often made vicious by the
influence of bodily pain; the briny phlegm and other bitter and
bilious humours wander over the body and find no exit, but are
compressed within, and mingle their own vapours with the motions
of the soul, and are carried to the three places of the soul,
creating infinite varieties of trouble and melancholy, of
rashness and cowardice, of forgetfulness and stupidity. When men
are in this evil plight of body, and evil forms of government and
evil discourses are superadded, and there is no education to save
them, they are corrupted through two causes; but of neither of
them are they really the authors. For the planters are to blame
rather than the plants, the educators and not the educated.
Still, we should endeavour to attain virtue and avoid vice; but
this is part of another subject.
Enough of disease—I have now to speak of the means by which the
mind and body are to be preserved, a higher theme than the other.
The good is the beautiful, and the beautiful is the symmetrical,
and there is no greater or fairer symmetry than that of body and
soul, as the contrary is the greatest of deformities. A leg or an
arm too long or too short is at once ugly and unserviceable, and
the same is true if body and soul are disproportionate. For a
strong and impassioned soul may ‘fret the pigmy body to decay,’
and so produce convulsions and other evils. The violence of
controversy, or the earnestness of enquiry, will often generate
inflammations and rheums which are not understood, or assigned to
their true cause by the professors of medicine. And in like
manner the body may be too much for the soul, darkening the
reason, and quickening the animal desires. The only security is
to preserve the balance of the two, and to this end the
mathematician or philosopher must practise gymnastics, and the
gymnast must cultivate music. The parts of the body too must be
treated in the same way—they should receive their appropriate
exercise. For the body is set in motion when it is heated and
cooled by the elements which enter in, or is dried up and
moistened by external things; and, if given up to these processes
when at rest, it is liable to destruction. But the natural
motion, as in the world, so also in the human frame, produces
harmony and divides hostile powers. The best exercise is the
spontaneous motion of the body, as in gymnastics, because most
akin to the motion of mind; not so good is the motion of which
the source is in another, as in sailing or riding; least good
when the body is at rest and the motion is in parts only, which
is a species of motion imparted by physic. This should only be
resorted to by men of sense in extreme cases; lesser diseases are
not to be irritated by medicine. For every disease is akin to the
living being and has an appointed term, just as life has, which
depends on the form of the triangles, and cannot be protracted
when they are worn out. And he who, instead of accepting his
destiny, endeavours to prolong his life by medicine, is likely to
multiply and magnify his diseases. Regimen and not medicine is
the true cure, when a man has time at his disposal.
Enough of the nature of man and of the body, and of training and
education. The subject is a great one and cannot be adequately
treated as an appendage to another. To sum up all in a word:
there are three kinds of soul located within us, and any one of
them, if remaining inactive, becomes very weak; if exercised,
very strong. Wherefore we should duly train and exercise all
three kinds.
The divine soul God lodged in the head, to raise us, like plants
which are not of earthly origin, to our kindred; for the head is
nearest to heaven. He who is intent upon the gratification of his
desires and cherishes the mortal soul, has all his ideas mortal,
and is himself mortal in the truest sense. But he who seeks after
knowledge and exercises the divine part of himself in godly and
immortal thoughts, attains to truth and immortality, as far as is
possible to man, and also to happiness, while he is training up
within him the divine principle and indwelling power of order.
There is only one way in which one person can benefit another;
and that is by assigning to him his proper nurture and motion. To
the motions of the soul answer the motions of the universe, and
by the study of these the individual is restored to his original
nature.
Thus we have finished the discussion of the universe, which,
according to our original intention, has now been brought down to
the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something
should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who
are probably degenerate and cowardly men. And when they
degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with
them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another
in the following manner:—The outlet for liquids they connected
with the living principle of the spinal marrow, which the man has
the desire to emit into the fruitful womb of the woman; this is
like a fertile field in which the seed is quickened and matured,
and at last brought to light. When this desire is unsatisfied the
man is over-mastered by the power of the generative organs, and
the woman is subjected to disorders from the obstruction of the
passages of the breath, until the two meet and pluck the fruit of
the tree.
The race of birds was created out of innocent, light-minded men,
who thought to pursue the study of the heavens by sight; these
were transformed into birds, and grew feathers instead of hair.
The race of wild animals were men who had no philosophy, and
never looked up to heaven or used the courses of the head, but
followed only the influences of passion. Naturally they turned to
their kindred earth, and put their forelegs to the ground, and
their heads were crushed into strange oblong forms. Some of them
have four feet, and some of them more than four,—the latter, who
are the more senseless, drawing closer to their native element;
the most senseless of all have no limbs and trail their whole
body on the ground. The fourth kind are the inhabitants of the
waters; these are made out of the most senseless and ignorant and
impure of men, whom God placed in the uttermost parts of the
world in return for their utter ignorance, and caused them to
respire water instead of the pure element of air. Such are the
laws by which animals pass into one another.
And so the world received animals, mortal and immortal, and was
fulfilled with them, and became a visible God, comprehending the
visible, made in the image of the Intellectual, being the one
perfect only-begotten heaven.
Section 2.
Nature in the aspect which she presented to a Greek philosopher
of the fourth century before Christ is not easily reproduced to
modern eyes. The associations of mythology and poetry have to be
added, and the unconscious influence of science has to be
subtracted, before we can behold the heavens or the earth as they
appeared to the Greek. The philosopher himself was a child and
also a man—a child in the range of his attainments, but also a
great intelligence having an insight into nature, and often
anticipations of the truth. He was full of original thoughts, and
yet liable to be imposed upon by the most obvious fallacies. He
occasionally confused numbers with ideas, and atoms with numbers;
his a priori notions were out of all proportion to his
experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens
by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which
nature worked for him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried
experiments for himself which would either prove or disprove his
theories. His knowledge was unequal; while in some branches, such
as medicine and astronomy, he had made considerable proficiency,
there were others, such as chemistry, electricity, mechanics, of
which the very names were unknown to him. He was the natural
enemy of mythology, and yet mythological ideas still retained
their hold over him. He was endeavouring to form a conception of
principles, but these principles or ideas were regarded by him as
real powers or entities, to which the world had been subjected.
He was always tending to argue from what was near to what was
remote, from what was known to what was unknown, from man to the
universe, and back again from the universe to man. While he was
arranging the world, he was arranging the forms of thought in his
own mind; and the light from within and the light from without
often crossed and helped to confuse one another. He might be
compared to a builder engaged in some great design, who could
only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with common
tools; or to some poet or musician, like Tynnichus (Ion), obliged
to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord
or of the flute.
The Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought
intermediate between mythology and philosophy and had a great
influence on the beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing
behind them; they were to physical science what the poems of
Homer were to early Greek history. They made men think of the
world as a whole; they carried the mind back into the infinity of
past time; they suggested the first observation of the effects of
fire and water on the earth’s surface. To the ancient physics
they stood much in the same relation which geology does to modern
science. But the Greek was not, like the enquirer of the last