Title: Timaeus
Author: Plato, 427? BC-347? BC
Language: English
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TIMAEUS

by Plato


Translated by Benjamin Jowett



INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.

Of all the writings of Plato the Timaeus is the most obscure and
repulsive to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the greatest
influence over the ancient and mediaeval world. The obscurity arises in
the infancy of physical science, out of the confusion of theological,
mathematical, and physiological notions, out of the desire to conceive
the whole of nature without any adequate knowledge of the parts, and
from a greater perception of similarities which lie on the surface than
of differences which are hidden from view. To bring sense under the
control of reason; to find some way through the mist or labyrinth of
appearances, either the highway of mathematics, or more devious paths
suggested by the analogy of man with the world, and of the world with
man; to see that all things have a cause and are tending towards an
end--this is the spirit of the ancient physical philosopher. He has no
notion of trying an experiment and is hardly capable of observing
the curiosities of nature which are 'tumbling out at his feet,' or of
interpreting even the most obvious of them. He is driven back from the
nearer to the more distant, from particulars to generalities, from the
earth to the stars. He lifts up his eyes to the heavens and seeks to
guide by their motions his erring footsteps. But we neither appreciate
the conditions of knowledge to which he was subjected, nor have the
ideas which fastened upon his imagination the same hold upon us. For he
is hanging between matter and mind; he is under the dominion at the same
time both of sense and of abstractions; his impressions are taken almost
at random from the outside of nature; he sees the light, but not
the objects which are revealed by the light; and he brings into
juxtaposition things which to us appear wide as the poles asunder,
because he finds nothing between them. He passes abruptly from persons
to ideas and numbers, and from ideas and numbers to persons,--from the
heavens to man, from astronomy to physiology; he confuses, or rather
does not distinguish, subject and object, first and final causes, and
is dreaming of geometrical figures lost in a flux of sense. He contrasts
the perfect movements of the heavenly bodies with the imperfect
representation of them (Rep.), and he does not always require strict
accuracy even in applications of number and figure (Rep.). His mind
lingers around the forms of mythology, which he uses as symbols or
translates into figures of speech. He has no implements of observation,
such as the telescope or microscope; the great science of chemistry is
a blank to him. It is only by an effort that the modern thinker can
breathe the atmosphere of the ancient philosopher, or understand how,
under such unequal conditions, he seems in many instances, by a sort of
inspiration, to have anticipated the truth.

The influence with the Timaeus has exercised upon posterity is due
partly to a misunderstanding. In the supposed depths of this dialogue
the Neo-Platonists found hidden meanings and connections with the Jewish
and Christian Scriptures, and out of them they elicited doctrines quite
at variance with the spirit of Plato. Believing that he was inspired by
the Holy Ghost, or had received his wisdom from Moses, they seemed to
find in his writings the Christian Trinity, the Word, the Church,
the creation of the world in a Jewish sense, as they really found the
personality of God or of mind, and the immortality of the soul. All
religions and philosophies met and mingled in the schools of Alexandria,
and the Neo-Platonists had a method of interpretation which could
elicit any meaning out of any words. They were really incapable of
distinguishing between the opinions of one philosopher and another--
between Aristotle and Plato, or between the serious thoughts of Plato
and his passing fancies. They were absorbed in his theology and were
under the dominion of his name, while that which was truly great
and truly characteristic in him, his effort to realize and connect
abstractions, was not understood by them at all. Yet the genius of
Plato and Greek philosophy reacted upon the East, and a Greek element of
thought and language overlaid and partly reduced to order the chaos of
Orientalism. And kindred spirits, like St. Augustine, even though they
were acquainted with his writings only through the medium of a Latin
translation, were profoundly affected by them, seeming to find 'God and
his word everywhere insinuated' in them (August. Confess.)

There is no danger of the modern commentators on the Timaeus falling
into the absurdities of the Neo-Platonists. In the present day we are
well aware that an ancient philosopher is to be interpreted from himself
and by the contemporary history of thought. We know that mysticism is
not criticism. The fancies of the Neo-Platonists are only interesting to
us because they exhibit a phase of the human mind which prevailed widely
in the first centuries of the Christian era, and is not wholly extinct
in our own day. But they have nothing to do with the interpretation
of Plato, and in spirit they are opposed to him. They are the feeble
expression of an age which has lost the power not only of creating
great works, but of understanding them. They are the spurious birth of
a marriage between philosophy and tradition, between Hellas and the
East--(Greek) (Rep.). Whereas the so-called mysticism of Plato is purely
Greek, arising out of his imperfect knowledge and high aspirations, and
is the growth of an age in which philosophy is not wholly separated from
poetry and mythology.

A greater danger with modern interpreters of Plato is the tendency to
regard the Timaeus as the centre of his system. We do not know how
Plato would have arranged his own dialogues, or whether the thought
of arranging any of them, besides the two 'Trilogies' which he has
expressly connected; was ever present to his mind. But, if he had
arranged them, there are many indications that this is not the place
which he would have assigned to the Timaeus. We observe, first of all,
that the dialogue is put into the mouth of a Pythagorean philosopher,
and not of Socrates. And this is required by dramatic propriety; for
the investigation of nature was expressly renounced by Socrates in the
Phaedo. Nor does Plato himself attribute any importance to his guesses
at science. He is not at all absorbed by them, as he is by the IDEA of
good. He is modest and hesitating, and confesses that his words partake
of the uncertainty of the subject (Tim.). The dialogue is primarily
concerned with the animal creation, including under this term the
heavenly bodies, and with man only as one among the animals. But we can
hardly suppose that Plato would have preferred the study of nature to
man, or that he would have deemed the formation of the world and the
human frame to have the same interest which he ascribes to the mystery
of being and not-being, or to the great political problems which he
discusses in the Republic and the Laws. There are no speculations on
physics in the other dialogues of Plato, and he himself regards the
consideration of them as a rational pastime only. He is beginning to
feel the need of further divisions of knowledge; and is becoming aware
that besides dialectic, mathematics, and the arts, there is another
field which has been hitherto unexplored by him. But he has not as
yet defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between
medicine and mathematics, and he would have felt that there was as
great an impiety in ranking theories of physics first in the order of
knowledge, as in placing the body before the soul.

It is true, however, that the Timaeus is by no means confined to
speculations on physics. The deeper foundations of the Platonic
philosophy, such as the nature of God, the distinction of the sensible
and intellectual, the great original conceptions of time and space,
also appear in it. They are found principally in the first half of the
dialogue. The construction of the heavens is for the most part ideal;
the cyclic year serves as the connection between the world of absolute
being and of generation, just as the number of population in the
Republic is the expression or symbol of the transition from the ideal
to the actual state. In some passages we are uncertain whether we are
reading a description of astronomical facts or contemplating processes
of the human mind, or of that divine mind (Phil.) which in Plato is
hardly separable from it. The characteristics of man are transferred
to the world-animal, as for example when intelligence and knowledge are
said to be perfected by the circle of the Same, and true opinion by
the circle of the Other; and conversely the motions of the world-animal
reappear in man; its amorphous state continues in the child, and in both
disorder and chaos are gradually succeeded by stability and order. It
is not however to passages like these that Plato is referring when he
speaks of the uncertainty of his subject, but rather to the composition
of bodies, to the relations of colours, the nature of diseases, and the
like, about which he truly feels the lamentable ignorance prevailing in
his own age.

We are led by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the centre or
inmost shrine of the edifice, but as a detached building in a different
style, framed, not after the Socratic, but after some Pythagorean model.
As in the Cratylus and Parmenides, we are uncertain whether Plato is
expressing his own opinions, or appropriating and perhaps improving
the philosophical speculations of others. In all three dialogues he is
exerting his dramatic and imitative power; in the Cratylus mingling a
satirical and humorous purpose with true principles of language; in
the Parmenides overthrowing Megarianism by a sort of ultra-Megarianism,
which discovers contradictions in the one as great as those which
have been previously shown to exist in the ideas. There is a similar
uncertainty about the Timaeus; in the first part he scales the heights
of transcendentalism, in the latter part he treats in a bald and
superficial manner of the functions and diseases of the human frame. He
uses the thoughts and almost the words of Parmenides when he discourses
of being and of essence, adopting from old religion into philosophy the
conception of God, and from the Megarians the IDEA of good. He agrees
with Empedocles and the Atomists in attributing the greater differences
of kinds to the figures of the elements and their movements into and out
of one another. With Heracleitus, he acknowledges the perpetual flux;
like Anaxagoras, he asserts the predominance of mind, although admitting
an element of necessity which reason is incapable of subduing; like the
Pythagoreans he supposes the mystery of the world to be contained in
number. Many, if not all the elements of the Pre-Socratic philosophy
are included in the Timaeus. It is a composite or eclectic work of
imagination, in which Plato, without naming them, gathers up into a kind
of system the various elements of philosophy which preceded him.

If we allow for the difference of subject, and for some growth in
Plato's own mind, the discrepancy between the Timaeus and the other
dialogues will not appear to be great. It is probable that the relation
of the ideas to God or of God to the world was differently conceived
by him at different times of his life. In all his later dialogues we
observe a tendency in him to personify mind or God, and he therefore
naturally inclines to view creation as the work of design. The creator
is like a human artist who frames in his mind a plan which he executes
by the help of his servants. Thus the language of philosophy which
speaks of first and second causes is crossed by another sort of
phraseology: 'God made the world because he was good, and the demons
ministered to him.' The Timaeus is cast in a more theological and less
philosophical mould than the other dialogues, but the same general
spirit is apparent; there is the same dualism or opposition between the
ideal and actual--the soul is prior to the body, the intelligible and
unseen to the visible and corporeal. There is the same distinction
between knowledge and opinion which occurs in the Theaetetus and
Republic, the same enmity to the poets, the same combination of music
and gymnastics. The doctrine of transmigration is still held by him, as
in the Phaedrus and Republic; and the soul has a view of the heavens
in a prior state of being. The ideas also remain, but they have
become types in nature, forms of men, animals, birds, fishes. And the
attribution of evil to physical causes accords with the doctrine which
he maintains in the Laws respecting the involuntariness of vice.

The style and plan of the Timaeus differ greatly from that of any other
of the Platonic dialogues. The language is weighty, abrupt, and in some
passages sublime. But Plato has not the same mastery over his instrument
which he exhibits in the Phaedrus or Symposium. Nothing can exceed the
beauty or art of the introduction, in which he is using words after his
accustomed manner. But in the rest of the work the power of language
seems to fail him, and the dramatic form is wholly given up. He could
write in one style, but not in another, and the Greek language had not
as yet been fashioned by any poet or philosopher to describe physical
phenomena. The early physiologists had generally written in verse; the
prose writers, like Democritus and Anaxagoras, as far as we can judge
from their fragments, never attained to a periodic style. And hence
we find the same sort of clumsiness in the Timaeus of Plato which
characterizes the philosophical poem of Lucretius. There is a want of
flow and often a defect of rhythm; the meaning is sometimes obscure, and
there is a greater use of apposition and more of repetition than occurs
in Plato's earlier writings. The sentences are less closely connected
and also more involved; the antecedents of demonstrative and relative
pronouns are in some cases remote and perplexing. The greater frequency
of participles and of absolute constructions gives the effect of
heaviness. The descriptive portion of the Timaeus retains traces of
the first Greek prose composition; for the great master of language was
speaking on a theme with which he was imperfectly acquainted, and had
no words in which to express his meaning. The rugged grandeur of the
opening discourse of Timaeus may be compared with the more harmonious
beauty of a similar passage in the Phaedrus.

To the same cause we may attribute the want of plan. Plato had not
the command of his materials which would have enabled him to produce
a perfect work of art. Hence there are several new beginnings and
resumptions and formal or artificial connections; we miss the 'callida
junctura' of the earlier dialogues. His speculations about the
Eternal, his theories of creation, his mathematical anticipations, are
supplemented by desultory remarks on the one immortal and the two
mortal souls of man, on the functions of the bodily organs in health and
disease, on sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. He soars into
the heavens, and then, as if his wings were suddenly clipped, he walks
ungracefully and with difficulty upon the earth. The greatest things in
the world, and the least things in man, are brought within the compass
of a short treatise. But the intermediate links are missing, and we
cannot be surprised that there should be a want of unity in a work which
embraces astronomy, theology, physiology, and natural philosophy in a
few pages.

It is not easy to determine how Plato's cosmos may be presented to the
reader in a clearer and shorter form; or how we may supply a thread of
connexion to his ideas without giving greater consistency to them than
they possessed in his mind, or adding on consequences which would
never have occurred to him. For he has glimpses of the truth, but no
comprehensive or perfect vision. There are isolated expressions about
the nature of God which have a wonderful depth and power; but we are
not justified in assuming that these had any greater significance to
the mind of Plato than language of a neutral and impersonal character...
With a view to the illustration of the Timaeus I propose to divide this
Introduction into sections, of which the first will contain an outline
of the dialogue: (2) I shall consider the aspects of nature which
presented themselves to Plato and his age, and the elements of
philosophy which entered into the conception of them: (3) the theology
and physics of the Timaeus, including the soul of the world, the
conception of time and space, and the composition of the elements: (4)
in the fourth section I shall consider the Platonic astronomy, and the
position of the earth. There will remain, (5) the psychology, (6) the
physiology of Plato, and (7) his analysis of the senses to be briefly
commented upon: (8) lastly, we may examine in what points Plato
approaches or anticipates the discoveries of modern science.

Section 1.

Socrates begins the Timaeus with a summary of the Republic. He lightly
touches upon a few points,--the division of labour and distribution
of the citizens into classes, the double nature and training of the
guardians, the community of property and of women and children. But
he makes no mention of the second education, or of the government of
philosophers.

And now he desires to see the ideal State set in motion; he would like
to know how she behaved in some great struggle. But he is unable to
invent such a narrative himself; and he is afraid that the poets are
equally incapable; for, although he pretends to have nothing to say
against them, he remarks that they are a tribe of imitators, who can
only describe what they have seen. And he fears that the Sophists, who
are plentifully supplied with graces of speech, in their erratic way of
life having never had a city or house of their own, may through want of
experience err in their conception of philosophers and statesmen. 'And
therefore to you I turn, Timaeus, citizen of Locris, who are at once
a philosopher and a statesman, and to you, Critias, whom all Athenians
know to be similarly accomplished, and to Hermocrates, who is also
fitted by nature and education to share in our discourse.'

HERMOCRATES: 'We will do our best, and have been already preparing; for
on our way home, Critias told us of an ancient tradition, which I
wish, Critias, that you would repeat to Socrates.' 'I will, if Timaeus
approves.' 'I approve.' Listen then, Socrates, to a tale of Solon's,
who, being the friend of Dropidas my great-grandfather, told it to my
grandfather Critias, and he told me. The narrative related to ancient
famous actions of the Athenian people, and to one especially, which I
will rehearse in honour of you and of the goddess. Critias when he told
this tale of the olden time, was ninety years old, I being not more than
ten. The occasion of the rehearsal was the day of the Apaturia called
the Registration of Youth, at which our parents gave prizes for
recitation. Some poems of Solon were recited by the boys. They had not
at that time gone out of fashion, and the recital of them led some one
to say, perhaps in compliment to Critias, that Solon was not only the
wisest of men but also the best of poets. The old man brightened up
at hearing this, and said: Had Solon only had the leisure which was
required to complete the famous legend which he brought with him from
Egypt he would have been as distinguished as Homer and Hesiod. 'And what
was the subject of the poem?' said the person who made the remark. The
subject was a very noble one; he described the most famous action in
which the Athenian people were ever engaged. But the memory of their
exploits has passed away owing to the lapse of time and the extinction
of the actors. 'Tell us,' said the other, 'the whole story, and where
Solon heard the story.' He replied--There is at the head of the Egyptian
Delta, where the river Nile divides, a city and district called Sais;
the city was the birthplace of King Amasis, and is under the protection
of the goddess Neith or Athene. The citizens have a friendly feeling
towards the Athenians, believing themselves to be related to them.
Hither came Solon, and was received with honour; and here he first
learnt, by conversing with the Egyptian priests, how ignorant he and
his countrymen were of antiquity. Perceiving this, and with the view of
eliciting information from them, he told them the tales of Phoroneus and
Niobe, and also of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and he endeavoured to count
the generations which had since passed. Thereupon an aged priest said to
him: 'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is no old
man who is a Hellene.' 'What do you mean?' he asked. 'In mind,' replied
the priest, 'I mean to say that you are children; there is no opinion
or tradition of knowledge among you which is white with age; and I
will tell you why. Like the rest of mankind you have suffered from
convulsions of nature, which are chiefly brought about by the two great
agencies of fire and water. The former is symbolized in the Hellenic
tale of young Phaethon who drove his father's horses the wrong way, and
having burnt up the earth was himself burnt up by a thunderbolt. For
there occurs at long intervals a derangement of the heavenly bodies, and
then the earth is destroyed by fire. At such times, and when fire is the
agent, those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore are safer than those
who dwell upon high and dry places, who in their turn are safer when
the danger is from water. Now the Nile is our saviour from fire, and as
there is little rain in Egypt, we are not harmed by water; whereas in
other countries, when a deluge comes, the inhabitants are swept by the
rivers into the sea. The memorials which your own and other nations
have once had of the famous actions of mankind perish in the waters at
certain periods; and the rude survivors in the mountains begin again,
knowing nothing of the world before the flood. But in Egypt the
traditions of our own and other lands are by us registered for ever in
our temples. The genealogies which you have recited to us out of your
own annals, Solon, are a mere children's story. For in the first place,
you remember one deluge only, and there were many of them, and you know
nothing of that fairest and noblest race of which you are a seed or
remnant. The memory of them was lost, because there was no written
voice among you. For in the times before the great flood Athens was the
greatest and best of cities and did the noblest deeds and had the best
constitution of any under the face of heaven.' Solon marvelled, and
desired to be informed of the particulars. 'You are welcome to hear
them,' said the priest, 'both for your own sake and for that of the
city, and above all for the sake of the goddess who is the common
foundress of both our cities. Nine thousand years have elapsed since she
founded yours, and eight thousand since she founded ours, as our annals
record. Many laws exist among us which are the counterpart of yours as
they were in the olden time. I will briefly describe them to you,
and you shall read the account of them at your leisure in the sacred
registers. In the first place, there was a caste of priests among the
ancient Athenians, and another of artisans; also castes of shepherds,
hunters, and husbandmen, and lastly of warriors, who, like the warriors
of Egypt, were separated from the rest, and carried shields and spears,
a custom which the goddess first taught you, and then the Asiatics, and
we among Asiatics first received from her. Observe again, what care the
law took in the pursuit of wisdom, searching out the deep things of the
world, and applying them to the use of man. The spot of earth which the
goddess chose had the best of climates, and produced the wisest men; in
no other was she herself, the philosopher and warrior goddess, so likely
to have votaries. And there you dwelt as became the children of the
gods, excelling all men in virtue, and many famous actions are recorded
of you. The most famous of them all was the overthrow of the island of
Atlantis. This great island lay over against the Pillars of Heracles, in
extent greater than Libya and Asia put together, and was the passage to
other islands and to a great ocean of which the Mediterranean sea was
only the harbour; and within the Pillars the empire of Atlantis reached
in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to Egypt. This mighty power was
arrayed against Egypt and Hellas and all the countries bordering on the
Mediterranean. Then your city did bravely, and won renown over the
whole earth. For at the peril of her own existence, and when the other
Hellenes had deserted her, she repelled the invader, and of her own
accord gave liberty to all the nations within the Pillars. A little
while afterwards there were great earthquakes and floods, and your
warrior race all sank into the earth; and the great island of Atlantis
also disappeared in the sea. This is the explanation of the shallows
which are found in that part of the Atlantic ocean.'

Such was the tale, Socrates, which Critias heard from Solon; and I
noticed when listening to you yesterday, how close the resemblance was
between your city and citizens and the ancient Athenian State. But I
would not speak at the time, because I wanted to refresh my memory.
I had heard the old man when I was a child, and though I could not
remember the whole of our yesterday's discourse, I was able to recall
every word of this, which is branded into my mind; and I am prepared,
Socrates, to rehearse to you the entire narrative. The imaginary State
which you were describing may be identified with the reality of Solon,
and our antediluvian ancestors may be your citizens. 'That is excellent,
Critias, and very appropriate to a Panathenaic festival; the truth of
the story is a great advantage.' Then now let me explain to you
the order of our entertainment; first, Timaeus, who is a natural
philosopher, will speak of the origin of the world, going down to the
creation of man, and then I shall receive the men whom he has created,
and some of whom will have been educated by you, and introduce them to
you as the lost Athenian citizens of whom the Egyptian record spoke.
As the law of Solon prescribes, we will bring them into court and
acknowledge their claims to citizenship. 'I see,' replied Socrates,
'that I shall be well entertained; and do you, Timaeus, offer up a
prayer and begin.'

TIMAEUS: All men who have any right feeling, at the beginning of any
enterprise, call upon the Gods; and he who is about to speak of the
origin of the universe has a special need of their aid. May my words
be acceptable to them, and may I speak in the manner which will be most
intelligible to you and will best express my own meaning!

First, I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes
and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always
becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense.
All that becomes and is created is the work of a cause, and that is
fair which the artificer makes after an eternal pattern, but whatever is
fashioned after a created pattern is not fair. Is the world created or
uncreated?--that is the first question. Created, I reply, being visible
and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and if sensible,
then created; and if created, made by a cause, and the cause is the
ineffable father of all things, who had before him an eternal archetype.
For to imagine that the archetype was created would be blasphemy, seeing
that the world is the noblest of creations, and God is the best of
causes. And the world being thus created according to the eternal
pattern is the copy of something; and we may assume that words are akin
to the matter of which they speak. What is spoken of the unchanging or
intelligible must be certain and true; but what is spoken of the created
image can only be probable; being is to becoming what truth is to
belief. And amid the variety of opinions which have arisen about God and
the nature of the world we must be content to take probability for
our rule, considering that I, who am the speaker, and you, who are the
judges, are only men; to probability we may attain but no further.

SOCRATES: Excellent, Timaeus, I like your manner of approaching the
subject--proceed.

TIMAEUS: Why did the Creator make the world?...He was good, and
therefore not jealous, and being free from jealousy he desired that all
things should be like himself. Wherefore he set in order the visible
world, which he found in disorder. Now he who is the best could
only create the fairest; and reflecting that of visible things the
intelligent is superior to the unintelligent, he put intelligence
in soul and soul in body, and framed the universe to be the best and
fairest work in the order of nature, and the world became a living soul
through the providence of God.

In the likeness of what animal was the world made?--that is the third
question...The form of the perfect animal was a whole, and contained all
intelligible beings, and the visible animal, made after the pattern of
this, included all visible creatures.

Are there many worlds or one only?--that is the fourth question...One
only. For if in the original there had been more than one they would
have been the parts of a third, which would have been the true pattern
of the world; and therefore there is, and will ever be, but one created
world. Now that which is created is of necessity corporeal and visible
and tangible,--visible and therefore made of fire,--tangible and
therefore solid and made of earth. But two terms must be united by a
third, which is a mean between them; and had the earth been a surface
only, one mean would have sufficed, but two means are required to unite
solid bodies. And as the world was composed of solids, between the
elements of fire and earth God placed two other elements of air and
water, and arranged them in a continuous proportion--

fire:air::air:water, and air:water::water:earth,

and so put together a visible and palpable heaven, having harmony and
friendship in the union of the four elements; and being at unity with
itself it was indissoluble except by the hand of the framer. Each of the
elements was taken into the universe whole and entire; for he considered
that the animal should be perfect and one, leaving no remnants out of
which another animal could be created, and should also be free from old
age and disease, which are produced by the action of external forces.
And as he was to contain all things, he was made in the all-containing
form of a sphere, round as from a lathe and every way equidistant from
the centre, as was natural and suitable to him. He was finished and
smooth, having neither eyes nor ears, for there was nothing without
him which he could see or hear; and he had no need to carry food to
his mouth, nor was there air for him to breathe; and he did not require
hands, for there was nothing of which he could take hold, nor feet, with
which to walk. All that he did was done rationally in and by himself,
and he moved in a circle turning within himself, which is the most
intellectual of motions; but the other six motions were wanting to him;
wherefore the universe had no feet or legs.

And so the thought of God made a God in the image of a perfect body,
having intercourse with himself and needing no other, but in every part
harmonious and self-contained and truly blessed. The soul was first made
by him--the elder to rule the younger; not in the order in which our
wayward fancy has led us to describe them, but the soul first and
afterwards the body. God took of the unchangeable and indivisible and
also of the divisible and corporeal, and out of the two he made a third
nature, essence, which was in a mean between them, and partook of the
same and the other, the intractable nature of the other being compressed
into the same. Having made a compound of all the three, he proceeded
to divide the entire mass into portions related to one another in the
ratios of 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27, and proceeded to fill up the double and
triple intervals thus--

  - over 1, 4/3, 3/2, - over 2, 8/3, 3, - over 4, 16/3, 6,  - over 8:
  - over 1, 3/2, 2,   - over 3, 9/2, 6, - over 9, 27/2, 18, - over 27;

in which double series of numbers are two kinds of means; the one
exceeds and is exceeded by equal parts of the extremes, e.g. 1, 4/3, 2;
the other kind of mean is one which is equidistant from the extremes--2,
4, 6. In this manner there were formed intervals of thirds, 3:2, of
fourths, 4:3, and of ninths, 9:8. And next he filled up the intervals
of a fourth with ninths, leaving a remnant which is in the ratio of
256:243. The entire compound was divided by him lengthways into two
parts, which he united at the centre like the letter X, and bent into an
inner and outer circle or sphere, cutting one another again at a point
over against the point at which they cross. The outer circle or sphere
was named the sphere of the same--the inner, the sphere of the other
or diverse; and the one revolved horizontally to the right, the other
diagonally to the left. To the sphere of the same which was undivided
he gave dominion, but the sphere of the other or diverse was distributed
into seven unequal orbits, having intervals in ratios of twos and
threes, three of either sort, and he bade the orbits move in opposite
directions to one another--three of them, the Sun, Mercury, Venus,
with equal swiftness, and the remaining four--the Moon, Saturn, Mars,
Jupiter, with unequal swiftness to the three and to one another, but all
in due proportion.

When the Creator had made the soul he made the body within her; and
the soul interfused everywhere from the centre to the circumference of
heaven, herself turning in herself, began a divine life of rational
and everlasting motion. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul
is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and is the best of
creations, being the work of the best. And being composed of the same,
the other, and the essence, these three, and also divided and bound
in harmonical proportion, and revolving within herself--the soul when
touching anything which has essence, whether divided or undivided, is
stirred to utter the sameness or diversity of that and some other thing,
and to tell how and when and where individuals are affected or related,
whether in the world of change or of essence. When reason is in the
neighbourhood of sense, and the circle of the other or diverse is moving
truly, then arise true opinions and beliefs; when reason is in the
sphere of thought, and the circle of the same runs smoothly, then
intelligence is perfected.

When the Father who begat the world saw the image which he had made
of the Eternal Gods moving and living, he rejoiced; and in his joy
resolved, since the archetype was eternal, to make the creature eternal
as far as this was possible. Wherefore he made an image of eternity
which is time, having an uniform motion according to number, parted into
months and days and years, and also having greater divisions of past,
present, and future. These all apply to becoming in time, and have no
meaning in relation to the eternal nature, which ever is and never was
or will be; for the unchangeable is never older or younger, and when
we say that he 'was' or 'will be,' we are mistaken, for these words are
applicable only to becoming, and not to true being; and equally wrong
are we in saying that what has become IS become and that what becomes
IS becoming, and that the non-existent IS non-existent...These are the
forms of time which imitate eternity and move in a circle measured by
number.

Thus was time made in the image of the eternal nature; and it was
created together with the heavens, in order that if they were dissolved,
it might perish with them. And God made the sun and moon and five other
wanderers, as they are called, seven in all, and to each of them he gave
a body moving in an orbit, being one of the seven orbits into which the
circle of the other was divided. He put the moon in the orbit which was
nearest to the earth, the sun in that next, the morning star and
Mercury in the orbits which move opposite to the sun but with equal
swiftness--this being the reason why they overtake and are overtaken by
one another. All these bodies became living creatures, and learnt their
appointed tasks, and began to move, the nearer more swiftly, the remoter
more slowly, according to the diagonal movement of the other. And since
this was controlled by the movement of the same, the seven planets in
their courses appeared to describe spirals; and that appeared fastest
which was slowest, and that which overtook others appeared to be
overtaken by them. And God lighted a fire in the second orbit from the
earth which is called the sun, to give light over the whole heaven, and
to teach intelligent beings that knowledge of number which is derived
from the revolution of the same. Thus arose day and night, which are
the periods of the most intelligent nature; a month is created by the
revolution of the moon, a year by that of the sun. Other periods of
wonderful length and complexity are not observed by men in general;
there is moreover a cycle or perfect year at the completion of which
they all meet and coincide...To this end the stars came into being, that
the created heaven might imitate the eternal nature.

Thus far the universal animal was made in the divine image, but the
other animals were not as yet included in him. And God created them
according to the patterns or species of them which existed in the divine
original. There are four of them: one of gods, another of birds, a third
of fishes, and a fourth of animals. The gods were made in the form of a
circle, which is the most perfect figure and the figure of the universe.
They were created chiefly of fire, that they might be bright, and were
made to know and follow the best, and to be scattered over the heavens,
of which they were to be the glory. Two kinds of motion were assigned to
them--first, the revolution in the same and around the same, in peaceful
unchanging thought of the same; and to this was added a forward motion
which was under the control of the same. Thus then the fixed stars were
created, being divine and eternal animals, revolving on the same spot,
and the wandering stars, in their courses, were created in the manner
already described. The earth, which is our nurse, clinging around the
pole extended through the universe, he made to be the guardian and
artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods that are in the
interior of heaven. Vain would be the labour of telling all the
figures of them, moving as in dance, and their juxta-positions and
approximations, and when and where and behind what other stars they
appear to disappear--to tell of all this without looking at a plan of
them would be labour in vain.

The knowledge of the other gods is beyond us, and we can only accept the
traditions of the ancients, who were the children of the gods, as they
said; for surely they must have known their own ancestors. Although they
give no proof, we must believe them as is customary. They tell us that
Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven; that Phoreys,
Cronos, and Rhea came in the next generation, and were followed by Zeus
and Here, whose brothers and children are known to everybody.

When all of them, both those who show themselves in the sky, and those
who retire from view, had come into being, the Creator addressed them
thus:--'Gods, sons of gods, my works, if I will, are indissoluble. That
which is bound may be dissolved, but only an evil being would dissolve
that which is harmonious and happy. And although you are not immortal
you shall not die, for I will hold you together. Hear me, then:--Three
tribes of mortal beings have still to be created, but if created by me
they would be like gods. Do ye therefore make them; I will implant in
them the seed of immortality, and you shall weave together the mortal
and immortal, and provide food for them, and receive them again in
death.' Thus he spake, and poured the remains of the elements into
the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe. They were no
longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture he distributed into
souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each to a star--then
having mounted them, as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the
universe, and told them of their future birth and human lot. They were
to be sown in the planets, and out of them was to come forth the most
religious of animals, which would hereafter be called man. The souls
were to be implanted in bodies, which were in a perpetual flux, whence,
he said, would arise, first, sensation; secondly, love, which is a
mixture of pleasure and pain; thirdly, fear and anger, and the opposite
affections: and if they conquered these, they would live righteously,
but if they were conquered by them, unrighteously. He who lived
well would return to his native star, and would there have a blessed
existence; but, if he lived ill, he would pass into the nature of a
woman, and if he did not then alter his evil ways, into the likeness of
some animal, until the reason which was in him reasserted her sway over
the elements of fire, air, earth, water, which had engrossed her, and
he regained his first and better nature. Having given this law to his
creatures, that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed
them, some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other
planets; and he ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies for them
and to make the necessary additions to them, and to avert from them all
but self-inflicted evil.

Having given these commands, the Creator remained in his own nature. And
his children, receiving from him the immortal principle, borrowed from
the world portions of earth, air, fire, water, hereafter to be returned,
which they fastened together, not with the adamantine bonds which bound
themselves, but by little invisible pegs, making each separate body out
of all the elements, subject to influx and efflux, and containing the
courses of the soul. These swelling and surging as in a river moved
irregularly and irrationally in all the six possible ways, forwards,
backwards, right, left, up and down. But violent as were the internal
and alimentary fluids, the tide became still more violent when the body
came into contact with flaming fire, or the solid earth, or gliding
waters, or the stormy wind; the motions produced by these impulses pass
through the body to the 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 three
first regular solids are formed--first, the equilateral pyramid or
tetrahedron; secondly, the octahedron; thirdly, the icosahedron; and
from the isosceles triangle is formed the cube. And there is a fifth
figure (which is made out of twelve pentagons), the dodecahedron--this
God used as a model for the twelvefold division of the Zodiac.

Let us now assign the geometrical forms to their respective elements.
The cube is the most stable of them because resting on a quadrangular
plane surface, and composed of isosceles triangles. To the earth then,
which is the most stable of bodies and the most easily modelled of them,
may be assigned the form of a cube; and the remaining forms to the other
elements,--to fire the pyramid, to air the octahedron, and to water the
icosahedron,--according to their degrees of lightness or heaviness or
power, or want of power, of penetration. The single particles of any of
the elements are not seen by reason of their smallness; they only become
visible when collected. The ratios of their motions, numbers, and
other properties, are ordered by the God, who harmonized them as far as
necessity permitted.

The probable conclusion is as follows:--Earth, when dissolved by the
more penetrating element of fire, whether acting immediately or through
the medium of air or water, is decomposed but not transformed. Water,
when divided by fire or air, becomes one part fire, and two parts air.
A volume of air divided becomes two of fire. On the other hand, when
condensed, two volumes of fire make a volume of air; and two and a half
parts of air condense into one of water. Any element which is fastened
upon by fire is cut by the sharpness of the triangles, until at length,
coalescing with the fire, it is at rest; for similars are not affected
by similars. When two kinds of bodies quarrel with one another, then the
tendency to decomposition continues until the smaller either escapes to
its kindred element or becomes one with its conqueror. And this tendency
in bodies to condense or escape is a source of motion...Where there is
motion there must be a mover, and where there is a mover there must be
something to move. These cannot exist in what is uniform, and therefore
motion is due to want of uniformity. But then why, when things are
divided after their kinds, do they not cease from motion? The answer is,
that the circular motion of all things compresses them, and as 'nature
abhors a vacuum,' the finer and more subtle particles of the lighter
elements, such as fire and air, are thrust into the interstices of the
larger, each of them penetrating according to their rarity, and thus
all the elements are on their way up and down everywhere and always
into their own places. Hence there is a principle of inequality, and
therefore of motion, in all time.

In the next place, we may observe that there are different kinds of
fire--(1) flame, (2) light that burns not, (3) the red heat of the
embers of fire. And there are varieties of air, as for example, the pure
aether, the opaque mist, and other nameless forms. Water, again, is
of two kinds, liquid and fusile. The liquid is composed of small and
unequal particles, the fusile of large and uniform particles and is more
solid, but nevertheless melts at the approach of fire, and then spreads
upon the earth. When the substance cools, the fire passes into the air,
which is displaced, and forces together and condenses the liquid mass.
This process is called cooling and congealment. Of the fusile kinds the
fairest and heaviest is gold; this is hardened by filtration through
rock, and is of a bright yellow colour. A shoot of gold which is darker
and denser than the rest is called adamant. Another kind is called
copper, which is harder and yet lighter because the interstices are
larger than in gold. There is mingled with it a fine and small portion
of earth which comes out in the form of rust. These are a few of the
conjectures which philosophy forms, when, leaving the eternal nature,
she turns for innocent recreation to consider the truths of generation.

Water which is mingled with fire is called liquid because it rolls
upon the earth, and soft because its bases give way. This becomes more
equable when separated from fire and air, and then congeals into hail or
ice, or the looser forms of hoar frost or snow. There are other waters
which are called juices and are distilled through plants. Of these we
may mention, first, wine, which warms the soul as well as the body;
secondly, oily substances, as for example, oil or pitch; thirdly,
honey, which relaxes the contracted parts of the mouth and so produces
sweetness; fourthly, vegetable acid, which is frothy and has a burning
quality and dissolves the flesh. Of the kinds of earth, that which is
filtered through water passes into stone; the water is broken up by the
earth and escapes in the form of air--this in turn presses upon the mass
of earth, and the earth, compressed into an indissoluble union with
the remaining water, becomes rock. Rock, when it is made up of equal
particles, is fair and transparent, but the reverse when of unequal.
Earth is converted into pottery when the watery part is suddenly drawn
away; or if moisture remains, the earth, when fused by fire, becomes,
on cooling, a stone of a black colour. When the earth is finer and of
a briny nature then two half-solid bodies are formed by separating the
water,--soda and salt. The strong compounds of earth and water are not
soluble by water, but only by fire. Earth itself, when not consolidated,
is dissolved by water; when consolidated, by fire only. The cohesion of
water, when strong, is dissolved by fire only; when weak, either by air
or fire, the former entering the interstices, the latter penetrating
even the triangles. Air when strongly condensed is indissoluble by any
power which does not reach the triangles, and even when not strongly
condensed is only resolved by fire. Compounds of earth and water are
unaffected by water while the water occupies the interstices in them,
but begin to liquefy when fire enters into the interstices of the water.
They are of two kinds, some of them, like glass, having more earth,
others, like wax, having more water in them.

Having considered objects of sense, we now pass on to sensation. But we
cannot explain sensation without explaining the nature of flesh and of
the mortal soul; and as we cannot treat of both together, in order that
we may proceed at once to the sensations we must assume the existence of
body and soul.

What makes fire burn? The fineness of the sides, the sharpness of the
angles, the smallness of the particles, the quickness of the motion.
Moreover, the pyramid, which is the figure of fire, is more cutting than
any other. The feeling of cold is produced by the larger particles of
moisture outside the body trying to eject the smaller ones in the body
which they compress. The struggle which arises between elements thus
unnaturally brought together causes shivering. That is hard to which the
flesh yields, and soft which yields to the flesh, and these two terms
are also relative to one another. The yielding matter is that which
has the slenderest base, whereas that which has a rectangular base
is compact and repellent. Light and heavy are wrongly explained with
reference to a lower and higher in place. For in the universe, which is
a sphere, there is no opposition of above or below, and that which is to
us above would be below to a man standing at the antipodes. The greater
or less difficulty in detaching any element from its like is the real
cause of heaviness or of lightness. If you draw the earth into the
dissimilar air, the particles of earth cling to their native element,
and you more easily detach a small portion than a large. There would
be the same difficulty in moving any of the upper elements towards the
lower. The smooth and the rough are severally produced by the union of
evenness with compactness, and of hardness with inequality.

Pleasure and pain are the most important of the affections common to the
whole body. According to our general doctrine of sensation, parts of the
body which are easily moved readily transmit the motion to the mind; but
parts which are not easily moved have no effect upon the patient. The
bones and hair are of the latter kind, sight and hearing of the former.
Ordinary affections are neither pleasant nor painful. The impressions
of sight afford an example of these, and are neither violent nor
sudden. But sudden replenishments of the body cause pleasure, and sudden
disturbances, as for example cuttings and burnings, have the opposite
effect.

>From sensations common to the whole body, we proceed to those of
particular parts. The affections of the tongue appear to be caused by
contraction and dilation, but they have more of roughness or smoothness
than is found in other affections. Earthy particles, entering into the
small veins of the tongue which reach to the heart, when they melt into
and dry up the little veins are astringent if they are rough; or if
not so rough, they are only harsh, and if excessively abstergent, like
potash and soda, bitter. Purgatives of a weaker sort are called salt
and, having no bitterness, are rather agreeable. Inflammatory bodies,
which by their lightness are carried up into the head, cutting all that
comes in their way, are termed pungent. But when these are refined by
putrefaction, and enter the narrow veins of the tongue, and meet there
particles of earth and air, two kinds of globules are formed--one of
earthy and impure liquid, which boils and ferments, the other of pure
and transparent water, which are called bubbles; of all these affections
the cause is termed acid. When, on the other hand, the composition of
the deliquescent particles is congenial to the tongue, and disposes the
parts according to their nature, this remedial power in them is called
sweet.

Smells are not divided into kinds; all of them are transitional, and
arise out of the decomposition of one element into another, for the
simple air or water is without smell. They are vapours or mists, thinner
than water and thicker than air: and hence in drawing in the breath,
when there is an obstruction, the air passes, but there is no smell.
They have no names, but are distinguished as pleasant and unpleasant,
and their influence extends over the whole region from the head to the
navel.

Hearing is the effect of a stroke which is transmitted through the ears
by means of the air, brain, and blood to the soul, beginning at the head
and extending to the liver. The sound which moves swiftly is acute; that
which moves slowly is grave; that which is uniform is smooth, and the
opposite is harsh. Loudness depends on the quantity of the sound. Of the
harmony of sounds I will hereafter speak.

Colours are flames which emanate from all bodies, having particles
corresponding to the sense of sight. Some of the particles are less and
some larger, and some are equal to the parts of the sight. The equal
particles appear transparent; the larger contract, and the lesser dilate
the sight. White is produced by the dilation, black by the contraction,
of the particles of sight. There is also a swifter motion of another
sort of fire which forces a way through the passages of the eyes, and
elicits from them a union of fire and water which we call tears.
The inner fire flashes forth, and the outer finds a way in and is
extinguished in the moisture, and all sorts of colours are generated
by the mixture. This affection is termed by us dazzling, and the object
which produces it is called bright. There is yet another sort of
fire which mingles with the moisture of the eye without flashing, and
produces a colour like blood--to this we give the name of red. A bright
element mingling with red and white produces a colour which we call
auburn. The law of proportion, however, according to which compound
colours are formed, cannot be determined scientifically or even
probably. Red, when mingled with black and white, gives a purple hue,
which becomes umber when the colours are burnt and there is a larger
admixture of black. Flame-colour is a mixture of auburn and dun; dun of
white and black; yellow of white and auburn. White and bright meeting,
and falling upon a full black, become dark blue; dark blue mingling with
white becomes a light blue; the union of flame-colour and black makes
leek-green. There is no difficulty in seeing how other colours are
probably composed. But he who should attempt to test the truth of this
by experiment, would forget the difference of the human and divine
nature. God only is able to compound and resolve substances; such
experiments are impossible to man.

These are the elements of necessity which the Creator received in
the world of generation when he made the all-sufficient and perfect
creature, using the secondary causes as his ministers, but himself
fashioning the good in all things. For there are two sorts of causes,
the one divine, the other necessary; and we should seek to discover the
divine above all, and, for their sake, the necessary, because without
them the higher cannot be attained by us.

Having now before us the causes out of which the rest of our discourse
is to be framed, let us go back to the point at which we began, and
add a fair ending to our tale. As I said at first, all things were
originally a chaos in which there was no order or proportion. The
elements of this chaos were arranged by the Creator, and out of them
he made the world. Of the divine he himself was the author, but he
committed to his offspring the creation of the mortal. From him they
received the immortal soul, but themselves made the body to be its
vehicle, and constructed within another soul which was mortal, and
subject to terrible affections--pleasure, the inciter of evil; pain,
which deters from good; rashness and fear, foolish counsellors; anger
hard to be appeased; hope easily led astray. These they mingled with
irrational sense and all-daring love according to necessary laws and so
framed man. And, fearing to pollute the divine element, they gave the
mortal soul a separate habitation in the breast, parted off from the
head by a narrow isthmus. And as in a house the women's apartments are
divided from the men's, the cavity of the thorax was divided into two
parts, a higher and a lower. The higher of the two, which is the seat of
courage and anger, lies nearer to the head, between the midriff and the
neck, and assists reason in restraining the desires. The heart is the
house of guard in which all the veins meet, and through them reason
sends her commands to the extremity of her kingdom. When the passions
are in revolt, or danger approaches from without, then the heart beats
and swells; and the creating powers, knowing this, implanted in the
body the soft and bloodless substance of the lung, having a porous and
springy nature like a sponge, and being kept cool by drink and air which
enters through the trachea.

The part of the soul which desires meat and drink was placed between the
midriff and navel, where they made a sort of manger; and here they bound
it down, like a wild animal, away from the council-chamber, and leaving
the better principle undisturbed to advise quietly for the good of the
whole. For the Creator knew that the belly would not listen to reason,
and was under the power of idols and fancies. Wherefore he framed the
liver to connect with the lower nature, contriving that it should be
compact, and bright, and sweet, and also bitter and smooth, in order
that the power of thought which originates in the mind might there be
reflected, terrifying the belly with the elements of bitterness and
gall, and a suffusion of bilious colours when the liver is contracted,
and causing pain and misery by twisting out of its place the lobe and
closing up the vessels and gates. And the converse happens when some
gentle inspiration coming from intelligence mirrors the opposite
fancies, giving rest and sweetness and freedom, and at night, moderation
and peace accompanied with prophetic insight, when reason and sense are
asleep. For the authors of our being, in obedience to their Father's
will and in order to make men as good as they could, gave to the liver
the power of divination, which is never active when men are awake or
in health; but when they are under the influence of some disorder or
enthusiasm then they receive intimations, which have to be interpreted
by others who are called prophets, but should rather be called
interpreters of prophecy; after death these intimations become
unintelligible. The spleen which is situated in the neighbourhood, on
the left side, keeps the liver bright and clean, as a napkin does a
mirror, and the evacuations of the liver are received into it; and being
a hollow tissue it is for a time swollen with these impurities, but when
the body is purged it returns to its natural size.

The truth concerning the soul can only be established by the word of
God. Still, we may venture to assert what is probable both concerning
soul and body.

The creative powers were aware of our tendency to excess. And so when
they made the belly to be a receptacle for food, in order that men might
not perish by insatiable gluttony, they formed the convolutions of the
intestines, in this way retarding the passage of food through the body,
lest mankind should be absorbed in eating and drinking, and the whole
race become impervious to divine philosophy.

The creation of bones and flesh was on this wise. The foundation of
these is the marrow which binds together body and soul, and the marrow
is made out of such of the primary triangles as are adapted by their
perfection to produce all the four elements. These God took and mingled
them in due proportion, making as many kinds of marrow as there were
hereafter to be kinds of souls. The receptacle of the divine soul he
made round, and called that portion of the marrow brain, intending that
the vessel containing this substance should be the head. The remaining
part he divided into long and round figures, and to these as to anchors,
fastening the mortal soul, he proceeded to make the rest of the body,
first forming for both parts a covering of bone. The bone was formed by
sifting pure smooth earth and wetting it with marrow. It was then thrust
alternately into fire and water, and thus rendered insoluble by either.
Of bone he made a globe which he placed around the brain, leaving a
narrow opening, and around the marrow of the neck and spine he formed
the vertebrae, like hinges, which extended from the head through the
whole of the trunk. And as the bone was brittle and liable to mortify
and destroy the marrow by too great rigidity and susceptibility to heat
and cold, he contrived sinews and flesh--the first to give flexibility,
the second to guard against heat and cold, and to be a protection
against falls, containing a warm moisture, which in summer exudes and
cools the body, and in winter is a defence against cold. Having this in
view, the Creator mingled earth with fire and water and mixed with them
a ferment of acid and salt, so as to form pulpy flesh. But the sinews
he made of a mixture of bone and unfermented flesh, giving them a
mean nature between the two, and a yellow colour. Hence they were more
glutinous than flesh, but softer than bone. The bones which have most of
the living soul within them he covered with the thinnest film of
flesh, those which have least of it, he lodged deeper. At the joints he
diminished the flesh in order not to impede the flexure of the limbs,
and also to avoid clogging the perceptions of the mind. About the
thighs and arms, which have no sense because there is little soul in the
marrow, and about the inner bones, he laid the flesh thicker. For where
the flesh is thicker there is less feeling, except in certain parts
which the Creator has made solely of flesh, as for example, the tongue.
Had the combination of solid bone and thick flesh been consistent with
acute perceptions, the Creator would have given man a sinewy and fleshy
head, and then he would have lived twice as long. But our creators were
of opinion that a shorter life which was better was preferable to a
longer which was worse, and therefore they covered the head with thin
bone, and placed the sinews at the extremity of the head round the neck,
and fastened the jawbones to them below the face. And they framed the
mouth, having teeth and tongue and lips, with a view to the necessary
and the good; for food is a necessity, and the river of speech is the
best of rivers. Still, the head could not be left a bare globe of bone
on account of the extremes of heat and cold, nor be allowed to become
dull and senseless by an overgrowth of flesh. Wherefore it was covered
by a peel or skin which met and grew by the help of the cerebral humour.
The diversity of the sutures was caused by the struggle of the food
against the courses of the soul. The skin of the head was pierced by
fire, and out of the punctures came forth a moisture, part liquid,
and part of a skinny nature, which was hardened by the pressure of the
external cold and became hair. And God gave hair to the head of man
to be a light covering, so that it might not interfere with his
perceptions. Nails were formed by combining sinew, skin, and bone, and
were made by the creators with a view to the future when, as they knew,
women and other animals who would require them would be framed out of
man.

The gods also mingled natures akin to that of man with other forms and
perceptions. Thus trees and plants were created, which were originally
wild and have been adapted by cultivation to our use. They partake of
that third kind of life which is seated between the midriff and the
navel, and is altogether passive and incapable of reflection.

When the creators had furnished all these natures for our sustenance,
they cut channels through our bodies as in a garden, watering them with
a perennial stream. Two were cut down the back, along the back bone,
where the skin and flesh meet, one on the right and the other on the
left, having the marrow of generation between them. In the next place,
they divided the veins about the head and interlaced them with each
other in order that they might form an additional link between the head
and the body, and that the sensations from both sides might be diffused
throughout the body. In the third place, they contrived the passage
of liquids, which may be explained in this way:--Finer bodies retain
coarser, but not the coarser the finer, and the belly is capable of
retaining food, but not fire and air. God therefore formed a network of
fire and air to irrigate the veins, having within it two lesser nets,
and stretched cords reaching from both the lesser nets to the extremity
of the outer net. The inner parts of the net were made by him of fire,
the lesser nets and their cavities of air. The two latter he made to
pass into the mouth; the one ascending by the air-pipes from the lungs,
the other by the side of the air-pipes from the belly. The entrance to
the first he divided into two parts, both of which he made to meet at
the channels of the nose, that when the mouth was closed the passage
connected with it might still be fed with air. The cavity of the network
he spread around the hollows of the body, making the entire receptacle
to flow into and out of the lesser nets and the lesser nets into and out
of it, while the outer net found a way into and out of the pores of the
body, and the internal heat followed the air to and fro. These, as we
affirm, are the phenomena of respiration. And all this process takes
place in order that the body may be watered and cooled and nourished,
and the meat and drink digested and liquefied and carried into the
veins.

The causes of respiration have now to be considered. The exhalation of
the breath through the mouth and nostrils displaces the external air,
and at the same time leaves a vacuum into which through the pores the
air which is displaced enters. Also the vacuum which is made when the
air is exhaled through the pores is filled up by the inhalation of
breath through the mouth and nostrils. The explanation of this double
phenomenon is as follows:--Elements move towards their natural places.
Now as every animal has within him a fountain of fire, the air which
is inhaled through the mouth and nostrils, on coming into contact
with this, is heated; and when heated, in accordance with the law of
attraction, it escapes by the way it entered toward the place of fire.
On leaving the body it is cooled and drives round the air which it
displaces through the pores into the empty lungs. This again is in turn
heated by the internal fire and escapes, as it entered, through the
pores.

The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses, of swallowing, and of the
hurling of bodies, are to be explained on a similar principle; as also
sounds, which are sometimes discordant on account of the inequality
of them, and again harmonious by reason of equality. The slower sounds
reaching the swifter, when they begin to pause, by degrees assimilate
with them: whence arises a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and
which to the wise becomes a higher sense of delight, being an imitation
of divine harmony in mortal motions. Streams flow, lightnings play,
amber and the magnet attract, not by reason of attraction, but because
'nature abhors a vacuum,' and because things, when compounded or
dissolved, move different ways, each to its own place.

I will now return to the phenomena of respiration. The fire, entering
the belly, minces the food, and as it escapes, fills the veins by
drawing after it the divided portions, and thus the streams of nutriment
are diffused through the body. The fruits or herbs which are our daily
sustenance take all sorts of colours when intermixed, but the colour of
red or fire predominates, and hence the liquid which we call blood is
red, being the nurturing principle of the body, whence all parts are
watered and empty places filled.

The process of repletion and depletion is produced by the attraction
of like to like, after the manner of the universal motion. The external
elements by their attraction are always diminishing the substance of
the body: the particles of blood, too, formed out of the newly digested
food, are attracted towards kindred elements within the body and so fill
up the void. When more is taken away than flows in, then we decay; and
when less, we grow and increase.

The young of every animal has the triangles new and closely locked
together, and yet the entire frame is soft and delicate, being newly
made of marrow and nurtured on milk. These triangles are sharper than
those which enter the body from without in the shape of food, and
therefore they cut them up. But as life advances, the triangles wear out
and are no longer able to assimilate food; and at length, when the bonds
which unite the triangles of the marrow become undone, they in turn
unloose the bonds of the soul; and if the release be according to
nature, she then flies away with joy. For the death which is natural is
pleasant, but that which is caused by violence is painful.

Every one may understand the origin of diseases. They may be occasioned
by the disarrangement or disproportion of the elements out of which the
body is framed. This is the origin of many of them, but the worst of all
owe their severity to the following causes: There is a natural order
in the human frame according to which the flesh and sinews are made of
blood, the sinews out of the fibres, and the flesh out of the congealed
substance which is formed by separation from the fibres. The glutinous
matter which comes away from the sinews and the flesh, not only binds
the flesh to the bones, but nourishes the bones and waters the marrow.
When these processes take place in regular order the body is in health.

But when the flesh wastes and returns into the veins there is
discoloured blood as well as air in the veins, having acid and salt
qualities, from which is generated every sort of phlegm and bile. All
things go the wrong way and cease to give nourishment to the body, no
longer preserving their natural courses, but at war with themselves
and destructive to the constitution of the body. The oldest part of the
flesh which is hard to decompose blackens from long burning, and from
being corroded grows bitter, and as the bitter element refines away,
becomes acid. When tinged with blood the bitter substance has a red
colour, and this when mixed with black takes the hue of grass; or again,
the bitter substance has an auburn colour, when new flesh is decomposed
by the internal flame. To all which phenomena some physician or
philosopher who was able to see the one in many has given the name of
bile. The various kinds of bile have names answering to their colours.
Lymph or serum is of two kinds: first, the whey of blood, which is
gentle; secondly, the secretion of dark and bitter bile, which, when
mingled under the influence of heat with salt, is malignant and
is called acid phlegm. There is also white phlegm, formed by the
decomposition of young and tender flesh, and covered with little
bubbles, separately invisible, but becoming visible when collected.
The water of tears and perspiration and similar substances is also the
watery part of fresh phlegm. All these humours become sources of disease
when the blood is replenished in irregular ways and not by food or
drink. The danger, however, is not so great when the foundation remains,
for then there is a possibility of recovery. But when the substance
which unites the flesh and bones is diseased, and is no longer renewed
from the muscles and sinews, and instead of being oily and smooth and
glutinous becomes rough and salt and dry, then the fleshy parts fall
away and leave the sinews bare and full of brine, and the flesh gets
back again into the circulation of the blood, and makes the previously
mentioned disorders still greater. There are other and worse diseases
which are prior to these; as when the bone through the density of
the flesh does not receive sufficient air, and becomes stagnant and
gangrened, and crumbling away passes into the food, and the food into
the flesh, and the flesh returns again into the blood. Worst of all and
most fatal is the disease of the marrow, by which the whole course
of the body is reversed. There is a third class of diseases which are
produced, some by wind and some by phlegm and some by bile. When the
lung, which is the steward of the air, is obstructed, by rheums, and
in one part no air, and in another too much, enters in, then the parts
which are unrefreshed by air corrode, and other parts are distorted by
the excess of air; and in this manner painful diseases are produced. The
most painful are caused by wind generated within the body, which gets
about the great sinews of the shoulders--these are termed tetanus. The
cure of them is difficult, and in most cases they are relieved only by
fever. White phlegm, which is dangerous if kept in, by reason of the air
bubbles, is not equally dangerous if able to escape through the pores,
although it variegates the body, generating diverse kinds of leprosies.
If, when mingled with black bile, it disturbs the courses of the head
in sleep, there is not so much danger; but if it assails those who are
awake, then the attack is far more dangerous, and is called epilepsy or
the sacred disease. Acid and salt phlegm is the source of catarrh.

Inflammations originate in bile, which is sometimes relieved by boils
and swellings, but when detained, and above all when mingled with pure
blood, generates many inflammatory disorders, disturbing the position of
the fibres which are scattered about in the blood in order to maintain
the balance of rare and dense which is necessary to its regular
circulation. If the bile, which is only stale blood, or liquefied flesh,
comes in little by little, it is congealed by the fibres and produces
internal cold and shuddering. But when it enters with more of a flood
it overcomes the fibres by its heat and reaches the spinal marrow, and
burning up the cables of the soul sets her free from the 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
generation, confined to a period of six thousand years; he was able to
speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the production of
physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which had existed time
out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or forms of art and music which had
lasted, 'not in word only, but in very truth, for ten thousand years'
(Laws); he was aware that natural phenomena like the Delta of the Nile
might have slowly accumulated in long periods of time (Hdt.). But he
seems to have supposed that the course of events was recurring rather
than progressive. To this he was probably led by the fixedness of
Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were other
civilisations in the world more ancient than that of Hellas.

The ancient philosophers found in mythology many ideas which, if not
originally derived from nature, were easily transferred to her--such,
for example, as love or hate, corresponding to attraction or repulsion;
or the conception of necessity allied both to the regularity and
irregularity of nature; or of chance, the nameless or unknown cause; or
of justice, symbolizing the law of compensation; are of the Fates and
Furies, typifying the fixed order or the extraordinary convulsions of
nature. Their own interpretations of Homer and the poets were supposed
by them to be the original meaning. Musing in themselves on the
phenomena of nature, they were relieved at being able to utter the
thoughts of their hearts in figures of speech which to them were not
figures, and were already consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the
Orphic poets moved in a region of half-personification in which the
meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster
conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and the like, the first
rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The Gods themselves,
especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Athene, are
universals as well as individuals. They were gradually becoming lost
in a common conception of mind or God. They continued to exist for the
purposes of ritual or of art; but from the sixth century onwards or even
earlier there arose and gained strength in the minds of men the notion
of 'one God, greatest among Gods and men, who was all sight, all
hearing, all knowing' (Xenophanes).

Under the influence of such ideas, perhaps also deriving from the
traditions of their own or of other nations scraps of medicine and
astronomy, men came to the observation of nature. The Greek philosopher
looked at the blue circle of the heavens and it flashed upon him that
all things were one; the tumult of sense abated, and the mind found
repose in the thought which former generations had been striving to
realize. The first expression of this was some element, rarefied by
degrees into a pure abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense.
Soon an inner world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more
overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, which
to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to pale before
them, retaining only a faint and precarious existence. At the same time,
the minds of men parted into the two great divisions of those who saw
only a principle of motion, and of those who saw only a principle of
rest, in nature and in themselves; there were born Heracliteans or
Eleatics, as there have been in later ages born Aristotelians or
Platonists. Like some philosophers in modern times, who are accused of
making a theory first and finding their facts afterwards, the advocates
of either opinion never thought of applying either to themselves or to
their adversaries the criterion of fact. They were mastered by their
ideas and not masters of them. Like the Heraclitean fanatics whom Plato
has ridiculed in the Theaetetus, they were incapable of giving a
reason of the faith that was in them, and had all the animosities of a
religious sect. Yet, doubtless, there was some first impression derived
from external nature, which, as in mythology, so also in philosophy,
worked upon the minds of the first thinkers. Though incapable of
induction or generalization in the modern sense, they caught an
inspiration from the external world. The most general facts or
appearances of nature, the circle of the universe, the nutritive power
of water, the air which is the breath of life, the destructive force
of fire, the seeming regularity of the greater part of nature and the
irregularity of a remnant, the recurrence of day and night and of the
seasons, the solid earth and the impalpable aether, were always present
to them.

The great source of error and also the beginning of truth to them
was reasoning from analogy; they could see resemblances, but not
differences; and they were incapable of distinguishing illustration
from argument. Analogy in modern times only points the way, and is
immediately verified by experiment. The dreams and visions, which
pass through the philosopher's mind, of resemblances between different
classes of substances, or between the animal and vegetable world, are
put into the refiner's fire, and the dross and other elements which
adhere to them are purged away. But the contemporary of Plato and
Socrates was incapable of resisting the power of any analogy which
occurred to him, and was drawn into any consequences which seemed to
follow. He had no methods of difference or of concomitant variations, by
the use of which he could distinguish the accidental from the essential.
He could not isolate phenomena, and he was helpless against the
influence of any word which had an equivocal or double sense.

Yet without this crude use of analogy the ancient physical philosopher
would have stood still; he could not have made even 'one guess among
many' without comparison. The course of natural phenomena would have
passed unheeded before his eyes, like fair sights or musical sounds
before the eyes and ears of an animal. Even the fetichism of the savage
is the beginning of reasoning; the assumption of the most fanciful of
causes indicates a higher mental state than the absence of all enquiry
about them. The tendency to argue from the higher to the lower, from
man to the world, has led to many errors, but has also had an elevating
influence on philosophy. The conception of the world as a whole, a
person, an animal, has been the source of hasty generalizations; yet
this general grasp of nature led also to a spirit of comprehensiveness
in early philosophy, which has not increased, but rather diminished, as
the fields of knowledge have become more divided. The modern physicist
confines himself to one or perhaps two branches of science. But he
comparatively seldom rises above his own department, and often falls
under the narrowing influence which any single branch, when pursued
to the exclusion of every other, has over the mind. Language, two,
exercised a spell over the beginnings of physical philosophy, leading
to error and sometimes to truth; for many thoughts were suggested by
the double meanings of words (Greek), and the accidental distinctions
of words sometimes led the ancient philosopher to make corresponding
differences in things (Greek). 'If they are the same, why have they
different names; or if they are different, why have they the same
name?'--is an argument not easily answered in the infancy of knowledge.
The modern philosopher has always been taught the lesson which he still
imperfectly learns, that he must disengage himself from the influence
of words. Nor are there wanting in Plato, who was himself too often the
victim of them, impressive admonitions that we should regard not words
but things (States.). But upon the whole, the ancients, though not
entirely dominated by them, were much more subject to the influence
of words than the moderns. They had no clear divisions of colours
or substances; even the four elements were undefined; the fields of
knowledge were not parted off. They were bringing order out of disorder,
having a small grain of experience mingled in a confused heap of
a priori notions. And yet, probably, their first impressions, the
illusions and mirages of their fancy, created a greater intellectual
activity and made a nearer approach to the truth than any patient
investigation of isolated facts, for which the time had not yet come,
could have accomplished.

There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers were
subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogues seems to be
struggling--the tendency to mere abstractions; not perceiving that
pure abstraction is only negation, they thought that the greater the
abstraction the greater the truth. Behind any pair of ideas a new
idea which comprehended them--the (Greek), as it was technically
termed--began at once to appear. Two are truer than three, one than two.
The words 'being,' or 'unity,' or essence,' or 'good,' became sacred to
them. They did not see that they had a word only, and in one sense the
most unmeaning of words. They did not understand that the content of
notions is in inverse proportion to their universality--the element
which is the most widely diffused is also the thinnest; or, in the
language of the common logic, the greater the extension the less the
comprehension. But this vacant idea of a whole without parts, of a
subject without predicates, a rest without motion, has been also the
most fruitful of all ideas. It is the beginning of a priori thought, and
indeed of thinking at all. Men were led to conceive it, not by a love
of hasty generalization, but by a divine instinct, a dialectical
enthusiasm, in which the human faculties seemed to yearn for
enlargement. We know that 'being' is only the verb of existence, the
copula, the most general symbol of relation, the first and most meagre
of abstractions; but to some of the ancient philosophers this little
word appeared to attain divine proportions, and to comprehend all truth.
Being or essence, and similar words, represented to them a supreme or
divine being, in which they thought that they found the containing and
continuing principle of the universe. In a few years the human mind was
peopled with abstractions; a new world was called into existence to give
law and order to the old. But between them there was still a gulf, and
no one could pass from the one to the other.

Number and figure were the greatest instruments of thought which were
possessed by the Greek philosopher; having the same power over the mind
which was exerted by abstract ideas, they were also capable of practical
application. Many curious and, to the early thinker, mysterious
properties of them came to light when they were compared with one
another. They admitted of infinite multiplication and construction;
in Pythagorean triangles or in proportions of 1:2:4:8 and 1:3:9:27, or
compounds of them, the laws of the world seemed to be more than half
revealed. They were also capable of infinite subdivision--a wonder and
also a puzzle to the ancient thinker (Rep.). They were not, like being
or essence, mere vacant abstractions, but admitted of progress and
growth, while at the same time they confirmed a higher sentiment of the
mind, that there was order in the universe. And so there began to be
a real sympathy between the world within and the world without. The
numbers and figures which were present to the mind's eye became visible
to the eye of sense; the truth of nature was mathematics; the other
properties of objects seemed to reappear only in the light of number.
Law and morality also found a natural expression in number and figure.
Instruments of such power and elasticity could not fail to be 'a most
gracious assistance' to the first efforts of human intelligence.

There was another reason why numbers had so great an influence over the
minds of early thinkers--they were verified by experience. Every use
of them, even the most trivial, assured men of their truth; they were
everywhere to be found, in the least things and the greatest alike.
One, two, three, counted on the fingers was a 'trivial matter (Rep.), a
little instrument out of which to create a world; but from these and by
the help of these all our knowledge of nature has been developed. They
were the measure of all things, and seemed to give law to all things;
nature was rescued from chaos and confusion by their power; the notes of
music, the motions of the stars, the forms of atoms, the evolution and
recurrence of days, months, years, the military divisions of an army,
the civil divisions of a state, seemed to afford a 'present witness'
of them--what would have become of man or of the world if deprived of
number (Rep.)? The mystery of number and the mystery of music were akin.
There was a music of rhythm and of harmonious motion everywhere; and to
the real connexion which existed between music and number, a fanciful or
imaginary relation was superadded. There was a music of the spheres as
well as of the notes of the lyre. If in all things seen there was number
and figure, why should they not also pervade the unseen world, with
which by their wonderful and unchangeable nature they seemed to hold
communion?

Two other points strike us in the use which the ancient philosophers
made of numbers. First, they applied to external nature the relations of
them which they found in their own minds; and where nature seemed to be
at variance with number, as for example in the case of fractions, they
protested against her (Rep.; Arist. Metaph.). Having long meditated on
the properties of 1:2:4:8, or 1:3:9:27, or of 3, 4, 5, they discovered
in them many curious correspondences and were disposed to find in them
the secret of the universe. Secondly, they applied number and figure
equally to those parts of physics, such as astronomy or mechanics, in
which the modern philosopher expects to find them, and to those in
which he would never think of looking for them, such as physiology and
psychology. For the sciences were not yet divided, and there was nothing
really irrational in arguing that the same laws which regulated the
heavenly bodies were partially applied to the erring limbs or brain of
man. Astrology was the form which the lively fancy of ancient thinkers
almost necessarily gave to astronomy. The observation that the lower
principle, e.g. mechanics, is always seen in the higher, e.g. in the
phenomena of life, further tended to perplex them. Plato's doctrine
of the same and the other ruling the courses of the heavens and of the
human body is not a mere vagary, but is a natural result of the state of
knowledge and thought at which he had arrived.

When in modern times we contemplate the heavens, a certain amount of
scientific truth imperceptibly blends, even with the cursory glance of
an unscientific person. He knows that the earth is revolving round the
sun, and not the sun around the earth. He does not imagine the earth to
be the centre of the universe, and he has some conception of chemistry
and the cognate sciences. A very different aspect of nature would have
been present to the mind of the early Greek philosopher. He would have
beheld the earth a surface only, not mirrored, however faintly, in the
glass of science, but indissolubly connected with some theory of one,
two, or more elements. He would have seen the world pervaded by number
and figure, animated by a principle of motion, immanent in a principle
of rest. He would have tried to construct the universe on a quantitative
principle, seeming to find in endless combinations of geometrical
figures or in the infinite variety of their sizes a sufficient account
of the multiplicity of phenomena. To these a priori speculations he
would add a rude conception of matter and his own immediate experience
of health and disease. His cosmos would necessarily be imperfect and
unequal, being the first attempt to impress form and order on the
primaeval chaos of human knowledge. He would see all things as in a
dream.

The ancient physical philosophers have been charged by Dr. Whewell
and others with wasting their fine intelligences in wrong methods of
enquiry; and their progress in moral and political philosophy has
been sometimes contrasted with their supposed failure in physical
investigations. 'They had plenty of ideas,' says Dr. Whewell, 'and
plenty of facts; but their ideas did not accurately represent the facts
with which they were acquainted.' This is a very crude and misleading
way of describing ancient science. It is the mistake of an uneducated
person--uneducated, that is, in the higher sense of the word--who
imagines every one else to be like himself and explains every other age
by his own. No doubt the ancients often fell into strange and fanciful
errors: the time had not yet arrived for the slower and surer path of
the modern inductive philosophy. But it remains to be shown that they
could have done more in their age and country; or that the contributions
which they made to the sciences with which they were acquainted are not
as great upon the whole as those made by their successors. There is no
single step in astronomy as great as that of the nameless Pythagorean
who first conceived the world to be a body moving round the sun in
space: there is no truer or more comprehensive principle than the
application of mathematics alike to the heavenly bodies, and to the
particles of matter. The ancients had not the instruments which would
have enabled them to correct or verify their anticipations, and their
opportunities of observation were limited. Plato probably did more
for physical science by asserting the supremacy of mathematics than
Aristotle or his disciples by their collections of facts. When the
thinkers of modern times, following Bacon, undervalue or disparage the
speculations of ancient philosophers, they seem wholly to forget the
conditions of the world and of the human mind, under which they
carried on their investigations. When we accuse them of being under the
influence of words, do we suppose that we are altogether free from this
illusion? When we remark that Greek physics soon became stationary or
extinct, may we not observe also that there have been and may be again
periods in the history of modern philosophy which have been barren and
unproductive? We might as well maintain that Greek art was not real
or great, because it had nihil simile aut secundum, as say that Greek
physics were a failure because they admire no subsequent progress.

The charge of premature generalization which is often urged against
ancient philosophers is really an anachronism. For they can hardly be
said to have generalized at all. They may be said more truly to have
cleared up and defined by the help of experience ideas which they
already possessed. The beginnings of thought about nature must always
have this character. A true method is the result of many ages of
experiment and observation, and is ever going on and enlarging with the
progress of science and knowledge. At first men personify nature, then
they form impressions of nature, at last they conceive 'measure' or laws
of nature. They pass out of mythology into philosophy. Early science is
not a process of discovery in the modern sense; but rather a process
of correcting by observation, and to a certain extent only, the first
impressions of nature, which mankind, when they began to think,
had received from poetry or language or unintelligent sense. Of all
scientific truths the greatest and simplest is the uniformity of nature;
this was expressed by the ancients in many ways, as fate, or necessity,
or measure, or limit. Unexpected events, of which the cause was unknown
to them, they attributed to chance (Thucyd.). But their conception of
nature was never that of law interrupted by exceptions,--a somewhat
unfortunate metaphysical invention of modern times, which is at variance
with facts and has failed to satisfy the requirements of thought.

Section 3.

Plato's account of the soul is partly mythical or figurative, and partly
literal. Not that either he or we can draw a line between them, or say,
'This is poetry, this is philosophy'; for the transition from the one
to the other is imperceptible. Neither must we expect to find in him
absolute consistency. He is apt to pass from one level or stage of
thought to another without always making it apparent that he is changing
his ground. In such passages we have to interpret his meaning by the
general spirit of his writings. To reconcile his inconsistencies would
be contrary to the first principles of criticism and fatal to any true
understanding of him.

There is a further difficulty in explaining this part of the
Timaeus--the natural order of thought is inverted. We begin with the
most abstract, and proceed from the abstract to the concrete. We
are searching into things which are upon the utmost limit of human
intelligence, and then of a sudden we fall rather heavily to the earth.
There are no intermediate steps which lead from one to the other. But
the abstract is a vacant form to us until brought into relation with
man and nature. God and the world are mere names, like the Being of
the Eleatics, unless some human qualities are added on to them. Yet the
negation has a kind of unknown meaning to us. The priority of God and
of the world, which he is imagined to have created, to all other
existences, gives a solemn awe to them. And as in other systems of
theology and philosophy, that of which we know least has the greatest
interest to us.

There is no use in attempting to define or explain the first God in the
Platonic system, who has sometimes been thought to answer to God the
Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the Church seemed to
recognize 'the firstborn of every creature.' Nor need we discuss at
length how far Plato agrees in the later Jewish idea of creation,
according to which God made the world out of nothing. For his original
conception of matter as something which has no qualities is really a
negation. Moreover in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world
is described, even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single
act, but as a work or process which occupied six days. There is a chaos
in both, and it would be untrue to say that the Greek, any more than the
Hebrew, had any definite belief in the eternal existence of matter. The
beginning of things vanished into the distance. The real creation began,
not with matter, but with ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God
took of the same and the other, of the divided and undivided, of the
finite and infinite, and made essence, and out of the three combined
created the soul of the world. To the soul he added a body formed out
of the four elements. The general meaning of these words is that God
imparted determinations of thought, or, as we might say, gave law
and variety to the material universe. The elements are moving in a
disorderly manner before the work of creation begins; and there is an
eternal pattern of the world, which, like the 'idea of good,' is not
the Creator himself, but not separable from him. The pattern too, though
eternal, is a creation, a world of thought prior to the world of
sense, which may be compared to the wisdom of God in the book of
Ecclesiasticus, or to the 'God in the form of a globe' of the old
Eleatic philosophers. The visible, which already exists, is fashioned
in the likeness of this eternal pattern. On the other hand, there is no
truth of which Plato is more firmly convinced than of the priority of
the soul to the body, both in the universe and in man. So inconsistent
are the forms in which he describes the works which no tongue
can utter--his language, as he himself says, partaking of his own
uncertainty about the things of which he is speaking.

We may remark in passing, that the Platonic compared with the
Jewish description of the process of creation has less of freedom or
spontaneity. The Creator in Plato is still subject to a remnant of
necessity which he cannot wholly overcome. When his work is accomplished
he remains in his own nature. Plato is more sensible than the Hebrew
prophet of the existence of evil, which he seeks to put as far as
possible out of the way of God. And he can only suppose this to be
accomplished by God retiring into himself and committing the lesser
works of creation to inferior powers. (Compare, however, Laws for
another solution of the difficulty.)

Nor can we attach any intelligible meaning to his words when he speaks
of the visible being in the image of the invisible. For how can that
which is divided be like that which is undivided? Or that which
is changing be the copy of that which is unchanging? All the old
difficulties about the ideas come back upon us in an altered form. We
can imagine two worlds, one of which is the mere double of the other, or
one of which is an imperfect copy of the other, or one of which is the
vanishing ideal of the other; but we cannot imagine an intellectual
world which has no qualities--'a thing in itself'--a point which has no
parts or magnitude, which is nowhere, and nothing. This cannot be the
archetype according to which God made the world, and is in reality,
whether in Plato or in Kant, a mere negative residuum of human thought.

There is another aspect of the same difficulty which appears to have no
satisfactory solution. In what relation does the archetype stand to the
Creator himself? For the idea or pattern of the world is not the thought
of God, but a separate, self-existent nature, of which creation is
the copy. We can only reply, (1) that to the mind of Plato subject and
object were not yet distinguished; (2) that he supposes the process of
creation to take place in accordance with his own theory of ideas; and
as we cannot give a consistent account of the one, neither can we of
the other. He means (3) to say that the creation of the world is not
a material process of working with legs and arms, but ideal and
intellectual; according to his own fine expression, 'the thought of
God made the God that was to be.' He means (4) to draw an absolute
distinction between the invisible or unchangeable which is or is the
place of mind or being, and the world of sense or becoming which is
visible and changing. He means (5) that the idea of the world is prior
to the world, just as the other ideas are prior to sensible objects; and
like them may be regarded as eternal and self-existent, and also, like
the IDEA of good, may be viewed apart from the divine mind.

There are several other questions which we might ask and which can
receive no answer, or at least only an answer of the same kind as the
preceding. How can matter be conceived to exist without form? Or, how
can the essences or forms of things be distinguished from the eternal
ideas, or essence itself from the soul? Or, how could there have been
motion in the chaos when as yet time was not? Or, how did chaos come
into existence, if not by the will of the Creator? Or, how could there
have been a time when the world was not, if time was not? Or, how could
the Creator have taken portions of an indivisible same? Or, how could
space or anything else have been eternal when time is only created? Or,
how could the surfaces of geometrical figures have formed solids? We
must reply again that we cannot follow Plato in all his inconsistencies,
but that the gaps of thought are probably more apparent to us than to
him. He would, perhaps, have said that 'the first things are known only
to God and to him of men whom God loves.' How often have the gaps in
Theology been concealed from the eye of faith! And we may say that only
by an effort of metaphysical imagination can we hope to understand Plato
from his own point of view; we must not ask for consistency. Everywhere
we find traces of the Platonic theory of knowledge expressed in an
objective form, which by us has to be translated into the subjective,
before we can attach any meaning to it. And this theory is exhibited
in so many different points of view, that we cannot with any certainty
interpret one dialogue by another; e.g. the Timaeus by the Parmenides or
Phaedrus or Philebus.

The soul of the world may also be conceived as the personification of
the numbers and figures in which the heavenly bodies move. Imagine
these as in a Pythagorean dream, stripped of qualitative difference and
reduced to mathematical abstractions. They too conform to the principle
of the same, and may be compared with the modern conception of laws of
nature. They are in space, but not in time, and they are the makers
of time. They are represented as constantly thinking of the same; for
thought in the view of Plato is equivalent to truth or law, and need not
imply a human consciousness, a conception which is familiar enough to
us, but has no place, hardly even a name, in ancient Greek philosophy.
To this principle of the same is opposed the principle of the other--the
principle of irregularity and disorder, of necessity and chance, which
is only partially impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We
may observe by the way, that the principle of the other, which is the
principle of plurality and variation in the Timaeus, has nothing in
common with the 'other' of the Sophist, which is the principle of
determination.) The element of the same dominates to a certain extent
over the other--the fixed stars keep the 'wanderers' of the inner circle
in their courses, and a similar principle of fixedness or order appears
to regulate the bodily constitution of man. But there still remains a
rebellious seed of evil derived from the original chaos, which is the
source of disorder in the world, and of vice and disease in man.

But what did Plato mean by essence, (Greek), which is the intermediate
nature compounded of the Same and the Other, and out of which, together
with these two, the soul of the world is created? It is difficult to
explain a process of thought so strange and unaccustomed to us, in which
modern distinctions run into one another and are lost sight of. First,
let us consider once more the meaning of the Same and the Other. The
Same is the unchanging and indivisible, the heaven of the fixed stars,
partaking of the divine nature, which, having law in itself, gives law
to all besides and is the element of order and permanence in man and
on the earth. It is the rational principle, mind regarded as a work, as
creation--not as the creator. The old tradition of Parmenides and of the
Eleatic Being, the foundation of so much in the philosophy of Greece and
of the world, was lingering in Plato's mind. The Other is the variable
or changing element, the residuum of disorder or chaos, which cannot be
reduced to order, nor altogether banished, the source of evil, seen in
the errors of man and also in the wanderings of the planets, a necessity
which protrudes through nature. Of this too there was a shadow in the
Eleatic philosophy in the realm of opinion, which, like a mist, seemed
to darken the purity of truth in itself.--So far the words of Plato may
perhaps find an intelligible meaning. But when he goes on to speak of
the Essence which is compounded out of both, the track becomes fainter
and we can only follow him with hesitating steps. But still we find a
trace reappearing of the teaching of Anaxagoras: 'All was confusion, and
then mind came and arranged things.' We have already remarked that Plato
was not acquainted with the modern distinction of subject and object,
and therefore he sometimes confuses mind and the things of mind--(Greek)
and (Greek). By (Greek) he clearly means some conception of the
intelligible and the intelligent; it belongs to the class of (Greek).
Matter, being, the Same, the eternal,--for any of these terms, being
almost vacant of meaning, is equally suitable to express indefinite
existence,--are compared or united with the Other or Diverse, and out of
the union or comparison is elicited the idea of intelligence, the 'One
in many,' brighter than any Promethean fire (Phil.), which co-existing
with them and so forming a new existence, is or becomes the intelligible
world...So we may perhaps venture to paraphrase or interpret or put into
other words the parable in which Plato has wrapped up his conception
of the creation of the world. The explanation may help to fill up with
figures of speech the void of knowledge.

The entire compound was divided by the Creator in certain proportions
and reunited; it was then cut into two strips, which were bent into an
inner circle and an outer, both moving with an uniform motion around a
centre, the outer circle containing the fixed, the inner the wandering
stars. The soul of the world was diffused everywhere from the centre to
the circumference. To this God gave a body, consisting at first of
fire and earth, and afterwards receiving an addition of air and water;
because solid bodies, like the world, are always connected by two middle
terms and not by one. The world was made in the form of a globe, and all
the material elements were exhausted in the work of creation.

The proportions in which the soul of the world as well as the human soul
is divided answer to a series of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27, composed
of the two Pythagorean progressions 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27, of which
the number 1 represents a point, 2 and 3 lines, 4 and 8, 9 and 27 the
squares and cubes respectively of 2 and 3. This series, of which the
intervals are afterwards filled up, probably represents (1) the diatonic
scale according to the Pythagoreans and Plato; (2) the order and
distances of the heavenly bodies; and (3) may possibly contain an
allusion to the music of the spheres, which is referred to in the myth
at the end of the Republic. The meaning of the words that 'solid bodies
are always connected by two middle terms' or mean proportionals has
been much disputed. The most received explanation is that of Martin, who
supposes that Plato is only speaking of surfaces and solids compounded
of prime numbers (i.e. of numbers not made up of two factors, or, in
other words, only measurable by unity). The square of any such number
represents a surface, the cube a solid. The squares of any two such
numbers (e.g. 2 squared, 3 squared = 4, 9), have always a single mean
proportional (e.g. 4 and 9 have the single mean 6), whereas the cubes
of primes (e.g. 3 cubed and 5 cubed) have always two mean proportionals
(e.g. 27:45:75:125). But to this explanation of Martin's it may be
objected, (1) that Plato nowhere says that his proportion is to be
limited to prime numbers; (2) that the limitation of surfaces to squares
is also not to be found in his words; nor (3) is there any evidence to
show that the distinction of prime from other numbers was known to
him. What Plato chiefly intends to express is that a solid requires a
stronger bond than a surface; and that the double bond which is given
by two means is stronger than the single bond given by one. Having
reflected on the singular numerical phenomena of the existence of one
mean proportional between two square numbers are rather perhaps only
between the two lowest squares; and of two mean proportionals between
two cubes, perhaps again confining his attention to the two lowest
cubes, he finds in the latter symbol an expression of the relation
of the elements, as in the former an image of the combination of two
surfaces. Between fire and earth, the two extremes, he remarks that
there are introduced, not one, but two elements, air and water, which
are compared to the two mean proportionals between two cube numbers.
The vagueness of his language does not allow us to determine whether
anything more than this was intended by him.

Leaving the further explanation of details, which the reader will find
discussed at length in Boeckh and Martin, we may now return to the main
argument: Why did God make the world? Like man, he must have a purpose;
and his purpose is the diffusion of that goodness or good which he
himself is. The term 'goodness' is not to be understood in this passage
as meaning benevolence or love, in the Christian sense of the term, but
rather law, order, harmony, like the idea of good in the Republic. The
ancient mythologers, and even the Hebrew prophets, had spoken of the
jealousy of God; and the Greek had imagined that there was a Nemesis
always attending the prosperity of mortals. But Plato delights to think
of God as the author of order in his works, who, like a father, lives
over again in his children, and can never have too much of good or
friendship among his creatures. Only, as there is a certain remnant of
evil inherent in matter which he cannot get rid of, he detaches himself
from them and leaves them to themselves, that he may be guiltless of
their faults and sufferings.

Between the ideal and the sensible Plato interposes the two natures of
time and space. Time is conceived by him to be only the shadow or
image of eternity which ever is and never has been or will be, but is
described in a figure only as past or future. This is one of the great
thoughts of early philosophy, which are still as difficult to our minds
as they were to the early thinkers; or perhaps more difficult, because
we more distinctly see the consequences which are involved in such
an hypothesis. All the objections which may be urged against Kant's
doctrine of the ideality of space and time at once press upon us. If
time is unreal, then all which is contained in time is unreal--the
succession of human thoughts as well as the flux of sensations; there is
no connecting link between (Greek) and (Greek). Yet, on the other hand,
we are conscious that knowledge is independent of time, that truth
is not a thing of yesterday or tomorrow, but an 'eternal now.' To the
'spectator of all time and all existence' the universe remains at rest.
The truths of geometry and arithmetic in all their combinations are
always the same. The generations of men, like the leaves of the forest,
come and go, but the mathematical laws by which the world is governed
remain, and seem as if they could never change. The ever-present image
of space is transferred to time--succession is conceived as extension.
(We remark that Plato does away with the above and below in space, as
he has done away with the absolute existence of past and future.) The
course of time, unless regularly marked by divisions of number, partakes
of the indefiniteness of the Heraclitean flux. By such reflections we
may conceive the Greek to have attained the metaphysical conception of
eternity, which to the Hebrew was gained by meditation on the Divine
Being. No one saw that this objective was really a subjective, and
involved the subjectivity of all knowledge. 'Non in tempore sed cum
tempore finxit Deus mundum,' says St. Augustine, repeating a thought
derived from the Timaeus, but apparently unconscious of the results to
which his doctrine would have led.

The contradictions involved in the conception of time or motion, like
the infinitesimal in space, were a source of perplexity to the mind of
the Greek, who was driven to find a point of view above or beyond them.
They had sprung up in the decline of the Eleatic philosophy and
were very familiar to Plato, as we gather from the Parmenides. The
consciousness of them had led the great Eleatic philosopher to
describe the nature of God or Being under negatives. He sings of 'Being
unbegotten and imperishable, unmoved and never-ending, which never was
nor will be, but always is, one and continuous, which cannot spring from
any other; for it cannot be said or imagined not to be.' The idea
of eternity was for a great part a negation. There are regions of
speculation in which the negative is hardly separable from the positive,
and even seems to pass into it. Not only Buddhism, but Greek as well as
Christian philosophy, show that it is quite possible that the human mind
should retain an enthusiasm for mere negations. In different ages and
countries there have been forms of light in which nothing could be
discerned and which have nevertheless exercised a life-giving and
illumining power. For the higher intelligence of man seems to require,
not only something above sense, but above knowledge, which can only
be described as Mind or Being or Truth or God or the unchangeable and
eternal element, in the expression of which all predicates fail and fall
short. Eternity or the eternal is not merely the unlimited in time
but the truest of all Being, the most real of all realities, the most
certain of all knowledge, which we nevertheless only see through a glass
darkly. The passionate earnestness of Parmenides contrasts with the
vacuity of the thought which he is revolving in his mind.

Space is said by Plato to be the 'containing vessel or nurse of
generation.' Reflecting on the simplest kinds of external objects, which
to the ancients were the four elements, he was led to a more general
notion of a substance, more or less like themselves, out of which they
were fashioned. He would not have them too precisely distinguished.
Thus seems to have arisen the first dim perception of (Greek) or matter,
which has played so great a part in the metaphysical philosophy of
Aristotle and his followers. But besides the material out of which the
elements are made, there is also a space in which they are contained.
There arises thus a second nature which the senses are incapable of
discerning and which can hardly be referred to the intelligible class.
For it is and it is not, it is nowhere when filled, it is nothing
when empty. Hence it is said to be discerned by a kind of spurious
or analogous reason, partaking so feebly of existence as to be hardly
perceivable, yet always reappearing as the containing mother or nurse of
all things. It had not that sort of consistency to Plato which has been
given to it in modern times by geometry and metaphysics. Neither of
the Greek words by which it is described are so purely abstract as the
English word 'space' or the Latin 'spatium.' Neither Plato nor any other
Greek would have spoken of (Greek) or (Greek) in the same manner as we
speak of 'time' and 'space.'

Yet space is also of a very permanent or even eternal nature; and
Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than of the
unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must necessarily
exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed to fancy that even
if space were annihilated time might still survive. He admits indeed
that our knowledge of space is of a dreamy kind, and is given by a
spurious reason without the help of sense. (Compare the hypotheses and
images of Rep.) It is true that it does not attain to the clearness
of ideas. But like them it seems to remain, even if all the objects
contained in it are supposed to have vanished away. Hence it was natural
for Plato to conceive of it as eternal. We must remember further that in
his attempt to realize either space or matter the two abstract ideas of
weight and extension, which are familiar to us, had never passed before
his mind.

Thus far God, working according to an eternal pattern, out of his
goodness has created the same, the other, and the essence (compare the
three principles of the Philebus--the finite, the infinite, and the
union of the two), and out of them has formed the outer circle of the
fixed stars and the inner circle of the planets, divided according to
certain musical intervals; he has also created time, the moving image
of eternity, and space, existing by a sort of necessity and hardly
distinguishable from matter. The matter out of which the world is formed
is not absolutely void, but retains in the chaos certain germs or traces
of the elements. These Plato, like Empedocles, supposed to be four in
number--fire, air, earth, and water. They were at first mixed together;
but already in the chaos, before God fashioned them by form and number,
the greater masses of the elements had an appointed place. Into the
confusion (Greek) which preceded Plato does not attempt further to
penetrate. They are called elements, but they are so far from being
elements (Greek) or letters in the higher sense that they are not even
syllables or first compounds. The real elements are two triangles, the
rectangular isosceles which has but one form, and the most beautiful of
the many forms of scalene, which is half of an equilateral triangle. By
the combination of these triangles which exist in an infinite variety of
sizes, the surfaces of the four elements are constructed.

That there were only five regular solids was already known to the
ancients, and out of the surfaces which he has formed Plato proceeds to
generate the four first of the five. He perhaps forgets that he is only
putting together surfaces and has not provided for their transformation
into solids. The first solid is a regular pyramid, of which the base and
sides are formed by four equilateral or twenty-four scalene triangles.
Each of the four solid angles in this figure is a little larger than
the largest of obtuse angles. The second solid is composed of the same
triangles, which unite as eight equilateral triangles, and make one
solid angle out of four plane angles--six of these angles form a regular
octahedron. The third solid is a regular icosahedron, having twenty
triangular equilateral bases, and therefore 120 rectangular scalene
triangles. The fourth regular solid, or cube, is formed by the
combination of four isosceles triangles into one square and of six
squares into a cube. The fifth regular solid, or dodecahedron, cannot
be formed by a combination of either of these triangles, but each of its
faces may be regarded as composed of thirty triangles of another kind.
Probably Plato notices this as the only remaining regular polyhedron,
which from its approximation to a globe, and possibly because, as
Plutarch remarks, it is composed of 12 x 30 = 360 scalene triangles
(Platon. Quaest.), representing thus the signs and degrees of the
Zodiac, as well as the months and days of the year, God may be said to
have 'used in the delineation of the universe.' According to Plato
earth was composed of cubes, fire of regular pyramids, air of regular
octahedrons, water of regular icosahedrons. The stability of the last
three increases with the number of their sides.

The elements are supposed to pass into one another, but we must remember
that these transformations are not the transformations of real solids,
but of imaginary geometrical figures; in other words, we are composing
and decomposing the faces of substances and not the substances
themselves--it is a house of cards which we are pulling to pieces and
putting together again (compare however Laws). Yet perhaps Plato may
regard these sides or faces as only the forms which are impressed on
pre-existent matter. It is remarkable that he should speak of each of
these solids as a possible world in itself, though upon the whole
he inclines to the opinion that they form one world and not five.
To suppose that there is an infinite number of worlds, as Democritus
(Hippolyt. Ref. Haer. I.) had said, would be, as he satirically
observes, 'the characteristic of a very indefinite and ignorant mind.'

The twenty triangular faces of an icosahedron form the faces or sides of
two regular octahedrons and of a regular pyramid (20 = 8 x 2 + 4); and
therefore, according to Plato, a particle of water when decomposed is
supposed to give two particles of air and one of fire. So because an
octahedron gives the sides of two pyramids (8 = 4 x 2), a particle of
air is resolved into two particles of fire.

The transformation is effected by the superior power or number of the
conquering elements. The manner of the change is (1) a separation of
portions of the elements from the masses in which they are collected;
(2) a resolution of them into their original triangles; and (3) a
reunion of them in new forms. Plato himself proposes the question,
Why does motion continue at all when the elements are settled in their
places? He answers that although the force of attraction is continually
drawing similar elements to the same spot, still the revolution of the
universe exercises a condensing power, and thrusts them again out of
their natural places. Thus want of uniformity, the condition of motion,
is produced. In all such disturbances of matter there is an alternative
for the weaker element: it may escape to its kindred, or take the form
of the stronger--becoming denser, if it be denser, or rarer if rarer.
This is true of fire, air, and water, which, being composed of similar
triangles, are interchangeable; earth, however, which has triangles
peculiar to itself, is capable of dissolution, but not of change. Of the
interchangeable elements, fire, the rarest, can only become a denser,
and water, the densest, only a rarer: but air may become a denser or
a rarer. No single particle of the elements is visible, but only the
aggregates of them are seen. The subordinate species depend, not upon
differences of form in the original triangles, but upon differences of
size. The obvious physical phenomena from which Plato has gathered his
views of the relations of the elements seem to be the effect of fire
upon air, water, and earth, and the effect of water upon earth.
The particles are supposed by him to be in a perpetual process of
circulation caused by inequality. This process of circulation does not
admit of a vacuum, as he tells us in his strange account of respiration.

Of the phenomena of light and heavy he speaks afterwards, when treating
of sensation, but they may be more conveniently considered by us in this
place. They are not, he says, to be explained by 'above' and 'below,'
which in the universal globe have no existence, but by the attraction of
similars towards the great masses of similar substances; fire to
fire, air to air, water to water, earth to earth. Plato's doctrine of
attraction implies not only (1) the attraction of similar elements
to one another, but also (2) of smaller bodies to larger ones. Had he
confined himself to the latter he would have arrived, though, perhaps,
without any further result or any sense of the greatness of the
discovery, at the modern doctrine of gravitation. He does not observe
that water has an equal tendency towards both water and earth. So easily
did the most obvious facts which were inconsistent with his theories
escape him.

The general physical doctrines of the Timaeus may be summed up as
follows: (1) Plato supposes the greater masses of the elements to have
been already settled in their places at the creation: (2) they are four
in number, and are formed of rectangular triangles variously combined
into regular solid figures: (3) three of them, fire, air, and water,
admit of transformation into one another; the fourth, earth, cannot be
similarly transformed: (4) different sizes of the same triangles form
the lesser species of each element: (5) there is an attraction of like
to like--smaller masses of the same kind being drawn towards greater:
(6) there is no void, but the particles of matter are ever pushing one
another round and round (Greek). Like the atomists, Plato attributes the
differences between the elements to differences in geometrical figures.
But he does not explain the process by which surfaces become solids;
and he characteristically ridicules Democritus for not seeing that the
worlds are finite and not infinite.

Section 4.

The astronomy of Plato is based on the two principles of the same and
the other, which God combined in the creation of the world. The soul,
which is compounded of the same, the other, and the essence, is diffused
from the centre to the circumference of the heavens. We speak of a soul
of the universe; but more truly regarded, the universe of the Timaeus is
a soul, governed by mind, and holding in solution a residuum of matter
or evil, which the author of the world is unable to expel, and of which
Plato cannot tell us the origin. The creation, in Plato's sense, is
really the creation of order; and the first step in giving order is the
division of the heavens into an inner and outer circle of the other and
the same, of the divisible and the indivisible, answering to the two
spheres, of the planets and of the world beyond them, all together
moving around the earth, which is their centre. To us there is a
difficulty in apprehending how that which is at rest can also be in
motion, or that which is indivisible exist in space. But the whole
description is so ideal and imaginative, that we can hardly venture to
attribute to many of Plato's words in the Timaeus any more meaning
than to his mythical account of the heavens in the Republic and in the
Phaedrus. (Compare his denial of the 'blasphemous opinion' that there
are planets or wandering stars; all alike move in circles--Laws.) The
stars are the habitations of the souls of men, from which they come and
to which they return. In attributing to the fixed stars only the most
perfect motion--that which is on the same spot or circulating around the
same--he might perhaps have said that to 'the spectator of all time and
all existence,' to borrow once more his own grand expression, or viewed,
in the language of Spinoza, 'sub specie aeternitatis,' they were still
at rest, but appeared to move in order to teach men the periods of time.
Although absolutely in motion, they are relatively at rest; or we
may conceive of them as resting, while the space in which they are
contained, or the whole anima mundi, revolves.

The universe revolves around a centre once in twenty-four hours, but the
orbits of the fixed stars take a different direction from those of the
planets. The outer and the inner sphere cross one another and meet again
at a point opposite to that of their first contact; the first moving in
a circle from left to right along the side of a parallelogram which is
supposed to be inscribed in it, the second also moving in a circle along
the diagonal of the same parallelogram from right to left; or, in other
words, the first describing the path of the equator, the second, the
path of the ecliptic. The motion of the second is controlled by the
first, and hence the oblique line in which the planets are supposed to
move becomes a spiral. The motion of the same is said to be undivided,
whereas the inner motion is split into seven unequal orbits--the
intervals between them being in the ratio of two and three, three of
either:--the Sun, moving in the opposite direction to Mercury and
Venus, but with equal swiftness; the remaining four, Moon, Saturn, Mars,
Jupiter, with unequal swiftness to the former three and to one another.
Thus arises the following progression:--Moon 1, Sun 2, Venus 3, Mercury
4, Mars 8, Jupiter 9, Saturn 27. This series of numbers is the compound
of the two Pythagorean ratios, having the same intervals, though not in
the same order, as the mixture which was originally divided in forming
the soul of the world.

Plato was struck by the phenomenon of Mercury, Venus, and the Sun
appearing to overtake and be overtaken by one another. The true reason
of this, namely, that they lie within the circle of the earth's orbit,
was unknown to him, and the reason which he gives--that the two former
move in an opposite direction to the latter--is far from explaining the
appearance of them in the heavens. All the planets, including the sun,
are carried round in the daily motion of the circle of the fixed stars,
and they have a second or oblique motion which gives the explanation
of the different lengths of the sun's course in different parts of the
earth. The fixed stars have also two movements--a forward movement in
their orbit which is common to the whole circle; and a movement on the
same spot around an axis, which Plato calls the movement of thought
about the same. In this latter respect they are more perfect than the
wandering stars, as Plato himself terms them in the Timaeus, although in
the Laws he condemns the appellation as blasphemous.

The revolution of the world around earth, which is accomplished in
a single day and night, is described as being the most perfect or
intelligent. Yet Plato also speaks of an 'annus magnus' or cyclical
year, in which periods wonderful for their complexity are found to
coincide in a perfect number, i.e. a number which equals the sum of its
factors, as 6 = 1 + 2 + 3. This, although not literally contradictory,
is in spirit irreconcilable with the perfect revolution of twenty-four
hours. The same remark may be applied to the complexity of the
appearances and occultations of the stars, which, if the outer heaven is
supposed to be moving around the centre once in twenty-four hours, must
be confined to the effects produced by the seven planets. Plato seems to
confuse the actual observation of the heavens with his desire to find in
them mathematical perfection. The same spirit is carried yet further
by him in the passage already quoted from the Laws, in which he affirms
their wanderings to be an appearance only, which a little knowledge of
mathematics would enable men to correct.

We have now to consider the much discussed question of the rotation or
immobility of the earth. Plato's doctrine on this subject is contained
in the following words:--'The earth, which is our nurse, compacted (OR
revolving) around the pole which is extended through the universe, he
made to be the guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest
of gods that are in the interior of heaven'. There is an unfortunate
doubt in this passage (1) about the meaning of the word (Greek), which
is translated either 'compacted' or 'revolving,' and is equally capable
of both explanations. A doubt (2) may also be raised as to whether the
words 'artificer of day and night' are consistent with the mere passive
causation of them, produced by the immobility of the earth in the midst
of the circling universe. We must admit, further, (3) that Aristotle
attributed to Plato the doctrine of the rotation of the earth on its
axis. On the other hand it has been urged that if the earth goes round
with the outer heaven and sun in twenty-four hours, there is no way of
accounting for the alternation of day and night; since the equal motion
of the earth and sun would have the effect of absolute immobility. To
which it may be replied that Plato never says that the earth goes round
with the outer heaven and sun; although the whole question depends on
the relation of earth and sun, their movements are nowhere precisely
described. But if we suppose, with Mr. Grote, that the diurnal rotation
of the earth on its axis and the revolution of the sun and outer heaven
precisely coincide, it would be difficult to imagine that Plato was
unaware of the consequence. For though he was ignorant of many things
which are familiar to us, and often confused in his ideas where we have
become clear, we have no right to attribute to him a childish want of
reasoning about very simple facts, or an inability to understand the
necessary and obvious deductions from geometrical figures or movements.
Of the causes of day and night the pre-Socratic philosophers, and
especially the Pythagoreans, gave various accounts, and therefore the
question can hardly be imagined to have escaped him. On the other hand
it may be urged that the further step, however simple and obvious, is
just what Plato often seems to be ignorant of, and that as there is
no limit to his insight, there is also no limit to the blindness which
sometimes obscures his intelligence (compare the construction of solids
out of surfaces in his account of the creation of the world, or the
attraction of similars to similars). Further, Mr. Grote supposes, not
that (Greek) means 'revolving,' or that this is the sense in which
Aristotle understood the word, but that the rotation of the earth is
necessarily implied in its adherence to the cosmical axis. But (a) if,
as Mr Grote assumes, Plato did not see that the rotation of the earth
on its axis and of the sun and outer heavens around the earth in equal
times was inconsistent with the alternation of day and night, neither
need we suppose that he would have seen the immobility of the earth to
be inconsistent with the rotation of the axis. And (b) what proof is
there that the axis of the world revolves at all? (c) The comparison of
the two passages quoted by Mr Grote (see his pamphlet on 'The Rotation
of the Earth') from Aristotle De Coelo, Book II (Greek) clearly shows,
although this is a matter of minor importance, that Aristotle, as
Proclus and Simplicius supposed, understood (Greek) in the Timaeus to
mean 'revolving.' For the second passage, in which motion on an axis is
expressly mentioned, refers to the first, but this would be unmeaning
unless (Greek) in the first passage meant rotation on an axis. (4)
The immobility of the earth is more in accordance with Plato's other
writings than the opposite hypothesis. For in the Phaedo the earth is
described as the centre of the world, and is not said to be in motion.
In the Republic the pilgrims appear to be looking out from the earth
upon the motions of the heavenly bodies; in the Phaedrus, Hestia,
who remains immovable in the house of Zeus while the other gods go in
procession, is called the first and eldest of the gods, and is probably
the symbol of the earth. The silence of Plato in these and in some other
passages (Laws) in which he might be expected to speak of the rotation
of the earth, is more favourable to the doctrine of its immobility than
to the opposite. If he had meant to say that the earth revolves on its
axis, he would have said so in distinct words, and have explained the
relation of its movements to those of the other heavenly bodies. (5)
The meaning of the words 'artificer of day and night' is literally true
according to Plato's view. For the alternation of day and night is not
produced by the motion of the heavens alone, or by the immobility of the
earth alone, but by both together; and that which has the inherent force
or energy to remain at rest when all other bodies are moving, may be
truly said to act, equally with them. (6) We should not lay too much
stress on Aristotle or the writer De Caelo having adopted the other
interpretation of the words, although Alexander of Aphrodisias thinks
that he could not have been ignorant either of the doctrine of Plato
or of the sense which he intended to give to the word (Greek). For the
citations of Plato in Aristotle are frequently misinterpreted by him;
and he seems hardly ever to have had in his mind the connection in which
they occur. In this instance the allusion is very slight, and there
is no reason to suppose that the diurnal revolution of the heavens was
present to his mind. Hence we need not attribute to him the error from
which we are defending Plato.

After weighing one against the other all these complicated
probabilities, the final conclusion at which we arrive is that there
is nearly as much to be said on the one side of the question as on the
other, and that we are not perfectly certain, whether, as Bockh and the
majority of commentators, ancient as well as modern, are inclined to
believe, Plato thought that the earth was at rest in the centre of the
universe, or, as Aristotle and Mr. Grote suppose, that it revolved on
its axis. Whether we assume the earth to be stationary in the centre of
the universe, or to revolve with the heavens, no explanation is given of
the variation in the length of days and nights at different times of the
year. The relations of the earth and heavens are so indistinct in the
Timaeus and so figurative in the Phaedo, Phaedrus and Republic, that we
must give up the hope of ascertaining how they were imagined by Plato,
if he had any fixed or scientific conception of them at all.

Section 5.

The soul of the world is framed on the analogy of the soul of man, and
many traces of anthropomorphism blend with Plato's highest flights of
idealism. The heavenly bodies are endowed with thought; the principles
of the same and other exist in the universe as well as in the human
mind. The soul of man is made out of the remains of the elements which
had been used in creating the soul of the world; these remains, however,
are diluted to the third degree; by this Plato expresses the measure of
the difference between the soul human and divine. The human soul, like
the cosmical, is framed before the body, as the mind is before the soul
of either--this is the order of the divine work--and the finer parts of
the body, which are more akin to the soul, such as the spinal marrow,
are prior to the bones and flesh. The brain, the containing vessel of
the divine part of the soul, is (nearly) in the form of a globe, which
is the image of the gods, who are the stars, and of the universe.

There is, however, an inconsistency in Plato's manner of conceiving
the soul of man; he cannot get rid of the element of necessity which is
allowed to enter. He does not, like Kant, attempt to vindicate for men a
freedom out of space and time; but he acknowledges him to be subject
to the influence of external causes, and leaves hardly any place
for freedom of the will. The lusts of men are caused by their bodily
constitution, though they may be increased by bad education and bad
laws, which implies that they may be decreased by good education and
good laws. He appears to have an inkling of the truth that to the higher
nature of man evil is involuntary. This is mixed up with the view which,
while apparently agreeing with it, is in reality the opposite of it,
that vice is due to physical causes. In the Timaeus, as well as in the
Laws, he also regards vices and crimes as simply involuntary; they are
diseases analogous to the diseases of the body, and arising out of the
same causes. If we draw together the opposite poles of Plato's system,
we find that, like Spinoza, he combines idealism with fatalism.

The soul of man is divided by him into three parts, answering roughly
to the charioteer and steeds of the Phaedrus, and to the (Greek) of the
Republic and Nicomachean Ethics. First, there is the immortal nature
of which the brain is the seat, and which is akin to the soul of the
universe. This alone thinks and knows and is the ruler of the whole.
Secondly, there is the higher mortal soul which, though liable to
perturbations of her own, takes the side of reason against the lower
appetites. The seat of this is the heart, in which courage, anger, and
all the nobler affections are supposed to reside. There the veins all
meet; it is their centre or house of guard whence they carry the orders
of the thinking being to the extremities of his kingdom. There is also
a third or appetitive soul, which receives the commands of the immortal
part, not immediately but mediately, through the liver, which reflects
on its surface the admonitions and threats of the reason.

The liver is imagined by Plato to be a smooth and bright substance,
having a store of sweetness and also of bitterness, which reason freely
uses in the execution of her mandates. In this region, as ancient
superstition told, were to be found intimations of the future. But
Plato is careful to observe that although such knowledge is given to the
inferior parts of man, it requires to be interpreted by the superior.
Reason, and not enthusiasm, is the true guide of man; he is only
inspired when he is demented by some distemper or possession. The
ancient saying, that 'only a man in his senses can judge of his own
actions,' is approved by modern philosophy too. The same irony which
appears in Plato's remark, that 'the men of old time must surely have
known the gods who were their ancestors, and we should believe them as
custom requires,' is also manifest in his account of divination.

The appetitive soul is seated in the belly, and there imprisoned like
a wild beast, far away from the council chamber, as Plato graphically
calls the head, in order that the animal passions may not interfere with
the deliberations of reason. Though the soul is said by him to be prior
to the body, yet we cannot help seeing that it is constructed on the
model of the body--the threefold division into the rational, passionate,
and appetitive corresponding to the head, heart and belly. The human
soul differs from the soul of the world in this respect, that it is
enveloped and finds its expression in matter, whereas the soul of the
world is not only enveloped or diffused in matter, but is the element
in which matter moves. The breath of man is within him, but the air or
aether of heaven is the element which surrounds him and all things.

Pleasure and pain are attributed in the Timaeus to the suddenness of our
sensations--the first being a sudden restoration, the second a sudden
violation, of nature (Phileb.). The sensations become conscious to us
when they are exceptional. Sight is not attended either by pleasure or
pain, but hunger and the appeasing of hunger are pleasant and painful
because they are extraordinary.

Section 6.

I shall not attempt to connect the physiological speculations of Plato
either with ancient or modern medicine. What light I can throw upon them
will be derived from the comparison of them with his general system.

There is no principle so apparent in the physics of the Timaeus, or in
ancient physics generally, as that of continuity. The world is conceived
of as a whole, and the elements are formed into and out of one another;
the varieties of substances and processes are hardly known or noticed.
And in a similar manner the human body is conceived of as a whole, and
the different substances of which, to a superficial observer, it appears
to be composed--the blood, flesh, sinews--like the elements out of which
they are formed, are supposed to pass into one another in regular order,
while the infinite complexity of the human frame remains unobserved. And
diseases arise from the opposite process--when the natural proportions
of the four elements are disturbed, and the secondary substances which
are formed out of them, namely, blood, flesh, sinews, are generated in
an inverse order.

Plato found heat and air within the human frame, and the blood
circulating in every part. He assumes in language almost unintelligible
to us that a network of fire and air envelopes the greater part of the
body. This outer net contains two lesser nets, one corresponding to
the stomach, the other to the lungs; and the entrance to the latter is
forked or divided into two passages which lead to the nostrils and to
the mouth. In the process of respiration the external net is said to
find a way in and out of the pores of the skin: while the interior of
it and the lesser nets move alternately into each other. The whole
description is figurative, as Plato himself implies when he speaks of a
'fountain of fire which we compare to the network of a creel.' He really
means by this what we should describe as a state of heat or temperature
in the interior of the body. The 'fountain of fire' or heat is also in a
figure the circulation of the blood. The passage is partly imagination,
partly fact.

He has a singular theory of respiration for which he accounts solely by
the movement of the air in and out of the body; he does not attribute
any part of the process to the action of the body itself. The air has
a double ingress and a double exit, through the mouth or nostrils, and
through the skin. When exhaled through the mouth or nostrils, it leaves
a vacuum which is filled up by other air finding a way in through the
pores, this air being thrust out of its place by the exhalation from the
mouth and nostrils. There is also a corresponding process of inhalation
through the mouth or nostrils, and of exhalation through the pores. The
inhalation through the pores appears to take place nearly at the same
time as the exhalation through the mouth; and conversely. The internal
fire is in either case the propelling cause outwards--the inhaled air,
when heated by it, having a natural tendency to move out of the body to
the place of fire; while the impossibility of a vacuum is the propelling
cause inwards.

Thus we see that this singular theory is dependent on two principles
largely employed by Plato in explaining the operations of nature, the
impossibility of a vacuum and the attraction of like to like. To these
there has to be added a third principle, which is the condition of
the action of the other two,--the interpenetration of particles in
proportion to their density or rarity. It is this which enables fire and
air to permeate the flesh.

Plato's account of digestion and the circulation of the blood is closely
connected with his theory of respiration. Digestion is supposed to be
effected by the action of the internal fire, which in the process of
respiration moves into the stomach and minces the food. As the fire
returns to its place, it takes with it the minced food or blood; and in
this way the veins are replenished. Plato does not enquire how the blood
is separated from the faeces.

Of the anatomy and functions of the body he knew very little,--e.g.
of the uses of the nerves in conveying motion and sensation, which he
supposed to be communicated by the bones and veins; he was also ignorant
of the distinction between veins and arteries;--the latter term
he applies to the vessels which conduct air from the mouth to the
lungs;--he supposes the lung to be hollow and bloodless; the spinal
marrow he conceives to be the seed of generation; he confuses the parts
of the body with the states of the body--the network of fire and air is
spoken of as a bodily organ; he has absolutely no idea of the phenomena
of respiration, which he attributes to a law of equalization in nature,
the air which is breathed out displacing other air which finds a way
in; he is wholly unacquainted with the process of digestion. Except the
general divisions into the spleen, the liver, the belly, and the lungs,
and the obvious distinctions of flesh, bones, and the limbs of the body,
we find nothing that reminds us of anatomical facts. But we find much
which is derived from his theory of the universe, and transferred
to man, as there is much also in his theory of the universe which is
suggested by man. The microcosm of the human body is the lesser image of
the macrocosm. The courses of the same and the other affect both; they
are made of the same elements and therefore in the same proportions.
Both are intelligent natures endued with the power of self-motion,
and the same equipoise is maintained in both. The animal is a sort of
'world' to the particles of the blood which circulate in it. All the
four elements entered into the original composition of the human frame;
the bone was formed out of smooth earth; liquids of various kinds pass
to and fro; the network of fire and air irrigates the veins. Infancy
and childhood is the chaos or first turbid flux of sense prior to the
establishment of order; the intervals of time which may be observed in
some intermittent fevers correspond to the density of the elements. The
spinal marrow, including the brain, is formed out of the finest sorts of
triangles, and is the connecting link between body and mind. Health is
only to be preserved by imitating the motions of the world in space,
which is the mother and nurse of generation. The work of digestion
is carried on by the superior sharpness of the triangles forming the
substances of the human body to those which are introduced into it in
the shape of food. The freshest and acutest forms of triangles are those
that are found in children, but they become more obtuse with advancing
years; and when they finally wear out and fall to pieces, old age and
death supervene.

As in the Republic, Plato is still the enemy of the purgative treatment
of physicians, which, except in extreme cases, no man of sense will ever
adopt. For, as he adds, with an insight into the truth, 'every disease
is akin to the nature of the living being and is only irritated by
stimulants.' He is of opinion that nature should be left to herself, and
is inclined to think that physicians are in vain (Laws--where he says
that warm baths would be more beneficial to the limbs of the aged rustic
than the prescriptions of a not over-wise doctor). If he seems to be
extreme in his condemnation of medicine and to rely too much on diet and
exercise, he might appeal to nearly all the best physicians of our own
age in support of his opinions, who often speak to their patients of the
worthlessness of drugs. For we ourselves are sceptical about medicine,
and very unwilling to submit to the purgative treatment of physicians.
May we not claim for Plato an anticipation of modern ideas as about some
questions of astronomy and physics, so also about medicine? As in the
Charmides he tells us that the body cannot be cured without the soul,
so in the Timaeus he strongly asserts the sympathy of soul and body;
any defect of either is the occasion of the greatest discord and
disproportion in the other. Here too may be a presentiment that in the
medicine of the future the interdependence of mind and body will be more
fully recognized, and that the influence of the one over the other may
be exerted in a manner which is not now thought possible.

Section 7.

In Plato's explanation of sensation we are struck by the fact that
he has not the same distinct conception of organs of sense which is
familiar to ourselves. The senses are not instruments, but rather
passages, through which external objects strike upon the mind. The eye
is the aperture through which the stream of vision passes, the ear is
the aperture through which the vibrations of sound pass. But that the
complex structure of the eye or the ear is in any sense the cause of
sight and hearing he seems hardly to be aware.

The process of sight is the most complicated (Rep.), and consists of
three elements--the light which is supposed to reside within the eye,
the light of the sun, and the light emitted from external objects. When
the light of the eye meets the light of the sun, and both together meet
the light issuing from an external object, this is the simple act of
sight. When the particles of light which proceed from the object are
exactly equal to the particles of the visual ray which meet them from
within, then the body is transparent. If they are larger and contract
the visual ray, a black colour is produced; if they are smaller and
dilate it, a white. Other phenomena are produced by the variety and
motion of light. A sudden flash of fire at once elicits light and
moisture from the eye, and causes a bright colour. A more subdued light,
on mingling with the moisture of the eye, produces a red colour. Out
of these elements all other colours are derived. All of them are
combinations of bright and red with white and black. Plato himself tells
us that he does not know in what proportions they combine, and he is of
opinion that such knowledge is granted to the gods only. To have seen
the affinity of them to each other and their connection with light, is
not a bad basis for a theory of colours. We must remember that they were
not distinctly defined to his, as they are to our eyes; he saw them, not
as they are divided in the prism, or artificially manufactured for the
painter's use, but as they exist in nature, blended and confused with
one another.

We can hardly agree with him when he tells us that smells do not admit
of kinds. He seems to think that no definite qualities can attach to
bodies which are in a state of transition or evaporation; he also makes
the subtle observation that smells must be denser than air, though
thinner than water, because when there is an obstruction to the
breathing, air can penetrate, but not smell.

The affections peculiar to the tongue are of various kinds, and, like
many other affections, are caused by contraction and dilation. Some of
them are produced by rough, others by abstergent, others by inflammatory
substances,--these act upon the testing instruments of the tongue, and
produce a more or less disagreeable sensation, while other particles
congenial to the tongue soften and harmonize them. The instruments of
taste reach from the tongue to the heart. Plato has a lively sense of
the manner in which sensation and motion are communicated from one part
of the body to the other, though he confuses the affections with the
organs. Hearing is a blow which passes through the ear and ends in the
region of the liver, being transmitted by means of the air, the brain,
and the blood to the soul. The swifter sound is acute, the sound which
moves slowly is grave. A great body of sound is loud, the opposite
is low. Discord is produced by the swifter and slower motions of two
sounds, and is converted into harmony when the swifter motions begin to
pause and are overtaken by the slower.

The general phenomena of sensation are partly internal, but the more
violent are caused by conflict with external objects. Proceeding by a
method of superficial observation, Plato remarks that the more sensitive
parts of the human frame are those which are least covered by flesh,
as is the case with the head and the elbows. Man, if his head had been
covered with a thicker pulp of flesh, might have been a longer-lived
animal than he is, but could not have had as quick perceptions. On the
other hand, the tongue is one of the most sensitive of organs; but then
this is made, not to be a covering to the bones which contain the marrow
or source of life, but with an express purpose, and in a separate mass.

Section 8.

We have now to consider how far in any of these speculations Plato
approximated to the discoveries of modern science. The modern physical
philosopher is apt to dwell exclusively on the absurdities of ancient
ideas about science, on the haphazard fancies and a priori assumptions
of ancient teachers, on their confusion of facts and ideas, on their
inconsistency and blindness to the most obvious phenomena. He measures
them not by what preceded them, but by what has followed them. He does
not consider that ancient physical philosophy was not a free enquiry,
but a growth, in which the mind was passive rather than active, and
was incapable of resisting the impressions which flowed in upon it.
He hardly allows to the notions of the ancients the merit of being the
stepping-stones by which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge. He
never reflects, how great a thing it was to have formed a conception,
however imperfect, either of the human frame as a whole, or of the world
as a whole. According to the view taken in these volumes the errors of
ancient physicists were not separable from the intellectual conditions
under which they lived. Their genius was their own; and they were not
the rash and hasty generalizers which, since the days of Bacon, we
have been apt to suppose them. The thoughts of men widened to receive
experience; at first they seemed to know all things as in a dream: after
a while they look at them closely and hold them in their hands. They
begin to arrange them in classes and to connect causes with effects.
General notions are necessary to the apprehension of particular facts,
the metaphysical to the physical. Before men can observe the world, they
must be able to conceive it.

To do justice to the subject, we should consider the physical philosophy
of the ancients as a whole; we should remember, (1) that the nebular
theory was the received belief of several of the early physicists; (2)
that the development of animals out of fishes who came to land, and of
man out of the animals, was held by Anaximander in the sixth century
before Christ (Plut. Symp. Quaest; Plac. Phil.); (3) that even by
Philolaus and the early Pythagoreans, the earth was held to be a body
like the other stars revolving in space around the sun or a central
fire; (4) that the beginnings of chemistry are discernible in the
'similar particles' of Anaxagoras. Also they knew or thought (5) that
there was a sex in plants as well as in animals; (6) they were aware
that musical notes depended on the relative length or tension of the
strings from which they were emitted, and were measured by ratios
of number; (7) that mathematical laws pervaded the world; and even
qualitative differences were supposed to have their origin in number and
figure; (8) the annihilation of matter was denied by several of them,
and the seeming disappearance of it held to be a transformation only.
For, although one of these discoveries might have been supposed to be
a happy guess, taken together they seem to imply a great advance and
almost maturity of natural knowledge.

We should also remember, when we attribute to the ancients hasty
generalizations and delusions of language, that physical philosophy and
metaphysical too have been guilty of similar fallacies in quite recent
times. We by no means distinguish clearly between mind and body, between
ideas and facts. Have not many discussions arisen about the Atomic
theory in which a point has been confused with a material atom? Have not
the natures of things been explained by imaginary entities, such as
life or phlogiston, which exist in the mind only? Has not disease been
regarded, like sin, sometimes as a negative and necessary, sometimes as
a positive or malignant principle? The 'idols' of Bacon are nearly as
common now as ever; they are inherent in the human mind, and when they
have the most complete dominion over us, we are least able to perceive
them. We recognize them in the ancients, but we fail to see them in
ourselves.

Such reflections, although this is not the place in which to dwell upon
them at length, lead us to take a favourable view of the speculations
of the Timaeus. We should consider not how much Plato actually knew, but
how far he has contributed to the general ideas of physics, or supplied
the notions which, whether true or false, have stimulated the minds
of later generations in the path of discovery. Some of them may seem
old-fashioned, but 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 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 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 formerly the human mind is liable to be imposed
upon by the illusions of the past, which are ever assuming some new
form.

When we have shaken off the rubbish of ages, there remain one or two
questions of which the investigation has a permanent value:--

1. Did Plato derive the legend of Atlantis from an Egyptian source? It
may be replied that there is no such legend in any writer previous to
Plato; neither in Homer, nor in Pindar, nor in Herodotus is there any
mention of an Island of Atlantis, nor any reference to it in Aristotle,
nor any citation of an earlier writer by a later one in which it is
to be found. Nor have any traces been discovered hitherto in Egyptian
monuments of a connexion between Greece and Egypt older than the eighth
or ninth century B.C. It is true that Proclus, writing in the fifth
century after Christ, tells us of stones and columns in Egypt on which
the history of the Island of Atlantis was engraved. The statement may be
false--there are similar tales about columns set up 'by the Canaanites
whom Joshua drove out' (Procop.); but even if true, it would only show
that the legend, 800 years after the time of Plato, had been transferred
to Egypt, and inscribed, not, like other forgeries, in books, but on
stone. Probably in the Alexandrian age, when Egypt had ceased to have a
history and began to appropriate the legends of other nations, many such
monuments were to be found of events which had become famous in that or
other countries. The oldest witness to the story is said to be Crantor,
a Stoic philosopher who lived a generation later than Plato, and
therefore may have borrowed it from him. The statement is found in
Proclus; but we require better assurance than Proclus can give us before
we accept this or any other statement which he makes.

Secondly, passing from the external to the internal evidence, we may
remark that the story is far more likely to have been invented by Plato
than to have been brought by Solon from Egypt. That is another part of
his legend which Plato also seeks to impose upon us. The verisimilitude
which he has given to the tale is a further reason for suspecting it;
for he could easily 'invent Egyptian or any other tales' (Phaedrus). Are
not the words, 'The truth of the story is a great advantage,' if we read
between the lines, an indication of the fiction? It is only a legend
that Solon went to Egypt, and if he did he could not have conversed with
Egyptian priests or have read records in their temples. The truth is
that the introduction is a mosaic work of small touches which, partly
by their minuteness, and also by their seeming probability, win the
confidence of the reader. Who would desire better evidence than that
of Critias, who had heard the narrative in youth when the memory is
strongest at the age of ten from his grandfather Critias, an old man of
ninety, who in turn had heard it from Solon himself? Is not the famous
expression--'You Hellenes are ever children and there is no knowledge
among you hoary with age,' really a compliment to the Athenians who are
described in these words as 'ever young'? And is the thought expressed
in them to be attributed to the learning of the Egyptian priest, and not
rather to the genius of Plato? Or when the Egyptian says--'Hereafter at
our leisure we will take up the written documents and examine in detail
the exact truth about these things'--what is this but a literary trick
by which Plato sets off his narrative? Could any war between Athens and
the Island of Atlantis have really coincided with the struggle between
the Greeks and Persians, as is sufficiently hinted though not expressly
stated in the narrative of Plato? And whence came the tradition to
Egypt? or in what does the story consist except in the war between the
two rival powers and the submersion of both of them? And how was the
tale transferred to the poem of Solon? 'It is not improbable,' says Mr.
Grote, 'that Solon did leave an unfinished Egyptian poem' (Plato). But
are probabilities for which there is not a tittle of evidence, and
which are without any parallel, to be deemed worthy of attention by the
critic? How came the poem of Solon to disappear in antiquity? or why did
Plato, if the whole narrative was known to him, break off almost at the
beginning of it?

While therefore admiring the diligence and erudition of M. Martin,
we cannot for a moment suppose that the tale was told to Solon by an
Egyptian priest, nor can we believe that Solon wrote a poem upon the
theme which was thus suggested to him--a poem which disappeared in
antiquity; or that the Island of Atlantis or the antediluvian Athens
ever had any existence except in the imagination of Plato. Martin is of
opinion that Plato would have been terrified if he could have foreseen
the endless fancies to which his Island of Atlantis has given occasion.
Rather he would have been infinitely amused if he could have known that
his gift of invention would have deceived M. Martin himself into the
belief that the tradition was brought from Egypt by Solon and made the
subject of a poem by him. M. Martin may also be gently censured for
citing without sufficient discrimination ancient authors having very
different degrees of authority and value.

2. It is an interesting and not unimportant question which is touched
upon by Martin, whether the Atlantis of Plato in any degree held out
a guiding light to the early navigators. He is inclined to think that
there is no real connexion between them. But surely the discovery of the
New World was preceded by a prophetic anticipation of it, which, like
the hope of a Messiah, was entering into the hearts of men? And this
hope was nursed by ancient tradition, which had found expression from
time to time in the celebrated lines of Seneca and in many other places.
This tradition was sustained by the great authority of Plato, and
therefore the legend of the Island of Atlantis, though not closely
connected with the voyages of the early navigators, may be truly said to
have contributed indirectly to the great discovery.

The Timaeus of Plato, like the Protagoras and several portions of the
Phaedrus and Republic, was translated by Cicero into Latin. About a
fourth, comprehending with lacunae the first portion of the dialogue,
is preserved in several MSS. These generally agree, and therefore may
be supposed to be derived from a single original. The version is very
faithful, and is a remarkable monument of Cicero's skill in managing the
difficult and intractable Greek. In his treatise De Natura Deorum, he
also refers to the Timaeus, which, speaking in the person of Velleius
the Epicurean, he severely criticises.

The commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus is a wonderful monument of
the silliness and prolixity of the Alexandrian Age. It extends to
about thirty pages of the book, and is thirty times the length of the
original. It is surprising that this voluminous work should have found
a translator (Thomas Taylor, a kindred spirit, who was himself a
Neo-Platonist, after the fashion, not of the fifth or sixteenth, but of
the nineteenth century A.D.). The commentary is of little or no value,
either in a philosophical or philological point of view. The writer is
unable to explain particular passages in any precise manner, and he is
equally incapable of grasping the whole. He does not take words in their
simple meaning or sentences in their natural connexion. He is thinking,
not of the context in Plato, but of the contemporary Pythagorean
philosophers and their wordy strife. He finds nothing in the text
which he does not bring to it. He is full of Porphyry, Iamblichus and
Plotinus, of misapplied logic, of misunderstood grammar, and of the
Orphic theology.

Although such a work can contribute little or nothing to the
understanding of Plato, it throws an interesting light on the
Alexandrian times; it realizes how a philosophy made up of words only
may create a deep and widespread enthusiasm, how the forms of logic and
rhetoric may usurp the place of reason and truth, how all philosophies
grow faded and discoloured, and are patched and made up again like
worn-out garments, and retain only a second-hand existence. He who
would study this degeneracy of philosophy and of the Greek mind in the
original cannot do better than devote a few of his days and nights to
the commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus.

A very different account must be given of the short work entitled
'Timaeus Locrus,' which is a brief but clear analysis of the Timaeus
of Plato, omitting the introduction or dialogue and making a few small
additions. It does not allude to the original from which it is taken;
it is quite free from mysticism and Neo-Platonism. In length it does not
exceed a fifth part of the Timaeus. It is written in the Doric dialect,
and contains several words which do not occur in classical Greek. No
other indication of its date, except this uncertain one of language,
appears in it. In several places the writer has simplified the language
of Plato, in a few others he has embellished and exaggerated it. He
generally preserves the thought of the original, but does not copy the
words. On the whole this little tract faithfully reflects the meaning
and spirit of the Timaeus.

From the garden of the Timaeus, as from the other dialogues of Plato,
we may still gather a few flowers and present them at parting to
the reader. There is nothing in Plato grander and simpler than the
conversation between Solon and the Egyptian priest, in which the
youthfulness of Hellas is contrasted with the antiquity of Egypt. Here
are to be found the famous words, 'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever
young, and there is not an old man among you'--which may be compared
to the lively saying of Hegel, that 'Greek history began with the youth
Achilles and left off with the youth Alexander.' The numerous arts of
verisimilitude by which Plato insinuates into the mind of the reader
the truth of his narrative have been already referred to. Here occur
a sentence or two not wanting in Platonic irony (Greek--a word to the
wise). 'To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond
us, and we must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm
themselves to be the offspring of the Gods--that is what they say--and
they must surely have known their own ancestors. How can we doubt the
word of the children of the Gods? Although they give no probable or
certain proofs, still, as they declare that they are speaking of what
took place in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe
them.' 'Our creators well knew that women and other animals would some
day be framed out of men, and they further knew that many animals would
require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they fashioned in
men at their first creation the rudiments of nails.' Or once more, let
us reflect on two serious passages in which the order of the world is
supposed to find a place in the human soul and to infuse harmony
into it. 'The soul, when touching anything that has essence, whether
dispersed in parts or undivided, is stirred through all her powers to
declare the sameness or difference of that thing and some other; and to
what individuals are related, and by what affected, and in what way
and how and when, both in the world of generation and in the world of
immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether
she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same,--in voiceless
silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved,--when
reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world, and when the
circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense
to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But
when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the
same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge
are necessarily perfected;' where, proceeding in a similar path of
contemplation, he supposes the inward and the outer world mutually to
imply each other. 'God invented and gave us sight to the end that we
might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them
to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the
unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking
of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring
courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.' Or let us weigh carefully
some other profound thoughts, such as the following. 'He who neglects
education walks lame to the end of his life, and returns imperfect and
good for nothing to the world below.' 'The father and maker of all this
universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him
to all men would be impossible.' 'Let me tell you then why the Creator
made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have
jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all
things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest
sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in
believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things
should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.' This
is the leading thought in the Timaeus, just as the IDEA of Good is
the leading thought of the Republic, the one expression describing the
personal, the other the impersonal Good or God, differing in form rather
than in substance, and both equally implying to the mind of Plato a
divine reality. The slight touch, perhaps ironical, contained in the
words, 'as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men,'
is very characteristic of Plato.


*****



TIMAEUS.


PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates.


SOCRATES: One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of
those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my entertainers to-day?

TIMAEUS: He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not willingly
have been absent from this gathering.

SOCRATES: Then, if he is not coming, you and the two others must supply
his place.

TIMAEUS: Certainly, and we will do all that we can; having been
handsomely entertained by you yesterday, those of us who remain should
be only too glad to return your hospitality.

SOCRATES: Do you remember what were the points of which I required you
to speak?

TIMAEUS: We remember some of them, and you will be here to remind us
of anything which we have forgotten: or rather, if we are not troubling
you, will you briefly recapitulate the whole, and then the particulars
will be more firmly fixed in our memories?

SOCRATES: To be sure I will: the chief theme of my yesterday's discourse
was the State--how constituted and of what citizens composed it would
seem likely to be most perfect.

TIMAEUS: Yes, Socrates; and what you said of it was very much to our
mind.

SOCRATES: Did we not begin by separating the husbandmen and the artisans
from the class of defenders of the State?

TIMAEUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And when we had given to each one that single employment and
particular art which was suited to his nature, we spoke of those
who were intended to be our warriors, and said that they were to be
guardians of the city against attacks from within as well as from
without, and to have no other employment; they were to be merciful in
judging their subjects, of whom they were by nature friends, but fierce
to their enemies, when they came across them in battle.

TIMAEUS: Exactly.

SOCRATES: We said, if I am not mistaken, that the guardians should
be gifted with a temperament in a high degree both passionate and
philosophical; and that then they would be as they ought to be, gentle
to their friends and fierce with their enemies.

TIMAEUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And what did we say of their education? Were they not to be
trained in gymnastic, and music, and all other sorts of knowledge which
were proper for them?

TIMAEUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: And being thus trained they were not to consider gold or
silver or anything else to be their own private property; they were to
be like hired troops, receiving pay for keeping guard from those who
were protected by them--the pay was to be no more than would suffice
for men of simple life; and they were to spend in common, and to live
together in the continual practice of virtue, which was to be their sole
pursuit.

TIMAEUS: That was also said.

SOCRATES: Neither did we forget the women; of whom we declared, that
their natures should be assimilated and brought into harmony with those
of the men, and that common pursuits should be assigned to them both in
time of war and in their ordinary life.

TIMAEUS: That, again, was as you say.

SOCRATES: And what about the procreation of children? Or rather was not
the proposal too singular to be forgotten? for all wives and children
were to be in common, to the intent that no one should ever know his own
child, but they were to imagine that they were all one family; those
who were within a suitable limit of age were to be brothers and sisters,
those who were of an elder generation parents and grandparents, and
those of a younger, children and grandchildren.

TIMAEUS: Yes, and the proposal is easy to remember, as you say.

SOCRATES: And do you also remember how, with a view of securing as far
as we could the best breed, we said that the chief magistrates, male
and female, should contrive secretly, by the use of certain lots, so to
arrange the nuptial meeting, that the bad of either sex and the good
of either sex might pair with their like; and there was to be no
quarrelling on this account, for they would imagine that the union was a
mere accident, and was to be attributed to the lot?

TIMAEUS: I remember.

SOCRATES: And you remember how we said that the children of the good
parents were to be educated, and the children of the bad secretly
dispersed among the inferior citizens; and while they were all growing
up the rulers were to be on the look-out, and to bring up from below in
their turn those who were worthy, and those among themselves who were
unworthy were to take the places of those who came up?

TIMAEUS: True.

SOCRATES: Then have I now given you all the heads of our yesterday's
discussion? Or is there anything more, my dear Timaeus, which has been
omitted?

TIMAEUS: Nothing, Socrates; it was just as you have said.

SOCRATES: I should like, before proceeding further, to tell you how I
feel about the State which we have described. I might compare myself
to a person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created by the
painter's art, or, better still, alive but at rest, is seized with a
desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some struggle or conflict
to which their forms appear suited; this is my feeling about the State
which we have been describing. There are conflicts which all cities
undergo, and I should like to hear some one tell of our own city
carrying on a struggle against her neighbours, and how she went out to
war in a becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her
actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities
a result worthy of her training and education. Now I, Critias and
Hermocrates, am conscious that I myself should never be able to
celebrate the city and her citizens in a befitting manner, and I am
not surprised at my own incapacity; to me the wonder is rather that
the poets present as well as past are no better--not that I mean
to depreciate them; but every one can see that they are a tribe of
imitators, and will imitate best and most easily the life in which they
have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man's
education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder
adequately to represent in language. I am aware that the Sophists have
plenty of brave words and fair conceits, but I am afraid that being only
wanderers from one city to another, and having never had habitations
of their own, they may fail in their conception of philosophers and
statesmen, and may not know what they do and say in time of war, when
they are fighting or holding parley with their enemies. And thus people
of your class are the only ones remaining who are fitted by nature and
education to take part at once both in politics and philosophy. Here is
Timaeus, of Locris in Italy, a city which has admirable laws, and who is
himself in wealth and rank the equal of any of his fellow-citizens; he
has held the most important and honourable offices in his own state,
and, as I believe, has scaled the heights of all philosophy; and here
is Critias, whom every Athenian knows to be no novice in the matters
of which we are speaking; and as to Hermocrates, I am assured by many
witnesses that his genius and education qualify him to take part in any
speculation of the kind. And therefore yesterday when I saw that you
wanted me to describe the formation of the State, I readily assented,
being very well aware, that, if you only would, none were better
qualified to carry the discussion further, and that when you had engaged
our city in a suitable war, you of all men living could best exhibit
her playing a fitting part. When I had completed my task, I in return
imposed this other task upon you. You conferred together and agreed
to entertain me to-day, as I had entertained you, with a feast of
discourse. Here am I in festive array, and no man can be more ready for
the promised banquet.

HERMOCRATES: And we too, Socrates, as Timaeus says, will not be wanting
in enthusiasm; and there is no excuse for not complying with your
request. As soon as we arrived yesterday at the guest-chamber of
Critias, with whom we are staying, or rather on our way thither, we
talked the matter over, and he told us an ancient tradition, which I
wish, Critias, that you would repeat to Socrates, so that he may help us
to judge whether it will satisfy his requirements or not.

CRITIAS: I will, if Timaeus, who is our other partner, approves.

TIMAEUS: I quite approve.

CRITIAS: Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is
certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of
the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my
great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his
poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfather, who remembered
and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvellous
actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through
lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular,
greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a
fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and
worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival.

SOCRATES: Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of the
Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon, to be not
a mere legend, but an actual fact?

CRITIAS: I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an aged man;
for Critias, at the time of telling it, was, as he said, nearly ninety
years of age, and I was about ten. Now the day was that day of the
Apaturia which is called the Registration of Youth, at which, according
to custom, our parents gave prizes for recitations, and the poems of
several poets were recited by us boys, and many of us sang the poems of
Solon, which at that time had not gone out of fashion. One of our tribe,
either because he thought so or to please Critias, said that in his
judgment Solon was not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of
poets. The old man, as I very well remember, brightened up at hearing
this and said, smiling: Yes, Amynander, if Solon had only, like other
poets, made poetry the business of his life, and had completed the tale
which he brought with him from Egypt, and had not been compelled, by
reason of the factions and troubles which he found stirring in his own
country when he came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he
would have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet.

And what was the tale about, Critias? said Amynander.

About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which ought
to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of time and the
destruction of the actors, it has not come down to us.

Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom Solon
heard this veritable tradition.

He replied:--In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile
divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of
Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the
city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their
foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted
by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great
lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to
them. To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour;
he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about
antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene
knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion,
wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about
the most ancient things in our part of the world--about Phoroneus, who
is called 'the first man,' and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the
survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their
descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years
ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the
priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes
are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.
Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that
in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among
you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I
will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions
of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought
about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by
innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have
preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having
yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to
drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the
earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form
of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in
the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon
the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who
live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to
destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from
this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and
preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with
a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and
shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in
cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land,
neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above
on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which
reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient. The fact is,
that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer sun does
not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser
numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or
in any other region of which we are informed--if there were any actions
noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been
written down by us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas
just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with
letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual
interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down,
and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education;
and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing
of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.
As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us,
Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place
you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in
the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land
the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and
your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which
survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations,
the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For
there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city
which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed
of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have
had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the
face of heaven. Solon marvelled at his words, and earnestly requested
the priests to inform him exactly and in order about these former
citizens. You are welcome to hear about them, Solon, said the priest,
both for your own sake and for that of your city, and above all, for the
sake of the goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator
of both our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before
ours (Observe that Plato gives the same date (9000 years ago) for the
foundation of Athens and for the repulse of the invasion from Atlantis
(Crit.).), receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your
race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is
recorded in our sacred registers to be 8000 years old. As touching your
citizens of 9000 years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and
of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we will
hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves.
If you compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of
ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the
first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all
the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several
crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the class
of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen; and you will
observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other
classes, and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to
military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields
and spears, a style of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics
first to us, as in your part of the world first to you. Then as to
wisdom, do you observe how our law from the very first made a study of
the whole order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which
gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for
human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them.
All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when
establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you
were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in
that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who
was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled
that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And
there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones, and
excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and disciples
of the gods.

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our
histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour.
For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an
expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city
put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in
those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated
in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles;
the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the
way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the
opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which
is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow
entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be
most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis
there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole
island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and,
furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya
within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as
Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue
at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the
straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence
of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in
courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when
the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having
undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed
over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet
subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within
the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and
floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men
in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner
disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those
parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in
the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from
Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about your
city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came
into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious
coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative
of Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had
elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of
all run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak. And
so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in
all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our
purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well provided.

And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on my way home yesterday I
at once communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered it; and
after I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly the
whole of it. Truly, as is often said, the lessons of our childhood make
a wonderful impression on our memories; for I am not sure that I could
remember all the discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised
if I forgot any of these things which I have heard very long ago. I
listened at the time with childlike interest to the old man's narrative;
he was very ready to teach me, and I asked him again and again to repeat
his words, so that like an indelible picture they were branded into my
mind. As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed them as he spoke them to my
companions, that they, as well as myself, might have something to say.
And now, Socrates, to make an end of my preface, I am ready to tell
you the whole tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the
particulars, as they were told to me. The city and citizens, which you
yesterday described to us in fiction, we will now transfer to the world
of reality. It shall be the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose
that the citizens whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of
whom the priest spoke; they will perfectly harmonize, and there will be
no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these
ancient Athenians. Let us divide the subject among us, and all endeavour
according to our ability gracefully to execute the task which you have
imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited to
the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other instead.

SOCRATES: And what other, Critias, can we find that will be better than
this, which is natural and suitable to the festival of the goddess, and
has the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction? How or
where shall we find another if we abandon this? We cannot, and therefore
you must tell the tale, and good luck to you; and I in return for my
yesterday's discourse will now rest and be a listener.

CRITIAS: Let me proceed to explain to you, Socrates, the order in which
we have arranged our entertainment. Our intention is, that Timaeus, who
is the most of an astronomer amongst us, and has made the nature of
the universe his special study, should speak first, beginning with the
generation of the world and going down to the creation of man; next, I
am to receive the men whom he has created, and of whom some will have
profited by the excellent education which you have given them; and then,
in accordance with the tale of Solon, and equally with his law, we will
bring them into court and make them citizens, as if they were those very
Athenians whom the sacred Egyptian record has recovered from
oblivion, and thenceforward we will speak of them as Athenians and
fellow-citizens.

SOCRATES: I see that I shall receive in my turn a perfect and splendid
feast of reason. And now, Timaeus, you, I suppose, should speak next,
after duly calling upon the Gods.

TIMAEUS: All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the
beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call
upon God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the
universe, how created or how existing without creation, if we be not
altogether out of our wits, must invoke the aid of Gods and Goddesses
and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with
themselves. Let this, then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I
add an exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most
intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent.

First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What
is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is
always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence
and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by
opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a
process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything
that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause,
for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator,
whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature
of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair
and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created
pattern, it is not fair or perfect. Was the heaven then or the world,
whether called by this or by any other more appropriate name--assuming
the name, I am asking a question which has to be asked at the beginning
of an enquiry about anything--was the world, I say, always in existence
and without beginning? or created, and had it a beginning? Created,
I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore
sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense
and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created
must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father
and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found
him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible. And there is still a
question to be asked about him: Which of the patterns had the artificer
in view when he made the world--the pattern of the unchangeable, or of
that which is created? If the world be indeed fair and the artificer
good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal;
but if what cannot be said without blasphemy is true, then to the
created pattern. Every one will see that he must have looked to the
eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of
causes. And having been created in this way, the world has been framed
in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is
unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is admitted, be
a copy of something. Now it is all-important that the beginning of
everything should be according to nature. And in speaking of the copy
and the original we may assume that words are akin to the matter
which they describe; when they relate to the lasting and permanent and
intelligible, they ought to be lasting and unalterable, and, as far as
their nature allows, irrefutable and immovable--nothing less. But
when they express only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things
themselves, they need only be likely and analogous to the real words. As
being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates, amid the
many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are
not able to give notions which are altogether and in every respect exact
and consistent with one another, do not be surprised. Enough, if we
adduce probabilities as likely as any others; for we must remember that
I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal
men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and enquire no
further.

SOCRATES: Excellent, Timaeus; and we will do precisely as you bid us.
The prelude is charming, and is already accepted by us--may we beg of
you to proceed to the strain?

TIMAEUS: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of
generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of
anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things
should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest
sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in
believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things
should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore
also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an
irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order,
considering that this was in every way better than the other. Now the
deeds of the best could never be or have been other than the fairest;
and the creator, reflecting on the things which are by nature visible,
found that no unintelligent creature taken as a whole was fairer than
the intelligent taken as a whole; and that intelligence could not be
present in anything which was devoid of soul. For which reason, when he
was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body,
that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and
best. Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the
world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence
by the providence of God.

This being supposed, let us proceed to the next stage: In the likeness
of what animal did the Creator make the world? It would be an unworthy
thing to liken it to any nature which exists as a part only; for nothing
can be beautiful which is like any imperfect thing; but let us suppose
the world to be the very image of that whole of which all other animals
both individually and in their tribes are portions. For the original of
the universe contains in itself all intelligible beings, just as this
world comprehends us and all other visible creatures. For the Deity,
intending to make this world like the fairest and most perfect of
intelligible beings, framed one visible animal comprehending within
itself all other animals of a kindred nature. Are we right in saying
that there is one world, or that they are many and infinite? There must
be one only, if the created copy is to accord with the original. For
that which includes all other intelligible creatures cannot have a
second or companion; in that case there would be need of another living
being which would include both, and of which they would be parts, and
the likeness would be more truly said to resemble not them, but that
other which included them. In order then that the world might be
solitary, like the perfect animal, the creator made not two worlds or an
infinite number of them; but there is and ever will be one only-begotten
and created heaven.

Now that which is created is of necessity corporeal, and also visible
and tangible. And nothing is visible where there is no fire, or tangible
which has no solidity, and nothing is solid without earth. Wherefore
also God in the beginning of creation made the body of the universe to
consist of fire and earth. But two things cannot be rightly put together
without a third; there must be some bond of union between them. And the
fairest bond is that which makes the most complete fusion of itself and
the things which it combines; and proportion is best adapted to effect
such a union. For whenever in any three numbers, whether cube or square,
there is a mean, which is to the last term what the first term is to it;
and again, when the mean is to the first term as the last term is to the
mean--then the mean becoming first and last, and the first and last both
becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be the same,
and having become the same with one another will be all one. If the
universal frame had been created a surface only and having no depth, a
single mean would have sufficed to bind together itself and the other
terms; but now, as the world must be solid, and solid bodies are always
compacted not by one mean but by two, God placed water and air in the
mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion
so far as was possible (as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air
is to water so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together
a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such
elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created,
and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of
friendship; and having been reconciled to itself, it was indissoluble by
the hand of any other than the framer.

Now the creation took up the whole of each of the four elements; for the
Creator compounded the world out of all the fire and all the water and
all the air and all the earth, leaving no part of any of them nor any
power of them outside. His intention was, in the first place, that
the animal should be as far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect
parts: secondly, that it should be one, leaving no remnants out of which
another such world might be created: and also that it should be free
from old age and unaffected by disease. Considering that if heat and
cold and other powerful forces which unite bodies surround and attack
them from without when they are unprepared, they decompose them, and by
bringing diseases and old age upon them, make them waste away--for this
cause and on these grounds he made the world one whole, having every
part entire, and being therefore perfect and not liable to old age and
disease. And he gave to the world the figure which was suitable and also
natural. Now to the animal which was to comprehend all animals, that
figure was suitable which comprehends within itself all other figures.
Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a
lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the
centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he
considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike. This he
finished off, making the surface smooth all round for many reasons; in
the first place, because the living being had no need of eyes when there
was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there
was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be
breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help
of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already
digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him:
for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his
own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking
place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which
was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked
anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself
against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon
him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of
walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to
him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and
intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same
spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six
motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of
their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the
universe was created without legs and without feet.

Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was to
be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a
surface in every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire
and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put
the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be
the exterior environment of it; and he made the universe a circle moving
in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to
converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance.
Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god.

Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are speaking
of them in this order; for having brought them together he would never
have allowed that the elder should be ruled by the younger; but this is
a random manner of speaking which we have, because somehow we ourselves
too are very much under the dominion of chance. Whereas he made the soul
in origin and excellence prior to and older than the body, to be the
ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject. And he
made her out of the following elements and on this wise: Out of the
indivisible and unchangeable, and also out of that which is divisible
and has to do with material bodies, he compounded a third and
intermediate kind of essence, partaking of the nature of the same and of
the other, and this compound he placed accordingly in a mean between the
indivisible, and the divisible and material. He took the three elements
of the same, the other, and the essence, and mingled them into one form,
compressing by force the reluctant and unsociable nature of the other
into the same. When he had mingled them with the essence and out of
three made one, he again divided this whole into as many portions as was
fitting, each portion being a compound of the same, the other, and the
essence. And he proceeded to divide after this manner:--First of all, he
took away one part of the whole (1), and then he separated a second part
which was double the first (2), and then he took away a third part which
was half as much again as the second and three times as much as the
first (3), and then he took a fourth part which was twice as much as the
second (4), and a fifth part which was three times the third (9), and a
sixth part which was eight times the first (8), and a seventh part
which was twenty-seven times the first (27). After this he filled up the
double intervals (i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8) and the triple (i.e. between
1, 3, 9, 27) cutting off yet other portions from the mixture and placing
them in the intervals, so that in each interval there were two kinds of
means, the one exceeding and exceeded by equal parts of its extremes (as
for example 1, 4/3, 2, in which the mean 4/3 is one-third of 1 more than
1, and one-third of 2 less than 2), the other being that kind of mean
which exceeds and is exceeded by an equal number (e.g.

  - over 1, 4/3, 3/2, - over 2, 8/3, 3, - over 4, 16/3, 6,  - over 8: and
  - over 1, 3/2, 2,   - over 3, 9/2, 6, - over 9, 27/2, 18, - over 27.

Where there were intervals of 3/2 and of 4/3 and of 9/8, made by the
connecting terms in the former intervals, he filled up all the intervals
of 4/3 with the interval of 9/8, leaving a fraction over; and the
interval which this fraction expressed was in the ratio of 256 to 243
(e.g.


 243:256::81/64:4/3::243/128:2::81/32:8/3::243/64:4::81/16:16/3::242/32:8.


And thus the whole mixture out of which he cut these portions was all
exhausted by him. This entire compound he divided lengthways into two
parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X,
and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and
each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point; and,
comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made
the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the
outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the
inner circle the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same
he carried round by the side (i.e. of the rectangular figure supposed to
be inscribed in the circle of the Same) to the right, and the motion of
the diverse diagonally (i.e. across the rectangular figure from corner
to corner) to the left. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same
and like, for that he left single and undivided; but the inner motion
he divided in six places and made seven unequal circles having their
intervals in ratios of two and three, three of each, and bade the orbits
proceed in a direction opposite to one another; and three (Sun, Mercury,
Venus) he made to move with equal swiftness, and the remaining four
(Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter) to move with unequal swiftness to the
three and to one another, but in due proportion.

Now when the Creator had framed the soul according to his will, he
formed within her the corporeal universe, and brought the two together,
and united them centre to centre. The soul, interfused everywhere from
the centre to the circumference of heaven, of which also she is the
external envelopment, herself turning in herself, began a divine
beginning of never-ceasing and rational life enduring throughout all
time. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible,
and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made by the best of
intellectual and everlasting natures, is the best of things created. And
because she is composed of the same and of the other and of the essence,
these three, and is divided and united in due proportion, and in her
revolutions returns upon herself, the soul, when touching anything which
has essence, whether dispersed in parts or undivided, is stirred through
all her powers, to declare the sameness or difference of that thing and
some other; and to what individuals are related, and by what affected,
and in what way and how and when, both in the world of generation and
in the world of immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal
truth, whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same--in
voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the
self-moved--when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world
and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts the
intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs
sure and certain. But when reason is concerned with the rational, and
the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence
and knowledge are necessarily perfected. And if any one affirms that
in which these two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the
very opposite of the truth.

When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving
and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in
his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and
as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far
as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to
bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible.
Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he
set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according
to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call
time. For there were no days and nights and months and years before the
heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven he created them
also. They are all parts of time, and the past and future are created
species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to the
eternal essence; for we say that he 'was,' he 'is,' he 'will be,' but
the truth is that 'is' alone is properly attributed to him, and that
'was' and 'will be' are only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they
are motions, but that which is immovably the same cannot become older or
younger by time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter will be, older
or younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states which affect
moving and sensible things and of which generation is the cause. These
are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according
to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that what has become IS become
and what becomes IS becoming, and that what will become IS about
to become and that the non-existent IS non-existent--all these are
inaccurate modes of expression (compare Parmen.). But perhaps this whole
subject will be more suitably discussed on some other occasion.

Time, then, and the heaven came into being at the same instant in
order that, having been created together, if ever there was to be a
dissolution of them, they might be dissolved together. It was framed
after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might resemble this
as far as was possible; for the pattern exists from eternity, and the
created heaven has been, and is, and will be, in all time. Such was the
mind and thought of God in the creation of time. The sun and moon and
five other stars, which are called the planets, were created by him in
order to distinguish and preserve the numbers of time; and when he had
made their several bodies, he placed them in the orbits in which the
circle of the other was revolving,--in seven orbits seven stars. First,
there was the moon in the orbit nearest the earth, and next the sun,
in the second orbit above the earth; then came the morning star and the
star sacred to Hermes, moving in orbits which have an equal swiftness
with the sun, but in an opposite direction; and this is the reason why
the sun and Hermes and Lucifer overtake and are overtaken by each other.
To enumerate the places which he assigned to the other stars, and to
give all the reasons why he assigned them, although a secondary matter,
would give more trouble than the primary. These things at some future
time, when we are at leisure, may have the consideration which they
deserve, but not at present.

Now, when all the stars which were necessary to the creation of time
had attained a motion suitable to them, and had become living creatures
having bodies fastened by vital chains, and learnt their appointed
task, moving in the motion of the diverse, which is diagonal, and passes
through and is governed by the motion of the same, they revolved, some
in a larger and some in a lesser orbit--those which had the lesser orbit
revolving faster, and those which had the larger more slowly. Now by
reason of the motion of the same, those which revolved fastest appeared
to be overtaken by those which moved slower although they really
overtook them; for the motion of the same made them all turn in a
spiral, and, because some went one way and some another, that which
receded most slowly from the sphere of the same, which was the swiftest,
appeared to follow it most nearly. That there might be some visible
measure of their relative swiftness and slowness as they proceeded in
their eight courses, God lighted a fire, which we now call the sun, in
the second from the earth of these orbits, that it might give light to
the whole of heaven, and that the animals, as many as nature intended,
might participate in number, learning arithmetic from the revolution of
the same and the like. Thus then, and for this reason the night and
the day were created, being the period of the one most intelligent
revolution. And the month is accomplished when the moon has completed
her orbit and overtaken the sun, and the year when the sun has completed
his own orbit. Mankind, with hardly an exception, have not remarked the
periods of the other stars, and they have no name for them, and do not
measure them against one another by the help of number, and hence they
can scarcely be said to know that their wanderings, being infinite in
number and admirable for their variety, make up time. And yet there
is no difficulty in seeing that the perfect number of time fulfils
the perfect year when all the eight revolutions, having their relative
degrees of swiftness, are accomplished together and attain their
completion at the same time, measured by the rotation of the same and
equally moving. After this manner, and for these reasons, came into
being such of the stars as in their heavenly progress received reversals
of motion, to the end that the created heaven might imitate the eternal
nature, and be as like as possible to the perfect and intelligible
animal.

Thus far and until the birth of time the created universe was made in
the likeness of the original, but inasmuch as all animals were not yet
comprehended therein, it was still unlike. What remained, the creator
then proceeded to fashion after the nature of the pattern. Now as in the
ideal animal the mind perceives ideas or species of a certain nature and
number, he thought that this created animal ought to have species of a
like nature and number. There are four such; one of them is the heavenly
race of the gods; another, the race of birds whose way is in the air;
the third, the watery species; and the fourth, the pedestrian and land
creatures. Of the heavenly and divine, he created the greater part out
of fire, that they might be the brightest of all things and fairest to
behold, and he fashioned them after the likeness of the universe in the
figure of a circle, and made them follow the intelligent motion of the
supreme, distributing them over the whole circumference of heaven, which
was to be a true cosmos or glorious world spangled with them all over.
And he gave to each of them two movements: the first, a movement on the
same spot after the same manner, whereby they ever continue to think
consistently the same thoughts about the same things; the second, a
forward movement, in which they are controlled by the revolution of the
same and the like; but by the other five motions they were unaffected,
in order that each of them might attain the highest perfection. And
for this reason the fixed stars were created, to be divine and eternal
animals, ever-abiding and revolving after the same manner and on the
same spot; and the other stars which reverse their motion and are
subject to deviations of this kind, were created in the manner already
described. The earth, which is our nurse, clinging (or 'circling')
around the pole which is extended through the universe, he framed to be
the guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods
that are in the interior of heaven. Vain would be the attempt to tell
all the figures of them circling as in dance, and their juxtapositions,
and the return of them in their revolutions upon themselves, and their
approximations, and to say which of these deities in their conjunctions
meet, and which of them are in opposition, and in what order they get
behind and before one another, and when they are severally eclipsed to
our sight and again reappear, sending terrors and intimations of the
future to those who cannot calculate their movements--to attempt to
tell of all this without a visible representation of the heavenly system
would be labour in vain. Enough on this head; and now let what we have
said about the nature of the created and visible gods have an end.

To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us, and we
must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm themselves
to be the offspring of the gods--that is what they say--and they must
surely have known their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the
children of the gods? Although they give no probable or certain proofs,
still, as they declare that they are speaking of what took place in
their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them. In this
manner, then, according to them, the genealogy of these gods is to be
received and set forth.

Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven, and from these
sprang Phorcys and Cronos and Rhea, and all that generation; and from
Cronos and Rhea sprang Zeus and Here, and all those who are said to be
their brethren, and others who were the children of these.

Now, when all of them, both those who visibly appear in their
revolutions as well as those other gods who are of a more retiring
nature, had come into being, the creator of the universe addressed them
in these words: 'Gods, children of gods, who are my works, and of whom
I am the artificer and father, my creations are indissoluble, if so I
will. All that is bound may be undone, but only an evil being would wish
to undo that which is harmonious and happy. Wherefore, since ye are but
creatures, ye are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but ye shall
certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death, having
in my will a greater and mightier bond than those with which ye
were bound at the time of your birth. And now listen to my
instructions:--Three tribes of mortal beings remain to be
created--without them the universe will be incomplete, for it will not
contain every kind of animal which it ought to contain, if it is to be
perfect. On the other hand, if they were created by me and received life
at my hands, they would be on an equality with the gods. In order then
that they may be mortal, and that this universe may be truly universal,
do ye, according to your natures, betake yourselves to the formation of
animals, imitating the power which was shown by me in creating you. The
part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and
is the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and
you--of that divine part I will myself sow the seed, and having made a
beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye then interweave
the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget living creatures, and
give them food, and make them to grow, and receive them again in death.'

Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he had previously
mingled the soul of the universe he poured the remains of the elements,
and mingled them in much the same manner; they were not, however, pure
as before, but diluted to the second and third degree. And having made
it he divided the whole mixture into souls equal in number to the stars,
and assigned each soul to a star; and having there placed them as in a
chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and declared to them
the laws of destiny, according to which their first birth would be one
and the same for all,--no one should suffer a disadvantage at his hands;
they were to be sown in the instruments of time severally adapted to
them, and to come forth the most religious of animals; and as human
nature was of two kinds, the superior race would hereafter be called
man. Now, when they should be implanted in bodies by necessity, and be
always gaining or losing some part of their bodily substance, then in
the first place it would be necessary that they should all have in
them one and the same faculty of sensation, arising out of irresistible
impressions; in the second place, they must have love, in which pleasure
and pain mingle; also fear and anger, and the feelings which are akin or
opposite to them; if they conquered these they would live righteously,
and if they were conquered by them, unrighteously. He who lived well
during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star,
and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he
failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a
woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil,
he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the
evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils
and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the
like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and
irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water
and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state.
Having given all these laws to his creatures, that he might be guiltless
of future evil in any of them, the creator sowed some of them in the
earth, and some in the moon, and some in the other instruments of
time; and when he had sown them he committed to the younger gods the
fashioning of their mortal bodies, and desired them to furnish what
was still lacking to the human soul, and having made all the suitable
additions, to rule over them, and to pilot the mortal animal in the
best and wisest manner which they could, and avert from him all but
self-inflicted evils.

When the creator had made all these ordinances he remained in his own
accustomed nature, and his children heard and were obedient to their
father's word, and receiving from him the immortal principle of a mortal
creature, in imitation of their own creator they borrowed portions of
fire, and earth, and water, and air from the world, which were hereafter
to be restored--these they took and welded them together, not with the
indissoluble chains by which they were themselves bound, but with little
pegs too small to be visible, making up out of all the four elements
each separate body, and fastening the courses of the immortal soul in
a body which was in a state of perpetual influx and efflux. Now
these courses, detained as in a vast river, neither overcame nor were
overcome; but were hurrying and hurried to and fro, so that the whole
animal was moved and progressed, irregularly however and irrationally
and anyhow, in all the six directions of motion, wandering backwards
and forwards, and right and left, and up and down, and in all the six
directions. For great as was the advancing and retiring flood which
provided nourishment, the affections produced by external contact
caused still greater tumult--when the body of any one met and came
into collision with some external fire, or with the solid earth or the
gliding waters, or was caught in the tempest borne on the air, and the
motions produced by any of these impulses were carried through the body
to the soul. All such motions have consequently received the general
name of 'sensations,' which they still retain. And they did in fact
at that time create a very great and mighty movement; uniting with the
ever-flowing stream in stirring up and violently shaking the courses of
the soul, they completely stopped the revolution of the same by their
opposing current, and hindered it from predominating and advancing; and
they so disturbed the nature of the other or diverse, that the three
double intervals (i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8), and the three triple
intervals (i.e. between 1, 3, 9, 27), together with the mean terms and
connecting links which are expressed by the ratios of 3:2, and 4:3, and
of 9:8--these, although they cannot be wholly undone except by him who
united them, were twisted by them in all sorts of ways, and the circles
were broken and disordered in every possible manner, so that when they
moved they were tumbling to pieces, and moved irrationally, at one time
in a reverse direction, and then again obliquely, and then upside
down, as you might imagine a person who is upside down and has his head
leaning upon the ground and his feet up against something in the air;
and when he is in such a position, both he and the spectator fancy that
the right of either is his left, and the left right. If, when powerfully
experiencing these and similar effects, the revolutions of the soul come
in contact with some external thing, either of the class of the same
or of the other, they speak of the same or of the other in a manner the
very opposite of the truth; and they become false and foolish, and there
is no course or revolution in them which has a guiding or directing
power; and if again any sensations enter in violently from without and
drag after them the whole vessel of the soul, then the courses of the
soul, though they seem to conquer, are really conquered.

And by reason of all these affections, the soul, when encased in a
mortal body, now, as in the beginning, is at first without intelligence;
but when the flood of growth and nutriment abates, and the courses of
the soul, calming down, go their own way and become steadier as time
goes on, then the several circles return to their natural form, and
their revolutions are corrected, and they call the same and the other by
their right names, and make the possessor of them to become a rational
being. And if these combine in him with any true nurture or education,
he attains the fulness and health of the perfect man, and escapes the
worst disease of all; but if he neglects education he walks lame to the
end of his life, and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world
below. This, however, is a later stage; at present we must treat more
exactly the subject before us, which involves a preliminary enquiry into
the generation of the body and its members, and as to how the soul was
created--for what reason and by what providence of the gods; and holding
fast to probability, we must pursue our way.

First, then, the gods, imitating the spherical shape of the universe,
enclosed the two divine courses in a spherical body, that, namely, which
we now term the head, being the most divine part of us and the lord of
all that is in us: to this the gods, when they put together the body,
gave all the other members to be servants, considering that it partook
of every sort of motion. In order then that it might not tumble about
among the high and deep places of the earth, but might be able to get
over the one and out of the other, they provided the body to be its
vehicle and means of locomotion; which consequently had length and was
furnished with four limbs extended and flexible; these God contrived
to be instruments of locomotion with which it might take hold and find
support, and so be able to pass through all places, carrying on high the
dwelling-place of the most sacred and divine part of us. Such was the
origin of legs and hands, which for this reason were attached to every
man; and the gods, deeming the front part of man to be more honourable
and more fit to command than the hinder part, made us to move mostly in
a forward direction. Wherefore man must needs have his front part unlike
and distinguished from the rest of his body.

And so in the vessel of the head, they first of all put a face in which
they inserted organs to minister in all things to the providence of the
soul, and they appointed this part, which has authority, to be by nature
the part which is in front. And of the organs they first contrived
the eyes to give light, and the principle according to which they were
inserted was as follows: So much of fire as would not burn, but gave
a gentle light, they formed into a substance akin to the light of
every-day life; and the pure fire which is within us and related
thereto they made to flow through the eyes in a stream smooth and dense,
compressing the whole eye, and especially the centre part, so that it
kept out everything of a coarser nature, and allowed to pass only this
pure element. When the light of day surrounds the stream of vision,
then like falls upon like, and they coalesce, and one body is formed by
natural affinity in the line of vision, wherever the light that falls
from within meets with an external object. And the whole stream of
vision, being similarly affected in virtue of similarity, diffuses the
motions of what it touches or what touches it over the whole body, until
they reach the soul, causing that perception which we call sight. But
when night comes on and the external and kindred fire departs, then the
stream of vision is cut off; for going forth to an unlike element it
is changed and extinguished, being no longer of one nature with the
surrounding atmosphere which is now deprived of fire: and so the eye no
longer sees, and we feel disposed to sleep. For when the eyelids, which
the gods invented for the preservation of sight, are closed, they keep
in the internal fire; and the power of the fire diffuses and equalizes
the inward motions; when they are equalized, there is rest, and when the
rest is profound, sleep comes over us scarce disturbed by dreams;
but where the greater motions still remain, of whatever nature and in
whatever locality, they engender corresponding visions in dreams, which
are remembered by us when we are awake and in the external world. And
now there is no longer any difficulty in understanding the creation
of images in mirrors and all smooth and bright surfaces. For from the
communion of the internal and external fires, and again from the union
of them and their numerous transformations when they meet in the mirror,
all these appearances of necessity arise, when the fire from the face
coalesces with the fire from the eye on the bright and smooth surface.
And right appears left and left right, because the visual rays come into
contact with the rays emitted by the object in a manner contrary to the
usual mode of meeting; but the right appears right, and the left left,
when the position of one of the two concurring lights is reversed; and
this happens when the mirror is concave and its smooth surface repels
the right stream of vision to the left side, and the left to the right
(He is speaking of two kinds of mirrors, first the plane, secondly the
concave; and the latter is supposed to be placed, first horizontally,
and then vertically.). Or if the mirror be turned vertically, then the
concavity makes the countenance appear to be all upside down, and the
lower rays are driven upwards and the upper downwards.

All these are to be reckoned among the second and co-operative causes
which God, carrying into execution the idea of the best as far as
possible, uses as his ministers. They are thought by most men not to be
the second, but the prime causes of all things, because they freeze and
heat, and contract and dilate, and the like. But they are not so, for
they are incapable of reason or intellect; the only being which can
properly have mind is the invisible soul, whereas fire and water, and
earth and air, are all of them visible bodies. The lover of intellect
and knowledge ought to explore causes of intelligent nature first of
all, and, secondly, of those things which, being moved by others, are
compelled to move others. And this is what we too must do. Both kinds
of causes should be acknowledged by us, but a distinction should be made
between those which are endowed with mind and are the workers of things
fair and good, and those which are deprived of intelligence and always
produce chance effects without order or design. Of the second or
co-operative causes of sight, which help to give to the eyes the power
which they now possess, enough has been said. I will therefore now
proceed to speak of the higher use and purpose for which God has given
them to us. The sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest
benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the
heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would
ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the
months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have
given us a conception of time, and the power of enquiring about the
nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy,
than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to
mortal man. This is the greatest boon of sight: and of the lesser
benefits why should I speak? even the ordinary man if he were deprived
of them would bewail his loss, but in vain. Thus much let me say
however: God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold
the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses
of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the
perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth
of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and
regulate our own vagaries. The same may be affirmed of speech and
hearing: they have been given by the gods to the same end and for a
like reason. For this is the principal end of speech, whereto it most
contributes. Moreover, so much of music as is adapted to the sound of
the voice and to the sense of hearing is granted to us for the sake of
harmony; and harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our
souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given
by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the
purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may
have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing
her into harmony and agreement with herself; and rhythm too was given by
them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways
which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them.

Thus far in what we have been saying, with small exception, the works of
intelligence have been set forth; and now we must place by the side
of them in our discourse the things which come into being through
necessity--for the creation is mixed, being made up of necessity and
mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuaded necessity to bring the greater
part of created things to perfection, and thus and after this manner in
the beginning, when the influence of reason got the better of necessity,
the universe was created. But if a person will truly tell of the way in
which the work was accomplished, he must include the other influence
of the variable cause as well. Wherefore, we must return again and find
another suitable beginning, as about the former matters, so also about
these. To which end we must consider the nature of fire, and water, and
air, and earth, such as they were prior to the creation of the heaven,
and what was happening to them in this previous state; for no one has as
yet explained the manner of their generation, but we speak of fire and
the rest of them, whatever they mean, as though men knew their natures,
and we maintain them to be the first principles and letters or elements
of the whole, when they cannot reasonably be compared by a man of any
sense even to syllables or first compounds. And let me say thus much: I
will not now speak of the first principle or principles of all things,
or by whatever name they are to be called, for this reason--because
it is difficult to set forth my opinion according to the method of
discussion which we are at present employing. Do not imagine, any
more than I can bring myself to imagine, that I should be right in
undertaking so great and difficult a task. Remembering what I said
at first about probability, I will do my best to give as probable an
explanation as any other--or rather, more probable; and I will first go
back to the beginning and try to speak of each thing and of all. Once
more, then, at the commencement of my discourse, I call upon God, and
beg him to be our saviour out of a strange and unwonted enquiry, and to
bring us to the haven of probability. So now let us begin again.

This new beginning of our discussion of the universe requires a fuller
division than the former; for then we made two classes, now a third must
be revealed. The two sufficed for the former discussion: one, which we
assumed, was a pattern intelligible and always the same; and the second
was only the imitation of the pattern, generated and visible. There is
also a third kind which we did not distinguish at the time, conceiving
that the two would be enough. But now the argument seems to require
that we should set forth in words another kind, which is difficult of
explanation and dimly seen. What nature are we to attribute to this new
kind of being? We reply, that it is the receptacle, and in a manner the
nurse, of all generation. I have spoken the truth; but I must express
myself in clearer language, and this will be an arduous task for
many reasons, and in particular because I must first raise questions
concerning fire and the other elements, and determine what each of them
is; for to say, with any probability or certitude, which of them should
be called water rather than fire, and which should be called any of them
rather than all or some one of them, is a difficult matter. How, then,
shall we settle this point, and what questions about the elements may be
fairly raised?

In the first place, we see that what we just now called water, by
condensation, I suppose, becomes stone and earth; and this same element,
when melted and dispersed, passes into vapour and air. Air, again, when
inflamed, becomes fire; and again fire, when condensed and extinguished,
passes once more into the form of air; and once more, air, when
collected and condensed, produces cloud and mist; and from these, when
still more compressed, comes flowing water, and from water comes earth
and stones once more; and thus generation appears to be transmitted from
one to the other in a circle. Thus, then, as the several elements never
present themselves in the same form, how can any one have the assurance
to assert positively that any of them, whatever it may be, is one thing
rather than another? No one can. But much the safest plan is to speak of
them as follows:--Anything which we see to be continually changing, as,
for example, fire, we must not call 'this' or 'that,' but rather say
that it is 'of such a nature'; nor let us speak of water as 'this'; but
always as 'such'; nor must we imply that there is any stability in any
of those things which we indicate by the use of the words 'this' and
'that,' supposing ourselves to signify something thereby; for they
are too volatile to be detained in any such expressions as 'this,'
or 'that,' or 'relative to this,' or any other mode of speaking which
represents them as permanent. We ought not to apply 'this' to any of
them, but rather the word 'such'; which expresses the similar principle
circulating in each and all of them; for example, that should be called
'fire' which is of such a nature always, and so of everything that has
generation. That in which the elements severally grow up, and appear,
and decay, is alone to be called by the name 'this' or 'that'; but that
which is of a certain nature, hot or white, or anything which admits of
opposite qualities, and all things that are compounded of them, ought
not to be so denominated. Let me make another attempt to explain my
meaning more clearly. Suppose a person to make all kinds of figures of
gold and to be always transmuting one form into all the rest;--somebody
points to one of them and asks what it is. By far the safest and truest
answer is, That is gold; and not to call the triangle or any other
figures which are formed in the gold 'these,' as though they had
existence, since they are in process of change while he is making
the assertion; but if the questioner be willing to take the safe and
indefinite expression, 'such,' we should be satisfied. And the same
argument applies to the universal nature which receives all bodies--that
must be always called the same; for, while receiving all things, she
never departs at all from her own nature, and never in any way, or at
any time, assumes a form like that of any of the things which enter into
her; she is the natural recipient of all impressions, and is stirred and
informed by them, and appears different from time to time by reason
of them. But the forms which enter into and go out of her are the
likenesses of real existences modelled after their patterns in a
wonderful and inexplicable manner, which we will hereafter investigate.
For the present we have only to conceive of three natures: first,
that which is in process of generation; secondly, that in which the
generation takes place; and thirdly, that of which the thing generated
is a resemblance. And we may liken the receiving principle to a mother,
and the source or spring to a father, and the intermediate nature to
a child; and may remark further, that if the model is to take every
variety of form, then the matter in which the model is fashioned will
not be duly prepared, unless it is formless, and free from the impress
of any of those shapes which it is hereafter to receive from without.
For if the matter were like any of the supervening forms, then whenever
any opposite or entirely different nature was stamped upon its surface,
it would take the impression badly, because it would intrude its own
shape. Wherefore, that which is to receive all forms should have
no form; as in making perfumes they first contrive that the liquid
substance which is to receive the scent shall be as inodorous as
possible; or as those who wish to impress figures on soft substances
do not allow any previous impression to remain, but begin by making the
surface as even and smooth as possible. In the same way that which is to
receive perpetually and through its whole extent the resemblances of all
eternal beings ought to be devoid of any particular form. Wherefore, the
mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible
things, is not to be termed earth, or air, or fire, or water, or any of
their compounds or any of the elements from which these are derived, but
is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in
some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most
incomprehensible. In saying this we shall not be far wrong; as far,
however, as we can attain to a knowledge of her from the previous
considerations, we may truly say that fire is that part of her nature
which from time to time is inflamed, and water that which is moistened,
and that the mother substance becomes earth and air, in so far as she
receives the impressions of them.

Let us consider this question more precisely. Is there any self-existent
fire? and do all those things which we call self-existent exist? or
are only those things which we see, or in some way perceive through the
bodily organs, truly existent, and nothing whatever besides them? And is
all that which we call an intelligible essence nothing at all, and
only a name? Here is a question which we must not leave unexamined or
undetermined, nor must we affirm too confidently that there can be no
decision; neither must we interpolate in our present long discourse
a digression equally long, but if it is possible to set forth a great
principle in a few words, that is just what we want.

Thus I state my view:--If mind and true opinion are two distinct
classes, then I say that there certainly are these self-existent ideas
unperceived by sense, and apprehended only by the mind; if, however, as
some say, true opinion differs in no respect from mind, then everything
that we perceive through the body is to be regarded as most real
and certain. But we must affirm them to be distinct, for they have a
distinct origin and are of a different nature; the one is implanted
in us by instruction, the other by persuasion; the one is always
accompanied by true reason, the other is without reason; the one cannot
be overcome by persuasion, but the other can: and lastly, every man may
be said to share in true opinion, but mind is the attribute of the gods
and of very few men. Wherefore also we must acknowledge that there
is one kind of being which is always the same, uncreated and
indestructible, never receiving anything into itself from without, nor
itself going out to any other, but invisible and imperceptible by any
sense, and of which the contemplation is granted to intelligence only.
And there is another nature of the same name with it, and like to it,
perceived by sense, created, always in motion, becoming in place and
again vanishing out of place, which is apprehended by opinion and sense.
And there is a third nature, which is space, and is eternal, and admits
not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is
apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and
is hardly real; which we beholding as in a dream, say of all existence
that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, but that
what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. Of these and
other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality
of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast
off sleep and determine the truth about them. For an image, since the
reality, after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it
exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be
in another (i.e. in space), grasping existence in some way or other,
or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the
nature of true being, maintains that while two things (i.e. the image
and space) are different they cannot exist one of them in the other and
so be one and also two at the same time.

Thus have I concisely given the result of my thoughts; and my verdict is
that being and space and generation, these three, existed in their three
ways before the heaven; and that the nurse of generation, moistened by
water and inflamed by fire, and receiving the forms of earth and air,
and experiencing all the affections which accompany these, presented
a strange variety of appearances; and being full of powers which were
neither similar nor equally balanced, was never in any part in a state
of equipoise, but swaying unevenly hither and thither, was shaken by
them, and by its motion again shook them; and the elements when moved
were separated and carried continually, some one way, some another; as,
when grain is shaken and winnowed by fans and other instruments used in
the threshing of corn, the close and heavy particles are borne away and
settle in one direction, and the loose and light particles in another.
In this manner, the four kinds or elements were then shaken by the
receiving vessel, which, moving like a winnowing machine, scattered
far away from one another the elements most unlike, and forced the most
similar elements into close contact. Wherefore also the various elements
had different places before they were arranged so as to form the
universe. At first, they were all without reason and measure. But when
the world began to get into order, fire and water and earth and air had
only certain faint traces of themselves, and were altogether such as
everything might be expected to be in the absence of God; this, I
say, was their nature at that time, and God fashioned them by form and
number. Let it be consistently maintained by us in all that we say that
God made them as far as possible the fairest and best, out of things
which were not fair and good. And now I will endeavour to show you the
disposition and generation of them by an unaccustomed argument, which I
am compelled to use; but I believe that you will be able to follow me,
for your education has made you familiar with the methods of science.

In the first place, then, as is evident to all, fire and earth and water
and air are bodies. And every sort of body possesses solidity, and
every solid must necessarily be contained in planes; and every plane
rectilinear figure is composed of triangles; and all triangles are
originally of two kinds, both of which are made up of one right and two
acute angles; one of them has at either end of the base the half of a
divided right angle, having equal sides, while in the other the right
angle is divided into unequal parts, having unequal sides. These, then,
proceeding by a combination of probability with demonstration, we
assume to be the original elements of fire and the other bodies; but the
principles which are prior to these God only knows, and he of men who is
the friend of God. And next we have to determine what are the four most
beautiful bodies which are unlike one another, and of which some are
capable of resolution into one another; for having discovered thus much,
we shall know the true origin of earth and fire and of the proportionate
and intermediate elements. And then we shall not be willing to allow
that there are any distinct kinds of visible bodies fairer than these.
Wherefore we must endeavour to construct the four forms of bodies
which excel in beauty, and then we shall be able to say that we have
sufficiently apprehended their nature. Now of the two triangles,
the isosceles has one form only; the scalene or unequal-sided has
an infinite number. Of the infinite forms we must select the most
beautiful, if we are to proceed in due order, and any one who can
point out a more beautiful form than ours for the construction of these
bodies, shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend.
Now, the one which we maintain to be the most beautiful of all the many
triangles (and we need not speak of the others) is that of which the
double forms a third triangle which is equilateral; the reason of this
would be long to tell; he who disproves what we are saying, and shows
that we are mistaken, may claim a friendly victory. Then let us choose
two triangles, out of which fire and the other elements have been
constructed, one isosceles, the other having the square of the longer
side equal to three times the square of the lesser side.

Now is the time to explain what was before obscurely said: there was an
error in imagining that all the four elements might be generated by and
into one another; this, I say, was an erroneous supposition, for
there are generated from the triangles which we have selected four
kinds--three from the one which has the sides unequal; the fourth
alone is framed out of the isosceles triangle. Hence they cannot all be
resolved into one another, a great number of small bodies being combined
into a few large ones, or the converse. But three of them can be thus
resolved and compounded, for they all spring from one, and when the
greater bodies are broken up, many small bodies will spring up out
of them and take their own proper figures; or, again, when many small
bodies are dissolved into their triangles, if they become one, they will
form one large mass of another kind. So much for their passage into one
another. I have now to speak of their several kinds, and show out of
what combinations of numbers each of them was formed. The first will be
the simplest and smallest construction, and its element is that triangle
which has its hypotenuse twice the lesser side. When two such triangles
are joined at the diagonal, and this is repeated three times, and the
triangles rest their diagonals and shorter sides on the same point as
a centre, a single equilateral triangle is formed out of six triangles;
and four equilateral triangles, if put together, make out of every three
plane angles one solid angle, being that which is nearest to the most
obtuse of plane angles; and out of the combination of these four angles
arises the first solid form which distributes into equal and similar
parts the whole circle in which it is inscribed. The second species
of solid is formed out of the same triangles, which unite as eight
equilateral triangles and form one solid angle out of four plane angles,
and out of six such angles the second body is completed. And the third
body is made up of 120 triangular elements, forming twelve solid angles,
each of them included in five plane equilateral triangles, having
altogether twenty bases, each of which is an equilateral triangle. The
one element (that is, the triangle which has its hypotenuse twice the
lesser side) having generated these figures, generated no more; but
the isosceles triangle produced the fourth elementary figure, which
is compounded of four such triangles, joining their right angles in a
centre, and forming one equilateral quadrangle. Six of these united form
eight solid angles, each of which is made by the combination of three
plane right angles; the figure of the body thus composed is a cube,
having six plane quadrangular equilateral bases. There was yet a fifth
combination which God used in the delineation of the universe.

Now, he who, duly reflecting on all this, enquires whether the worlds
are to be regarded as indefinite or definite in number, will be of
opinion that the notion of their indefiniteness is characteristic of a
sadly indefinite and ignorant mind. He, however, who raises the question
whether they are to be truly regarded as one or five, takes up a more
reasonable position. Arguing from probabilities, I am of opinion that
they are one; another, regarding the question from another point of
view, will be of another mind. But, leaving this enquiry, let us proceed
to distribute the elementary forms, which have now been created in idea,
among the four elements.

To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form; for earth is the most
immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies, and that
which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature.
Now, of the triangles which we assumed at first, that which has two
equal sides is by nature more firmly based than that which has unequal
sides; and of the compound figures which are formed out of either, the
plane equilateral quadrangle has necessarily a more stable basis than
the equilateral triangle, both in the whole and in the parts. Wherefore,
in assigning this figure to earth, we adhere to probability; and to
water we assign that one of the remaining forms which is the least
moveable; and the most moveable of them to fire; and to air that which
is intermediate. Also we assign the smallest body to fire, and the
greatest to water, and the intermediate in size to air; and, again, the
acutest body to fire, and the next in acuteness to air, and the third
to water. Of all these elements, that which has the fewest bases must
necessarily be the most moveable, for it must be the acutest and most
penetrating in every way, and also the lightest as being composed of the
smallest number of similar particles: and the second body has similar
properties in a second degree, and the third body in the third degree.
Let it be agreed, then, both according to strict reason and according to
probability, that the pyramid is the solid which is the original element
and seed of fire; and let us assign the element which was next in the
order of generation to air, and the third to water. We must imagine all
these to be so small that no single particle of any of the four kinds
is seen by us on account of their smallness: but when many of them are
collected together their aggregates are seen. And the ratios of their
numbers, motions, and other properties, everywhere God, as far as
necessity allowed or gave consent, has exactly perfected, and harmonized
in due proportion.

From all that we have just been saying about the elements or kinds, the
most probable conclusion is as follows:--earth, when meeting with fire
and dissolved by its sharpness, whether the dissolution take place in
the fire itself or perhaps in some mass of air or water, is borne hither
and thither, until its parts, meeting together and mutually harmonising,
again become earth; for they can never take any other form. But water,
when divided by fire or by air, on re-forming, may become one part fire
and two parts air; and a single volume of air divided becomes two of
fire. Again, when a small body of fire is contained in a larger body of
air or water or earth, and both are moving, and the fire struggling is
overcome and broken up, then two volumes of fire form one volume of air;
and when air is overcome and cut up into small pieces, two and a half
parts of air are condensed into one part of water. Let us consider the
matter in another way. When one of the other elements is fastened
upon by fire, and is cut by the sharpness of its angles and sides, it
coalesces with the fire, and then ceases to be cut by them any longer.
For no element which is one and the same with itself can be changed by
or change another of the same kind and in the same state. But so long
as in the process of transition the weaker is fighting against the
stronger, the dissolution continues. Again, when a few small particles,
enclosed in many larger ones, are in process of decomposition and
extinction, they only cease from their tendency to extinction when they
consent to pass into the conquering nature, and fire becomes air and air
water. But if bodies of another kind go and attack them (i.e. the small
particles), the latter continue to be dissolved until, being completely
forced back and dispersed, they make their escape to their own kindred,
or else, being overcome and assimilated to the conquering power, they
remain where they are and dwell with their victors, and from being many
become one. And owing to these affections, all things are changing their
place, for by the motion of the receiving vessel the bulk of each class
is distributed into its proper place; but those things which become
unlike themselves and like other things, are hurried by the shaking into
the place of the things to which they grow like.

Now all unmixed and primary bodies are produced by such causes as these.
As to the subordinate species which are included in the greater kinds,
they are to be attributed to the varieties in the structure of the two
original triangles. For either structure did not originally produce the
triangle of one size only, but some larger and some smaller, and there
are as many sizes as there are species of the four elements. Hence
when they are mingled with themselves and with one another there is an
endless variety of them, which those who would arrive at the probable
truth of nature ought duly to consider.

Unless a person comes to an understanding about the nature and
conditions of rest and motion, he will meet with many difficulties in
the discussion which follows. Something has been said of this matter
already, and something more remains to be said, which is, that motion
never exists in what is uniform. For to conceive that anything can
be moved without a mover is hard or indeed impossible, and equally
impossible to conceive that there can be a mover unless there be
something which can be moved--motion cannot exist where either of these
are wanting, and for these to be uniform is impossible; wherefore we
must assign rest to uniformity and motion to the want of uniformity. Now
inequality is the cause of the nature which is wanting in uniformity;
and of this we have already described the origin. But there still
remains the further point--why things when divided after their kinds do
not cease to pass through one another and to change their place--which
we will now proceed to explain. In the revolution of the universe are
comprehended all the four elements, and this being circular and having a
tendency to come together, compresses everything and will not allow any
place to be left void. Wherefore, also, fire above all things penetrates
everywhere, and air next, as being next in rarity of the elements;
and the two other elements in like manner penetrate according to their
degrees of rarity. For those things which are composed of the largest
particles have the largest void left in their compositions, and those
which are composed of the smallest particles have the least. And the
contraction caused by the compression thrusts the smaller particles into
the interstices of the larger. And thus, when the small parts are placed
side by side with the larger, and the lesser divide the greater and the
greater unite the lesser, all the elements are borne up and down and
hither and thither towards their own places; for the change in the size
of each changes its position in space. And these causes generate an
inequality which is always maintained, and is continually creating a
perpetual motion of the elements in all time.

In the next place we have to consider that there are divers kinds
of fire. There are, for example, first, flame; and secondly, those
emanations of flame which do not burn but only give light to the eyes;
thirdly, the remains of fire, which are seen in red-hot embers after the
flame has been extinguished. There are similar differences in the air;
of which the brightest part is called the aether, and the most turbid
sort mist and darkness; and there are various other nameless kinds which
arise from the inequality of the triangles. Water, again, admits in the
first place of a division into two kinds; the one liquid and the other
fusile. The liquid kind is composed of the small and unequal particles
of water; and moves itself and is moved by other bodies owing to the
want of uniformity and the shape of its particles; whereas the fusile
kind, being formed of large and uniform particles, is more stable than
the other, and is heavy and compact by reason of its uniformity.
But when fire gets in and dissolves the particles and destroys the
uniformity, it has greater mobility, and becoming fluid is thrust forth
by the neighbouring air and spreads upon the earth; and this dissolution
of the solid masses is called melting, and their spreading out upon the
earth flowing. Again, when the fire goes out of the fusile substance, it
does not pass into a vacuum, but into the neighbouring air; and the air
which is displaced forces together the liquid and still moveable mass
into the place which was occupied by the fire, and unites it with
itself. Thus compressed the mass resumes its equability, and is again
at unity with itself, because the fire which was the author of the
inequality has retreated; and this departure of the fire is called
cooling, and the coming together which follows upon it is termed
congealment. Of all the kinds termed fusile, that which is the densest
and is formed out of the finest and most uniform parts is that most
precious possession called gold, which is hardened by filtration through
rock; this is unique in kind, and has both a glittering and a yellow
colour. A shoot of gold, which is so dense as to be very hard, and takes
a black colour, is termed adamant. There is also another kind which has
parts nearly like gold, and of which there are several species; it is
denser than gold, and it contains a small and fine portion of earth, and
is therefore harder, yet also lighter because of the great interstices
which it has within itself; and this substance, which is one of the
bright and denser kinds of water, when solidified is called copper.
There is an alloy of earth mingled with it, which, when the two parts
grow old and are disunited, shows itself separately and is called rust.
The remaining phenomena of the same kind there will be no difficulty in
reasoning out by the method of probabilities. A man may sometimes set
aside meditations about eternal things, and for recreation turn to
consider the truths of generation which are probable only; he will thus
gain a pleasure not to be repented of, and secure for himself while
he lives a wise and moderate pastime. Let us grant ourselves this
indulgence, and go through the probabilities relating to the same
subjects which follow next in order.

Water which is mingled with fire, so much as is fine and liquid (being
so called by reason of its motion and the way in which it rolls along
the ground), and soft, because its bases give way and are less stable
than those of earth, when separated from fire and air and isolated,
becomes more uniform, and by their retirement is compressed into itself;
and if the condensation be very great, the water above the earth becomes
hail, but on the earth, ice; and that which is congealed in a less
degree and is only half solid, when above the earth is called snow, and
when upon the earth, and condensed from dew, hoar-frost. Then, again,
there are the numerous kinds of water which have been mingled with one
another, and are distilled through plants which grow in the earth; and
this whole class is called by the name of juices or saps. The unequal
admixture of these fluids creates a variety of species; most of them are
nameless, but four which are of a fiery nature are clearly distinguished
and have names. First, there is wine, which warms the soul as well
as the body: secondly, there is the oily nature, which is smooth and
divides the visual ray, and for this reason is bright and shining and of
a glistening appearance, including pitch, the juice of the castor berry,
oil itself, and other things of a like kind: thirdly, there is the class
of substances which expand the contracted parts of the mouth, until they
return to their natural state, and by reason of this property create
sweetness;--these are included under the general name of honey: and,
lastly, there is a frothy nature, which differs from all juices, having
a burning quality which dissolves the flesh; it is called opos (a
vegetable acid).

As to the kinds of earth, that which is filtered through water passes
into stone in the following manner:--The water which mixes with the
earth and is broken up in the process changes into air, and taking this
form mounts into its own place. But as there is no surrounding vacuum it
thrusts away the neighbouring air, and this being rendered heavy, and,
when it is displaced, having been poured around the mass of earth,
forcibly compresses it and drives it into the vacant space whence the
new air had come up; and the earth when compressed by the air into an
indissoluble union with water becomes rock. The fairer sort is that
which is made up of equal and similar parts and is transparent; that
which has the opposite qualities is inferior. But when all the watery
part is suddenly drawn out by fire, a more brittle substance is formed,
to which we give the name of pottery. Sometimes also moisture may
remain, and the earth which has been fused by fire becomes, when cool,
a certain stone of a black colour. A like separation of the water
which had been copiously mingled with them may occur in two substances
composed of finer particles of earth and of a briny nature; out of
either of them a half-solid-body is then formed, soluble in water--the
one, soda, which is used for purging away oil and earth, the other,
salt, which harmonizes so well in combinations pleasing to the palate,
and is, as the law testifies, a substance dear to the gods. The
compounds of earth and water are not soluble by water, but by fire only,
and for this reason:--Neither fire nor air melt masses of earth; for
their particles, being smaller than the interstices in its structure,
have plenty of room to move without forcing their way, and so they leave
the earth unmelted and undissolved; but particles of water, which are
larger, force a passage, and dissolve and melt the earth. Wherefore
earth when not consolidated by force is dissolved by water only; when
consolidated, by nothing but fire; for this is the only body which can
find an entrance. The cohesion of water again, when very strong, is
dissolved by fire only--when weaker, then either by air or fire--the
former entering the interstices, and the latter penetrating even the
triangles. But nothing can dissolve air, when strongly condensed, which
does not reach the elements or triangles; or if not strongly condensed,
then only fire can dissolve it. As to bodies composed of earth and
water, while the water occupies the vacant interstices of the earth
in them which are compressed by force, the particles of water which
approach them from without, finding no entrance, flow around the entire
mass and leave it undissolved; but the particles of fire, entering into
the interstices of the water, do to the water what water does to earth
and fire to air (The text seems to be corrupt.), and are the sole causes
of the compound body of earth and water liquefying and becoming fluid.
Now these bodies are of two kinds; some of them, such as glass and the
fusible sort of stones, have less water than they have earth; on the
other hand, substances of the nature of wax and incense have more of
water entering into their composition.

I have thus shown the various classes of bodies as they are diversified
by their forms and combinations and changes into one another, and now I
must endeavour to set forth their affections and the causes of them. In
the first place, the bodies which I have been describing are necessarily
objects of sense. But we have not yet considered the origin of flesh, or
what belongs to flesh, or of that part of the soul which is mortal. And
these things cannot be adequately explained without also explaining the
affections which are concerned with sensation, nor the latter without
the former: and yet to explain them together is hardly possible; for
which reason we must assume first one or the other and afterwards
examine the nature of our hypothesis. In order, then, that the
affections may follow regularly after the elements, let us presuppose
the existence of body and soul.

First, let us enquire what we mean by saying that fire is hot; and about
this we may reason from the dividing or cutting power which it exercises
on our bodies. We all of us feel that fire is sharp; and we may further
consider the fineness of the sides, and the sharpness of the angles,
and the smallness of the particles, and the swiftness of the motion--all
this makes the action of fire violent and sharp, so that it cuts
whatever it meets. And we must not forget that the original figure of
fire (i.e. the pyramid), more than any other form, has a dividing power
which cuts our bodies into small pieces (Kepmatizei), and thus naturally
produces that affection which we call heat; and hence the origin of
the name (thepmos, Kepma). Now, the opposite of this is sufficiently
manifest; nevertheless we will not fail to describe it. For the larger
particles of moisture which surround the body, entering in and driving
out the lesser, but not being able to take their places, compress the
moist principle in us; and this from being unequal and disturbed, is
forced by them into a state of rest, which is due to equability and
compression. But things which are contracted contrary to nature are
by nature at war, and force themselves apart; and to this war and
convulsion the name of shivering and trembling is given; and the whole
affection and the cause of the affection are both termed cold. That
is called hard to which our flesh yields, and soft which yields to
our flesh; and things are also termed hard and soft relatively to one
another. That which yields has a small base; but that which rests on
quadrangular bases is firmly posed and belongs to the class which offers
the greatest resistance; so too does that which is the most compact and
therefore most repellent. The nature of the light and the heavy will be
best understood when examined in connexion with our notions of above and
below; for it is quite a mistake to suppose that the universe is parted
into two regions, separate from and opposite to each other, the one
a lower to which all things tend which have any bulk, and an upper to
which things only ascend against their will. For as the universe is in
the form of a sphere, all the extremities, being equidistant from the
centre, are equally extremities, and the centre, which is equidistant
from them, is equally to be regarded as the opposite of them all. Such
being the nature of the world, when a person says that any of these
points is above or below, may he not be justly charged with using an
improper expression? For the centre of the world cannot be rightly
called either above or below, but is the centre and nothing else; and
the circumference is not the centre, and has in no one part of itself a
different relation to the centre from what it has in any of the opposite
parts. Indeed, when it is in every direction similar, how can one
rightly give to it names which imply opposition? For if there were any
solid body in equipoise at the centre of the universe, there would be
nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they are
all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the world in
a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former
position, speak of the same point as above and below; for, as I was
saying just now, to speak of the whole which is in the form of a globe
as having one part above and another below is not like a sensible man.
The reason why these names are used, and the circumstances under which
they are ordinarily applied by us to the division of the heavens, may be
elucidated by the following supposition:--if a person were to stand
in that part of the universe which is the appointed place of fire, and
where there is the great mass of fire to which fiery bodies gather--if,
I say, he were to ascend thither, and, having the power to do this, were
to abstract particles of fire and put them in scales and weigh them, and
then, raising the balance, were to draw the fire by force towards the
uncongenial element of the air, it would be very evident that he could
compel the smaller mass more readily than the larger; for when two
things are simultaneously raised by one and the same power, the smaller
body must necessarily yield to the superior power with less reluctance
than the larger; and the larger body is called heavy and said to
tend downwards, and the smaller body is called light and said to tend
upwards. And we may detect ourselves who are upon the earth doing
precisely the same thing. For we often separate earthy natures, and
sometimes earth itself, and draw them into the uncongenial element of
air by force and contrary to nature, both clinging to their kindred
elements. But that which is smaller yields to the impulse given by us
towards the dissimilar element more easily than the larger; and so we
call the former light, and the place towards which it is impelled we
call above, and the contrary state and place we call heavy and below
respectively. Now the relations of these must necessarily vary, because
the principal masses of the different elements hold opposite positions;
for that which is light, heavy, below or above in one place will be
found to be and become contrary and transverse and every way diverse in
relation to that which is light, heavy, below or above in an opposite
place. And about all of them this has to be considered:--that the
tendency of each towards its kindred element makes the body which is
moved heavy, and the place towards which the motion tends below, but
things which have an opposite tendency we call by an opposite name. Such
are the causes which we assign to these phenomena. As to the smooth
and the rough, any one who sees them can explain the reason of them
to another. For roughness is hardness mingled with irregularity, and
smoothness is produced by the joint effect of uniformity and density.

The most important of the affections which concern the whole body
remains to be considered--that is, the cause of pleasure and pain in the
perceptions of which I have been speaking, and in all other things which
are perceived by sense through the parts of the body, and have both
pains and pleasures attendant on them. Let us imagine the causes of
every affection, whether of sense or not, to be of the following nature,
remembering that we have already distinguished between the nature which
is easy and which is hard to move; for this is the direction in which we
must hunt the prey which we mean to take. A body which is of a nature
to be easily moved, on receiving an impression however slight, spreads
abroad the motion in a circle, the parts communicating with each other,
until at last, reaching the principle of mind, they announce the quality
of the agent. But a body of the opposite kind, being immobile, and not
extending to the surrounding region, merely receives the impression, and
does not stir any of the neighbouring parts; and since the parts do not
distribute the original impression to other parts, it has no effect
of motion on the whole animal, and therefore produces no effect on the
patient. This is true of the bones and hair and other more earthy parts
of the human body; whereas what was said above relates mainly to sight
and hearing, because they have in them the greatest amount of fire
and air. Now we must conceive of pleasure and pain in this way. An
impression produced in us contrary to nature and violent, if sudden,
is painful; and, again, the sudden return to nature is pleasant; but a
gentle and gradual return is imperceptible and vice versa. On the other
hand the impression of sense which is most easily produced is most
readily felt, but is not accompanied by pleasure or pain; such, for
example, are the affections of the sight, which, as we said above, is a
body naturally uniting with our body in the day-time; for cuttings and
burnings and other affections which happen to the sight do not give
pain, nor is there pleasure when the sight returns to its natural state;
but the sensations are clearest and strongest according to the manner in
which the eye is affected by the object, and itself strikes and touches
it; there is no violence either in the contraction or dilation of the
eye. But bodies formed of larger particles yield to the agent only with
a struggle; and then they impart their motions to the whole and cause
pleasure and pain--pain when alienated from their natural conditions,
and pleasure when restored to them. Things which experience gradual
withdrawings and emptyings of their nature, and great and sudden
replenishments, fail to perceive the emptying, but are sensible of the
replenishment; and so they occasion no pain, but the greatest pleasure,
to the mortal part of the soul, as is manifest in the case of perfumes.
But things which are changed all of a sudden, and only gradually and
with difficulty return to their own nature, have effects in every
way opposite to the former, as is evident in the case of burnings and
cuttings of the body.

Thus have we discussed the general affections of the whole body, and
the names of the agents which produce them. And now I will endeavour to
speak of the affections of particular parts, and the causes and agents
of them, as far as I am able. In the first place let us set forth what
was omitted when we were speaking of juices, concerning the affections
peculiar to the tongue. These too, like most of the other affections,
appear to be caused by certain contractions and dilations, but they
have besides more of roughness and smoothness than is found in other
affections; for whenever earthy particles enter into the small veins
which are the testing instruments of the tongue, reaching to the heart,
and fall upon the moist, delicate portions of flesh--when, as they
are dissolved, they contract and dry up the little veins, they are
astringent if they are rougher, but if not so rough, then only harsh.
Those of them which are of an abstergent nature, and purge the whole
surface of the tongue, if they do it in excess, and so encroach as to
consume some part of the flesh itself, like potash and soda, are all
termed bitter. But the particles which are deficient in the alkaline
quality, and which cleanse only moderately, are called salt, and having
no bitterness or roughness, are regarded as rather agreeable than
otherwise. Bodies which share in and are made smooth by the heat of
the mouth, and which are inflamed, and again in turn inflame that which
heats them, and which are so light that they are carried upwards to the
sensations of the head, and cut all that comes in their way, by reason
of these qualities in them, are all termed pungent. But when these same
particles, refined by putrefaction, enter into the narrow veins, and
are duly proportioned to the particles of earth and air which are there,
they set them whirling about one another, and while they are in a whirl
cause them to dash against and enter into one another, and so form
hollows surrounding the particles that enter--which watery vessels of
air (for a film of moisture, sometimes earthy, sometimes pure, is spread
around the air) are hollow spheres of water; and those of them which are
pure, are transparent, and are called bubbles, while those composed
of the earthy liquid, which is in a state of general agitation and
effervescence, are said to boil or ferment--of all these affections the
cause is termed acid. And there is the opposite affection arising from
an opposite cause, when the mass of entering particles, immersed in the
moisture of the mouth, is congenial to the tongue, and smooths and
oils over the roughness, and relaxes the parts which are unnaturally
contracted, and contracts the parts which are relaxed, and disposes
them all according to their nature;--that sort of remedy of violent
affections is pleasant and agreeable to every man, and has the name
sweet. But enough of this.

The faculty of smell does not admit of differences of kind; for all
smells are of a half-formed nature, and no element is so proportioned
as to have any smell. The veins about the nose are too narrow to admit
earth and water, and too wide to detain fire and air; and for this
reason no one ever perceives the smell of any of them; but smells always
proceed from bodies that are damp, or putrefying, or liquefying, or
evaporating, and are perceptible only in the intermediate state, when
water is changing into air and air into water; and all of them are
either vapour or mist. That which is passing out of air into water is
mist, and that which is passing from water into air is vapour; and hence
all smells are thinner than water and thicker than air. The proof of
this is, that when there is any obstruction to the respiration, and a
man draws in his breath by force, then no smell filters through, but the
air without the smell alone penetrates. Wherefore the varieties of smell
have no name, and they have not many, or definite and simple kinds;
but they are distinguished only as painful and pleasant, the one sort
irritating and disturbing the whole cavity which is situated between the
head and the navel, the other having a soothing influence, and restoring
this same region to an agreeable and natural condition.

In considering the third kind of sense, hearing, we must speak of the
causes in which it originates. We may in general assume sound to be a
blow which passes through the ears, and is transmitted by means of the
air, the brain, and the blood, to the soul, and that hearing is the
vibration of this blow, which begins in the head and ends in the region
of the liver. The sound which moves swiftly is acute, and the sound
which moves slowly is grave, and that which is regular is equable and
smooth, and the reverse is harsh. A great body of sound is loud, and
a small body of sound the reverse. Respecting the harmonies of sound I
must hereafter speak.

There is a fourth class of sensible things, having many intricate
varieties, which must now be distinguished. They are called by the
general name of colours, and are a flame which emanates from every sort
of body, and has particles corresponding to the sense of sight. I have
spoken already, in what has preceded, of the causes which generate
sight, and in this place it will be natural and suitable to give a
rational theory of colours.

Of the particles coming from other bodies which fall upon the sight,
some are smaller and some are larger, and some are equal to the parts of
the sight itself. Those which are equal are imperceptible, and we call
them transparent. The larger produce contraction, the smaller dilation,
in the sight, exercising a power akin to that of hot and cold bodies on
the flesh, or of astringent bodies on the tongue, or of those heating
bodies which we termed pungent. White and black are similar effects of
contraction and dilation in another sphere, and for this reason have
a different appearance. Wherefore, we ought to term white that which
dilates the visual ray, and the opposite of this is black. There is also
a swifter motion of a different sort of fire which strikes and dilates
the ray of sight until it reaches the eyes, forcing a way through their
passages and melting them, and eliciting from them a union of fire and
water which we call tears, being itself an opposite fire which comes
to them from an opposite direction--the inner fire flashes forth like
lightning, and the outer finds a way in and is extinguished in the
moisture, and all sorts of colours are generated by the mixture. This
affection is termed dazzling, and the object which produces it is
called bright and flashing. There is another sort of fire which is
intermediate, and which reaches and mingles with the moisture of the
eye without flashing; and in this, the fire mingling with the ray of
the moisture, produces a colour like blood, to which we give the name
of red. A bright hue mingled with red and white gives the colour called
auburn (Greek). The law of proportion, however, according to which the
several colours are formed, even if a man knew he would be foolish in
telling, for he could not give any necessary reason, nor indeed any
tolerable or probable explanation of them. Again, red, when mingled with
black and white, becomes purple, but it becomes umber (Greek) when the
colours are burnt as well as mingled and the black is more thoroughly
mixed with them. Flame-colour (Greek) is produced by a union of auburn
and dun (Greek), and dun by an admixture of black and white; pale yellow
(Greek), by an admixture of white and auburn. White and bright meeting,
and falling upon a full black, become dark blue (Greek), and when dark
blue mingles with white, a light blue (Greek) colour is formed, as
flame-colour with black makes leek green (Greek). There will be no
difficulty in seeing how and by what mixtures the colours derived from
these are made according to the rules of probability. He, however,
who should attempt to verify all this by experiment, would forget
the difference of the human and divine nature. For God only has the
knowledge and also the power which are able to combine many things into
one and again resolve the one into many. But no man either is or ever
will be able to accomplish either the one or the other operation.

These are the elements, thus of necessity then subsisting, which the
creator of the fairest and best of created things associated with
himself, when he made the self-sufficing and most perfect God, using the
necessary causes as his ministers in the accomplishment of his work,
but himself contriving the good in all his creations. Wherefore we may
distinguish two sorts of causes, the one divine and the other necessary,
and may seek for the divine in all things, as far as our nature admits,
with a view to the blessed life; but the necessary kind only for the
sake of the divine, considering that without them and when isolated from
them, these higher things for which we look cannot be apprehended or
received or in any way shared by us.

Seeing, then, that we have now prepared for our use the various classes
of causes which are the material out of which the remainder of our
discourse must be woven, just as wood is the material of the carpenter,
let us revert in a few words to the point at which we began, and then
endeavour to add on a suitable ending to the beginning of our tale.

As I said at first, when all things were in disorder God created in
each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each
other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive.
For in those days nothing had any proportion except by accident; nor did
any of the things which now have names deserve to be named at all--as,
for example, fire, water, and the rest of the elements. All these the
creator first set in order, and out of them he constructed the universe,
which was a single animal comprehending in itself all other animals,
mortal and immortal. Now of the divine, he himself was the creator,
but the creation of the mortal he committed to his offspring. And they,
imitating him, received from him the immortal principle of the soul; and
around this they proceeded to fashion a mortal body, and made it to
be the vehicle of the soul, and constructed within the body a soul of
another nature which was mortal, subject to terrible and irresistible
affections,--first of all, pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil;
then, pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two
foolish counsellors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily led
astray;--these they mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring
love according to necessary laws, and so framed man. Wherefore, fearing
to pollute the divine any more than was absolutely unavoidable, they
gave to the mortal nature a separate habitation in another part of the
body, placing the neck between them to be the isthmus and boundary,
which they constructed between the head and breast, to keep them apart.
And in the breast, and in what is termed the thorax, they encased the
mortal soul; and as the one part of this was superior and the other
inferior they divided the cavity of the thorax into two parts, as the
women's and men's apartments are divided in houses, and placed the
midriff to be a wall of partition between them. That part of the
inferior soul which is endowed with courage and passion and loves
contention they settled nearer the head, midway between the midriff and
the neck, in order that it might be under the rule of reason and might
join with it in controlling and restraining the desires when they are no
longer willing of their own accord to obey the word of command issuing
from the citadel.

The heart, the knot of the veins and the fountain of the blood which
races through all the limbs, was set in the place of guard, that when
the might of passion was roused by reason making proclamation of any
wrong assailing them from without or being perpetrated by the desires
within, quickly the whole power of feeling in the body, perceiving
these commands and threats, might obey and follow through every turn and
alley, and thus allow the principle of the best to have the command in
all of them. But the gods, foreknowing that the palpitation of the heart
in the expectation of danger and the swelling and excitement of passion
was caused by fire, formed and implanted as a supporter to the heart the
lung, which was, in the first place, soft and bloodless, and also had
within hollows like the pores of a sponge, in order that by receiving
the breath and the drink, it might give coolness and the power of
respiration and alleviate the heat. Wherefore they cut the air-channels
leading to the lung, and placed the lung about the heart as a soft
spring, that, when passion was rife within, the heart, beating against
a yielding body, might be cooled and suffer less, and might thus become
more ready to join with passion in the service of reason.

The part of the soul which desires meats and drinks and the other things
of which it has need by reason of the bodily nature, they placed between
the midriff and the boundary of the navel, contriving in all this region
a sort of manger for the food of the body; and there they bound it down
like a wild animal which was chained up with man, and must be nourished
if man was to exist. They appointed this lower creation his place here
in order that he might be always feeding at the manger, and have his
dwelling as far as might be from the council-chamber, making as little
noise and disturbance as possible, and permitting the best part to
advise quietly for the good of the whole. And knowing that this lower
principle in man would not comprehend reason, and even if attaining
to some degree of perception would never naturally care for rational
notions, but that it would be led away by phantoms and visions night
and day,--to be a remedy for this, God combined with it the liver, and
placed it in the house of the lower nature, contriving that it should
be solid and smooth, and bright and sweet, and should also have a bitter
quality, in order that the power of thought, which proceeds from the
mind, might be reflected as in a mirror which receives likenesses of
objects and gives back images of them to the sight; and so might strike
terror into the desires, when, making use of the bitter part of the
liver, to which it is akin, it comes threatening and invading, and
diffusing this bitter element swiftly through the whole liver produces
colours like bile, and contracting every part makes it wrinkled and
rough; and twisting out of its right place and contorting the lobe and
closing and shutting up the vessels and gates, causes pain and
loathing. And the converse happens when some gentle inspiration of the
understanding pictures images of an opposite character, and allays the
bile and bitterness by refusing to stir or touch the nature opposed
to itself, but by making use of the natural sweetness of the liver,
corrects all things and makes them to be right and smooth and free, and
renders the portion of the soul which resides about the liver happy
and joyful, enabling it to pass the night in peace, and to practise
divination in sleep, inasmuch as it has no share in mind and reason. For
the authors of our being, remembering the command of their father when
he bade them create the human race as good as they could, that they
might correct our inferior parts and make them to attain a measure of
truth, placed in the liver the seat of divination. And herein is a proof
that God has given the art of divination not to the wisdom, but to the
foolishness of man. No man, when in his wits, attains prophetic truth
and inspiration; but when he receives the inspired word, either his
intelligence is enthralled in sleep, or he is demented by some distemper
or possession. And he who would understand what he remembers to have
been said, whether in a dream or when he was awake, by the prophetic
and inspired nature, or would determine by reason the meaning of the
apparitions which he has seen, and what indications they afford to
this man or that, of past, present or future good and evil, must first
recover his wits. But, while he continues demented, he cannot judge
of the visions which he sees or the words which he utters; the ancient
saying is very true, that 'only a man who has his wits can act or judge
about himself and his own affairs.' And for this reason it is customary
to appoint interpreters to be judges of the true inspiration. Some
persons call them prophets; they are quite unaware that they are only
the expositors of dark sayings and visions, and are not to be called
prophets at all, but only interpreters of prophecy.

Such is the nature of the liver, which is placed as we have described
in order that it may give prophetic intimations. During the life of each
individual these intimations are plainer, but after his death the liver
becomes blind, and delivers oracles too obscure to be intelligible. The
neighbouring organ (the spleen) is situated on the left-hand side, and
is constructed with a view of keeping the liver bright and pure,--like
a napkin, always ready prepared and at hand to clean the mirror. And
hence, when any impurities arise in the region of the liver by reason of
disorders of the body, the loose nature of the spleen, which is composed
of a hollow and bloodless tissue, receives them all and clears them
away, and when filled with the unclean matter, swells and festers, but,
again, when the body is purged, settles down into the same place as
before, and is humbled.

Concerning the soul, as to which part is mortal and which divine, and
how and why they are separated, and where located, if God acknowledges
that we have spoken the truth, then, and then only, can we be confident;
still, we may venture to assert that what has been said by us is
probable, and will be rendered more probable by investigation. Let us
assume thus much.

The creation of the rest of the body follows next in order, and this we
may investigate in a similar manner. And it appears to be very meet that
the body should be framed on the following principles:--

The authors of our race were aware that we should be intemperate in
eating and drinking, and take a good deal more than was necessary or
proper, by reason of gluttony. In order then that disease might not
quickly destroy us, and lest our mortal race should perish without
fulfilling its end--intending to provide against this, the gods made
what is called the lower belly, to be a receptacle for the superfluous
meat and drink, and formed the convolution of the bowels, so that the
food might be prevented from passing quickly through and compelling
the body to require more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony, and
making the whole race an enemy to philosophy and music, and rebellious
against the divinest element within us.

The bones and flesh, and other similar parts of us, were made as
follows. The first principle of all of them was the generation of the
marrow. For the bonds of life which unite the soul with the body are
made fast there, and they are the root and foundation of the human race.
The marrow itself is created out of other materials: God took such of
the primary triangles as were straight and smooth, and were adapted by
their perfection to produce fire and water, and air and earth--these, I
say, he separated from their kinds, and mingling them in due proportions
with one another, made the marrow out of them to be a universal seed of
the whole race of mankind; and in this seed he then planted and enclosed
the souls, and in the original distribution gave to the marrow as many
and various forms as the different kinds of souls were hereafter to
receive. That which, like a field, was to receive the divine seed, he
made round every way, and called that portion of the marrow, brain,
intending that, when an animal was perfected, the vessel containing this
substance should be the head; but that which was intended to contain
the remaining and mortal part of the soul he distributed into figures at
once round and elongated, and he called them all by the name 'marrow';
and to these, as to anchors, fastening the bonds of the whole soul,
he proceeded to fashion around them the entire framework of our body,
constructing for the marrow, first of all a complete covering of bone.

Bone was composed by him in the following manner. Having sifted pure and
smooth earth he kneaded it and wetted it with marrow, and after that he
put it into fire and then into water, and once more into fire and again
into water--in this way by frequent transfers from one to the other he
made it insoluble by either. Out of this he fashioned, as in a lathe,
a globe made of bone, which he placed around the brain, and in this he
left a narrow opening; and around the marrow of the neck and back
he formed vertebrae which he placed under one another like pivots,
beginning at the head and extending through the whole of the trunk.
Thus wishing to preserve the entire seed, he enclosed it in a stone-like
casing, inserting joints, and using in the formation of them the power
of the other or diverse as an intermediate nature, that they might have
motion and flexure. Then again, considering that the bone would be too
brittle and inflexible, and when heated and again cooled would soon
mortify and destroy the seed within--having this in view, he contrived
the sinews and the flesh, that so binding all the members together by
the sinews, which admitted of being stretched and relaxed about the
vertebrae, he might thus make the body capable of flexion and extension,
while the flesh would serve as a protection against the summer heat
and against the winter cold, and also against falls, softly and easily
yielding to external bodies, like articles made of felt; and containing
in itself a warm moisture which in summer exudes and makes the surface
damp, would impart a natural coolness to the whole body; and again in
winter by the help of this internal warmth would form a very tolerable
defence against the frost which surrounds it and attacks it from
without. He who modelled us, considering these things, mixed earth with
fire and water and blended them; and making a ferment of acid and salt,
he mingled it with them and formed soft and succulent flesh. As for
the sinews, he made them of a mixture of bone and unfermented flesh,
attempered so as to be in a mean, and gave them a yellow colour;
wherefore the sinews have a firmer and more glutinous nature than flesh,
but a softer and moister nature than the bones. With these God covered
the bones and marrow, binding them together by sinews, and then
enshrouded them all in an upper covering of flesh. The more living and
sensitive of the bones he enclosed in the thinnest film of flesh, and
those which had the least life within them in the thickest and most
solid flesh. So again on the joints of the bones, where reason indicated
that no more was required, he placed only a thin covering of flesh,
that it might not interfere with the flexion of our bodies and make them
unwieldy because difficult to move; and also that it might not, by being
crowded and pressed and matted together, destroy sensation by reason of
its hardness, and impair the memory and dull the edge of intelligence.
Wherefore also the thighs and the shanks and the hips, and the bones of
the arms and the forearms, and other parts which have no joints, and the
inner bones, which on account of the rarity of the soul in the marrow
are destitute of reason--all these are abundantly provided with flesh;
but such as have mind in them are in general less fleshy, except
where the creator has made some part solely of flesh in order to give
sensation,--as, for example, the tongue. But commonly this is not the
case. For the nature which comes into being and grows up in us by a law
of necessity, does not admit of the combination of solid bone and much
flesh with acute perceptions. More than any other part the framework
of the head would have had them, if they could have co-existed, and the
human race, having a strong and fleshy and sinewy head, would have had
a life twice or many times as long as it now has, and also more healthy
and free from pain. But our creators, considering whether they should
make a longer-lived race which was worse, or a shorter-lived race which
was better, came to the conclusion that every one ought to prefer a
shorter span of life, which was better, to a longer one, which was
worse; and therefore they covered the head with thin bone, but not with
flesh and sinews, since it had no joints; and thus the head was added,
having more wisdom and sensation than the rest of the body, but also
being in every man far weaker. For these reasons and after this manner
God placed the sinews at the extremity of the head, in a circle round
the neck, and glued them together by the principle of likeness and
fastened the extremities of the jawbones to them below the face, and the
other sinews he dispersed throughout the body, fastening limb to limb.
The framers of us framed the mouth, as now arranged, having teeth and
tongue and lips, with a view to the necessary and the good contriving
the way in for necessary purposes, the way out for the best purposes;
for that is necessary which enters in and gives food to the body; but
the river of speech, which flows out of a man and ministers to the
intelligence, is the fairest and noblest of all streams. Still the head
could neither be left a bare frame of bones, on account of the extremes
of heat and cold in the different seasons, nor yet be allowed to
be wholly covered, and so become dull and senseless by reason of an
overgrowth of flesh. The fleshy nature was not therefore wholly dried
up, but a large sort of peel was parted off and remained over, which
is now called the skin. This met and grew by the help of the cerebral
moisture, and became the circular envelopment of the head. And the
moisture, rising up under the sutures, watered and closed in the skin
upon the crown, forming a sort of knot. The diversity of the sutures was
caused by the power of the courses of the soul and of the food, and the
more these struggled against one another the more numerous they became,
and fewer if the struggle were less violent. This skin the divine power
pierced all round with fire, and out of the punctures which were thus
made the moisture issued forth, and the liquid and heat which was pure
came away, and a mixed part which was composed of the same material as
the skin, and had a fineness equal to the punctures, was borne up by
its own impulse and extended far outside the head, but being too slow
to escape, was thrust back by the external air, and rolled up underneath
the skin, where it took root. Thus the hair sprang up in the skin, being
akin to it because it is like threads of leather, but rendered harder
and closer through the pressure of the cold, by which each hair, while
in process of separation from the skin, is compressed and cooled.
Wherefore the creator formed the head hairy, making use of the causes
which I have mentioned, and reflecting also that instead of flesh the
brain needed the hair to be a light covering or guard, which would give
shade in summer and shelter in winter, and at the same time would not
impede our quickness of perception. From the combination of sinew,
skin, and bone, in the structure of the finger, there arises a triple
compound, which, when dried up, takes the form of one hard skin
partaking of all three natures, and was fabricated by these second
causes, but designed by mind which is the principal cause with an eye
to the future. For our creators well knew that women and other animals
would some day be framed out of men, and they further knew that many
animals would require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they
fashioned in men at their first creation the rudiments of nails. For
this purpose and for these reasons they caused skin, hair, and nails to
grow at the extremities of the limbs.

And now that all the parts and members of the mortal animal had come
together, since its life of necessity consisted of fire and breath,
and it therefore wasted away by dissolution and depletion, the gods
contrived the following remedy: They mingled a nature akin to that of
man with other forms and perceptions, and thus created another kind
of animal. These are the trees and plants and seeds which have been
improved by cultivation and are now domesticated among us; anciently
there were only the wild kinds, which are older than the cultivated. For
everything that partakes of life may be truly called a living being, and
the animal of which we are now speaking partakes of the third kind of
soul, which is said to be seated between the midriff and the navel,
having no part in opinion or reason or mind, but only in feelings of
pleasure and pain and the desires which accompany them. For this nature
is always in a passive state, revolving in and about itself, repelling
the motion from without and using its own, and accordingly is not
endowed by nature with the power of observing or reflecting on its own
concerns. Wherefore it lives and does not differ from a living
being, but is fixed and rooted in the same spot, having no power of
self-motion.

Now after the superior powers had created all these natures to be food
for us who are of the inferior nature, they cut various channels through
the body as through a garden, that it might be watered as from a running
stream. In the first place, they cut two hidden channels or veins down
the back where the skin and the flesh join, which answered severally
to the right and left side of the body. These they let down along the
backbone, so as to have the marrow of generation between them, where it
was most likely to flourish, and in order that the stream coming down
from above might flow freely to the other parts, and equalize the
irrigation. In the next place, they divided the veins about the head,
and interlacing them, they sent them in opposite directions; those
coming from the right side they sent to the left of the body, and those
from the left they diverted towards the right, so that they and the skin
might together form a bond which should fasten the head to the body,
since the crown of the head was not encircled by sinews; and also in
order that the sensations from both sides might be distributed over the
whole body. And next, they ordered the water-courses of the body in a
manner which I will describe, and which will be more easily understood
if we begin by admitting that all things which have lesser parts retain
the greater, but the greater cannot retain the lesser. Now of all
natures fire has the smallest parts, and therefore penetrates through
earth and water and air and their compounds, nor can anything hold it.
And a similar principle applies to the human belly; for when meats and
drinks enter it, it holds them, but it cannot hold air and fire, because
the particles of which they consist are smaller than its own structure.

These elements, therefore, God employed for the sake of distributing
moisture from the belly into the veins, weaving together a network
of fire and air like a weel, having at the entrance two lesser weels;
further he constructed one of these with two openings, and from the
lesser weels he extended cords reaching all round to the extremities of
the network. All the interior of the net he made of fire, but the lesser
weels and their cavity, of air. The network he took and spread over the
newly-formed animal in the following manner:--He let the lesser weels
pass into the mouth; there were two of them, and one he let down by the
air-pipes into the lungs, the other by the side of the air-pipes into
the belly. The former he divided into two branches, both of which he
made to meet at the channels of the nose, so that when the way through
the mouth did not act, the streams of the mouth as well were replenished
through the nose. With the other cavity (i.e. of the greater weel) he
enveloped the hollow parts of the body, and at one time he made all this
to flow into the lesser weels, quite gently, for they are composed of
air, and at another time he caused the lesser weels to flow back again;
and the net he made to find a way in and out through the pores of the
body, and the rays of fire which are bound fast within followed the
passage of the air either way, never at any time ceasing so long as the
mortal being holds together. This process, as we affirm, the name-giver
named inspiration and expiration. And all this movement, active as
well as passive, takes place in order that the body, being watered and
cooled, may receive nourishment and life; for when the respiration is
going in and out, and the fire, which is fast bound within, follows
it, and ever and anon moving to and fro, enters through the belly and
reaches the meat and drink, it dissolves them, and dividing them into
small portions and guiding them through the passages where it goes,
pumps them as from a fountain into the channels of the veins, and makes
the stream of the veins flow through the body as through a conduit.

Let us once more consider the phenomena of respiration, and enquire into
the causes which have made it what it is. They are as follows:--Seeing
that there is no such thing as a vacuum into which any of those things
which are moved can enter, and the breath is carried from us into the
external air, the next point is, as will be clear to every one, that
it does not go into a vacant space, but pushes its neighbour out of its
place, and that which is thrust out in turn drives out its neighbour;
and in this way everything of necessity at last comes round to that
place from whence the breath came forth, and enters in there, and
following the breath, fills up the vacant space; and this goes on like
the rotation of a wheel, because there can be no such thing as a vacuum.
Wherefore also the breast and the lungs, when they emit the breath,
are replenished by the air which surrounds the body and which enters
in through the pores of the flesh and is driven round in a circle; and
again, the air which is sent away and passes out through the body forces
the breath inwards through the passage of the mouth and the nostrils.
Now the origin of this movement may be supposed to be as follows. In the
interior of every animal the hottest part is that which is around the
blood and veins; it is in a manner an internal fountain of fire, which
we compare to the network of a creel, being woven all of fire and
extended through the centre of the body, while the outer parts are
composed of air. Now we must admit that heat naturally proceeds outward
to its own place and to its kindred element; and as there are two exits
for the heat, the one out through the body, and the other through the
mouth and nostrils, when it moves towards the one, it drives round the
air at the other, and that which is driven round falls into the fire
and becomes warm, and that which goes forth is cooled. But when the heat
changes its place, and the particles at the other exit grow warmer, the
hotter air inclining in that direction and carried towards its native
element, fire, pushes round the air at the other; and this being
affected in the same way and communicating the same impulse, a circular
motion swaying to and fro is produced by the double process, which we
call inspiration and expiration.

The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses and of the swallowing of drink
and of the projection of bodies, whether discharged in the air or bowled
along the ground, are to be investigated on a similar principle;
and swift and slow sounds, which appear to be high and low, and are
sometimes discordant on account of their inequality, and then again
harmonical on account of the equality of the motion which they excite in
us. For when the motions of the antecedent swifter sounds begin to pause
and the two are equalized, the slower sounds overtake the swifter and
then propel them. When they overtake them they do not intrude a new
and discordant motion, but introduce the beginnings of a slower, which
answers to the swifter as it dies away, thus producing a single mixed
expression out of high and low, whence arises a pleasure which even the
unwise feel, and which to the wise becomes a higher sort of delight,
being an imitation of divine harmony in mortal motions. Moreover, as to
the flowing of water, the fall of the thunderbolt, and the marvels that
are observed about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean stones,--in
none of these cases is there any attraction; but he who investigates
rightly, will find that such wonderful phenomena are attributable to the
combination of certain conditions--the non-existence of a vacuum, the
fact that objects push one another round, and that they change places,
passing severally into their proper positions as they are divided or
combined.

Such as we have seen, is the nature and such are the causes of
respiration,--the subject in which this discussion originated. For the
fire cuts the food and following the breath surges up within, fire and
breath rising together and filling the veins by drawing up out of the
belly and pouring into them the cut portions of the food; and so the
streams of food are kept flowing through the whole body in all animals.
And fresh cuttings from kindred substances, whether the fruits of the
earth or herb of the field, which God planted to be our daily food,
acquire all sorts of colours by their inter-mixture; but red is the most
pervading of them, being created by the cutting action of fire and by
the impression which it makes on a moist substance; and hence the liquid
which circulates in the body has a colour such as we have described.
The liquid itself we call blood, which nourishes the flesh and the whole
body, whence all parts are watered and empty places filled.

Now the process of repletion and evacuation is effected after the
manner of the universal motion by which all kindred substances are drawn
towards one another. For the external elements which surround us are
always causing us to consume away, and distributing and sending off like
to like; the particles of blood, too, which are divided and contained
within the frame of the animal as in a sort of heaven, are compelled
to imitate the motion of the universe. Each, therefore, of the divided
parts within us, being carried to its kindred nature, replenishes the
void. When more is taken away than flows in, then we decay, and when
less, we grow and increase.

The frame of the entire creature when young has the triangles of each
kind new, and may be compared to the keel of a vessel which is just off
the stocks; they are locked firmly together and yet the whole mass is
soft and delicate, being freshly formed of marrow and nurtured on milk.
Now when the triangles out of which meats and drinks are composed come
in from without, and are comprehended in the body, being older and
weaker than the triangles already there, the frame of the body gets the
better of them and its newer triangles cut them up, and so the animal
grows great, being nourished by a multitude of similar particles. But
when the roots of the triangles are loosened by having undergone many
conflicts with many things in the course of time, they are no longer
able to cut or assimilate the food which enters, but are themselves
easily divided by the bodies which come in from without. In this way
every animal is overcome and decays, and this affection is called old
age. And at last, when the bonds by which the triangles of the marrow
are united no longer hold, and are parted by the strain of existence,
they in turn loosen the bonds of the soul, and she, obtaining a natural
release, flies away with joy. For that which takes place according to
nature is pleasant, but that which is contrary to nature is painful. And
thus death, if caused by disease or produced by wounds, is painful and
violent; but that sort of death which comes with old age and fulfils
the debt of nature is the easiest of deaths, and is accompanied with
pleasure rather than with pain.

Now every one can see whence diseases arise. There are four natures out
of which the body is compacted, earth and fire and water and air, and
the unnatural excess or defect of these, or the change of any of them
from its own natural place into another, or--since there are more kinds
than one of fire and of the other elements--the assumption by any of
these of a wrong kind, or any similar irregularity, produces disorders
and diseases; for when any of them is produced or changed in a manner
contrary to nature, the parts which were previously cool grow warm, and
those which were dry become moist, and the light become heavy, and the
heavy light; all sorts of changes occur. For, as we affirm, a thing
can only remain the same with itself, whole and sound, when the same is
added to it, or subtracted from it, in the same respect and in the
same manner and in due proportion; and whatever comes or goes away
in violation of these laws causes all manner of changes and infinite
diseases and corruptions. Now there is a second class of structures
which are also natural, and this affords a second opportunity of
observing diseases to him who would understand them. For whereas marrow
and bone and flesh and sinews are composed of the four elements, and the
blood, though after another manner, is likewise formed out of them, most
diseases originate in the way which I have described; but the worst
of all owe their severity to the fact that the generation of these
substances proceeds in a wrong order; they are then destroyed. For the
natural order is that the flesh and sinews should be made of blood, the
sinews out of the fibres to which they are akin, and the flesh out
of the clots which are formed when the fibres are separated. And the
glutinous and rich matter which comes away from the sinews and the
flesh, not only glues the flesh to the bones, but nourishes and imparts
growth to the bone which surrounds the marrow; and by reason of the
solidity of the bones, that which filters through consists of the purest
and smoothest and oiliest sort of triangles, dropping like dew from the
bones and watering the marrow. Now when each process takes place in this
order, health commonly results; when in the opposite order, disease. For
when the flesh becomes decomposed and sends back the wasting substance
into the veins, then an over-supply of blood of diverse kinds, mingling
with air in the veins, having variegated colours and bitter properties,
as well as acid and saline qualities, contains all sorts of bile and
serum and phlegm. For all things go the wrong way, and having become
corrupted, first they taint the blood itself, and then ceasing to
give nourishment to the body they are carried along the veins in all
directions, no longer preserving the order of their natural courses, but
at war with themselves, because they receive no good from one another,
and are hostile to the abiding constitution of the body, which they
corrupt and dissolve. The oldest part of the flesh which is corrupted,
being hard to decompose, from long burning grows black, and from being
everywhere corroded becomes bitter, and is injurious to every part of
the body which is still uncorrupted. Sometimes, when the bitter element
is refined away, the black part assumes an acidity which takes the place
of the bitterness; at other times the bitterness being tinged with blood
has a redder colour; and this, when mixed with black, takes the hue of
grass; and again, an auburn colour mingles with the bitter matter
when new flesh is decomposed by the fire which surrounds the internal
flame;--to all which symptoms some physician perhaps, or rather some
philosopher, who had the power of seeing in many dissimilar things one
nature deserving of a name, has assigned the common name of bile. But
the other kinds of bile are variously distinguished by their colours. As
for serum, that sort which is the watery part of blood is innocent,
but that which is a secretion of black and acid bile is malignant when
mingled by the power of heat with any salt substance, and is then called
acid phlegm. Again, the substance which is formed by the liquefaction
of new and tender flesh when air is present, if inflated and encased in
liquid so as to form bubbles, which separately are invisible owing to
their small size, but when collected are of a bulk which is visible,
and have a white colour arising out of the generation of foam--all this
decomposition of tender flesh when intermingled with air is termed by us
white phlegm. And the whey or sediment of newly-formed phlegm is sweat
and tears, and includes the various daily discharges by which the body
is purified. Now all these become causes of disease when the blood is
not replenished in a natural manner by food and drink but gains bulk
from opposite sources in violation of the laws of nature. When the
several parts of the flesh are separated by disease, if the foundation
remains, the power of the disorder is only half as great, and there
is still a prospect of an easy recovery; but when that which binds the
flesh to the bones is diseased, and no longer being separated from the
muscles and sinews, ceases to give nourishment to the bone and to unite
flesh and bone, and from being oily and smooth and glutinous becomes
rough and salt and dry, owing to bad regimen, then all the substance
thus corrupted crumbles away under the flesh and the sinews, and
separates from the bone, and the fleshy parts fall away from their
foundation and leave the sinews bare and full of brine, and the
flesh again gets into the circulation of the blood and makes the
previously-mentioned disorders still greater. And if these bodily
affections be severe, still worse are the prior disorders; as when the
bone itself, by reason of the density of the flesh, does not obtain
sufficient air, but becomes mouldy and hot and gangrened and receives no
nutriment, and the natural process is inverted, and the bone crumbling
passes into the food, and the food into the flesh, and the flesh again
falling into the blood makes all maladies that may occur more virulent
than those already mentioned. But the worst case of all is when the
marrow is diseased, either from excess or defect; and this is the cause
of the very greatest and most fatal disorders, in which the whole course
of the body is reversed.

There is a third class of diseases which may be conceived of as arising
in three ways; for they are produced sometimes by wind, and sometimes by
phlegm, and sometimes by bile. When the lung, which is the dispenser of
the air to the body, is obstructed by rheums and its passages are not
free, some of them not acting, while through others too much air enters,
then the parts which are unrefreshed by air corrode, while in other
parts the excess of air forcing its way through the veins distorts them
and decomposing the body is enclosed in the midst of it and occupies the
midriff; thus numberless painful diseases are produced, accompanied by
copious sweats. And oftentimes when the flesh is dissolved in the body,
wind, generated within and unable to escape, is the source of quite as
much pain as the air coming in from without; but the greatest pain is
felt when the wind gets about the sinews and the veins of the shoulders,
and swells them up, and so twists back the great tendons and the sinews
which are connected with them. These disorders are called tetanus and
opisthotonus, by reason of the tension which accompanies them. The
cure of them is difficult; relief is in most cases given by fever
supervening. The white phlegm, though dangerous when detained within by
reason of the air-bubbles, yet if it can communicate with the outside
air, is less severe, and only discolours the body, generating leprous
eruptions and similar diseases. When it is mingled with black bile and
dispersed about the courses of the head, which are the divinest part
of us, the attack if coming on in sleep, is not so severe; but when
assailing those who are awake it is hard to be got rid of, and being an
affection of a sacred part, is most justly called sacred. An acid and
salt phlegm, again, is the source of all those diseases which take the
form of catarrh, but they have many names because the places into which
they flow are manifold.

Inflammations of the body come from burnings and inflamings, and all of
them originate in bile. When bile finds a means of discharge, it boils
up and sends forth all sorts of tumours; but when imprisoned within, it
generates many inflammatory diseases, above all when mingled with pure
blood; since it then displaces the fibres which are scattered about in
the blood and are designed to maintain the balance of rare and dense,
in order that the blood may not be so liquefied by heat as to exude
from the pores of the body, nor again become too dense and thus find
a difficulty in circulating through the veins. The fibres are so
constituted as to maintain this balance; and if any one brings them
all together when the blood is dead and in process of cooling, then the
blood which remains becomes fluid, but if they are left alone, they soon
congeal by reason of the surrounding cold. The fibres having this power
over the blood, bile, which is only stale blood, and which from being
flesh is dissolved again into blood, at the first influx coming in
little by little, hot and liquid, is congealed by the power of the
fibres; and so congealing and made to cool, it produces internal cold
and shuddering. When it enters with more of a flood and overcomes the
fibres by its heat, and boiling up throws them into disorder, if it have
power enough to maintain its supremacy, it penetrates the marrow and
burns up what may be termed the cables of the soul, and sets her free;
but when there is not so much of it, and the body though wasted still
holds out, the bile is itself mastered, and is either utterly banished,
or is thrust through the veins into the lower or upper belly, and is
driven out of the body like an exile from a state in which there has
been civil war; whence arise diarrhoeas and dysenteries, and all such
disorders. When the constitution is disordered by excess of fire,
continuous heat and fever are the result; when excess of air is the
cause, then the fever is quotidian; when of water, which is a more
sluggish element than either fire or air, then the fever is a tertian;
when of earth, which is the most sluggish of the four, and is only
purged away in a four-fold period, the result is a quartan fever, which
can with difficulty be shaken off.

Such is the manner in which diseases of the body arise; the disorders
of the soul, which depend upon the body, originate as follows. We must
acknowledge disease of the mind to be a want of intelligence; and of
this there are two kinds; to wit, madness and ignorance. In whatever
state a man experiences either of them, that state may be called
disease; and excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as
the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in
great joy or in great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain
the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or to hear anything
rightly; but he is mad, and is at the time utterly incapable of any
participation in reason. He who has the seed about the spinal marrow too
plentiful and overflowing, like a tree overladen with fruit, has
many throes, and also obtains many pleasures in his desires and their
offspring, and is for the most part of his life deranged, because his
pleasures and pains are so very great; his soul is rendered foolish and
disordered by his body; yet he is regarded not as one diseased, but as
one who is voluntarily bad, which is a mistake. The truth is that
the intemperance of love is a disease of the soul due chiefly to the
moisture and fluidity which is produced in one of the elements by the
loose consistency of the bones. And in general, all that which is termed
the incontinence of pleasure and is deemed a reproach under the
idea that the wicked voluntarily do wrong is not justly a matter for
reproach. For no man is voluntarily bad; but the bad become bad by
reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education, things which
are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will. And in
the case of pain too in like manner the soul suffers much evil from the
body. For where the acid and briny phlegm and other bitter and bilious
humours wander about in the body, and find no exit or escape, but are
pent up within and mingle their own vapours with the motions of the
soul, and are blended with them, they produce all sorts of diseases,
more or fewer, and in every degree of intensity; and being carried to
the three places of the soul, whichever they may severally assail, they
create infinite varieties of ill-temper and melancholy, of rashness and
cowardice, and also of forgetfulness and stupidity. Further, when to
this evil constitution of body evil forms of government are added and
evil discourses are uttered in private as well as in public, and no sort
of instruction is given in youth to cure these evils, then all of us
who are bad become bad from two causes which are entirely beyond our
control. In such cases the planters are to blame rather than the plants,
the educators rather than the educated. But however that may be,
we should endeavour as far as we can by education, and studies, and
learning, to avoid vice and attain virtue; this, however, is part of
another subject.

There is a corresponding enquiry concerning the mode of treatment by
which the mind and the body are to be preserved, about which it is meet
and right that I should say a word in turn; for it is more our duty to
speak of the good than of the evil. Everything that is good is fair, and
the fair is not without proportion, and the animal which is to be
fair must have due proportion. Now we perceive lesser symmetries or
proportions and reason about them, but of the highest and greatest
we take no heed; for there is no proportion or disproportion more
productive of health and disease, and virtue and vice, than that between
soul and body. This however we do not perceive, nor do we reflect that
when a weak or small frame is the vehicle of a great and mighty soul,
or conversely, when a little soul is encased in a large body, then
the whole animal is not fair, for it lacks the most important of all
symmetries; but the due proportion of mind and body is the fairest and
loveliest of all sights to him who has the seeing eye. Just as a body
which has a leg too long, or which is unsymmetrical in some other
respect, is an unpleasant sight, and also, when doing its share of work,
is much distressed and makes convulsive efforts, and often stumbles
through awkwardness, and is the cause of infinite evil to its own
self--in like manner we should conceive of the double nature which we
call the living being; and when in this compound there is an impassioned
soul more powerful than the body, that soul, I say, convulses and fills
with disorders the whole inner nature of man; and when eager in the
pursuit of some sort of learning or study, causes wasting; or again,
when teaching or disputing in private or in public, and strifes and
controversies arise, inflames and dissolves the composite frame of
man and introduces rheums; and the nature of this phenomenon is not
understood by most professors of medicine, who ascribe it to the
opposite of the real cause. And once more, when a body large and too
strong for the soul is united to a small and weak intelligence, then
inasmuch as there are two desires natural to man,--one of food for the
sake of the body, and one of wisdom for the sake of the diviner part
of us--then, I say, the motions of the stronger, getting the better and
increasing their own power, but making the soul dull, and stupid, and
forgetful, engender ignorance, which is the greatest of diseases. There
is one protection against both kinds of disproportion:--that we should
not move the body without the soul or the soul without the body, and
thus they will be on their guard against each other, and be healthy and
well balanced. And therefore the mathematician or any one else whose
thoughts are much absorbed in some intellectual pursuit, must allow his
body also to have due exercise, and practise gymnastic; and he who
is careful to fashion the body, should in turn impart to the soul its
proper motions, and should cultivate music and all philosophy, if he
would deserve to be called truly fair and truly good. And the separate
parts should be treated in the same manner, in imitation of the pattern
of the universe; for as the body is heated and also cooled within by
the elements which enter into it, and is again dried up and moistened by
external things, and experiences these and the like affections from both
kinds of motions, the result is that the body if given up to motion when
in a state of quiescence is overmastered and perishes; but if any one,
in imitation of that which we call the foster-mother and nurse of the
universe, will not allow the body ever to be inactive, but is always
producing motions and agitations through its whole extent, which form
the natural defence against other motions both internal and external,
and by moderate exercise reduces to order according to their affinities
the particles and affections which are wandering about the body, as we
have already said when speaking of the universe, he will not allow enemy
placed by the side of enemy to stir up wars and disorders in the body,
but he will place friend by the side of friend, so as to create health.
Now of all motions that is the best which is produced in a thing
by itself, for it is most akin to the motion of thought and of the
universe; but that motion which is caused by others is not so good, and
worst of all is that which moves the body, when at rest, in parts only
and by some external agency. Wherefore of all modes of purifying and
re-uniting the body the best is gymnastic; the next best is a surging
motion, as in sailing or any other mode of conveyance which is not
fatiguing; the third sort of motion may be of use in a case of extreme
necessity, but in any other will be adopted by no man of sense: I mean
the purgative treatment of physicians; for diseases unless they are
very dangerous should not be irritated by medicines, since every form of
disease is in a manner akin to the living being, whose complex frame
has an appointed term of life. For not the whole race only, but each
individual--barring inevitable accidents--comes into the world having a
fixed span, and the triangles in us are originally framed with power to
last for a certain time, beyond which no man can prolong his life. And
this holds also of the constitution of diseases; if any one regardless
of the appointed time tries to subdue them by medicine, he only
aggravates and multiplies them. Wherefore we ought always to manage
them by regimen, as far as a man can spare the time, and not provoke a
disagreeable enemy by medicines.

Enough of the composite animal, and of the body which is a part of him,
and of the manner in which a man may train and be trained by himself so
as to live most according to reason: and we must above and before all
provide that the element which is to train him shall be the fairest and
best adapted to that purpose. A minute discussion of this subject would
be a serious task; but if, as before, I am to give only an outline, the
subject may not unfitly be summed up as follows.

I have often remarked that there are three kinds of soul located within
us, having each of them motions, and I must now repeat in the fewest
words possible, that one part, if remaining inactive and ceasing from
its natural motion, must necessarily become very weak, but that which is
trained and exercised, very strong. Wherefore we should take care
that the movements of the different parts of the soul should be in due
proportion.

And we should consider that God gave the sovereign part of the human
soul to be the divinity of each one, being that part which, as we say,
dwells at the top of the body, and inasmuch as we are a plant not of an
earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us from earth to our kindred
who are in heaven. And in this we say truly; for the divine power
suspended the head and root of us from that place where the generation
of the soul first began, and thus made the whole body upright. When a
man is always occupied with the cravings of desire and ambition, and is
eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts must be mortal, and,
as far as it is possible altogether to become such, he must be mortal
every whit, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has
been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has
exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have
thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as
human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be
immortal; and since he is ever cherishing the divine power, and has the
divinity within him in perfect order, he will be perfectly happy. Now
there is only one way of taking care of things, and this is to give to
each the food and motion which are natural to it. And the motions which
are naturally akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts
and revolutions of the universe. These each man should follow, and
correct the courses of the head which were corrupted at our birth,
and by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, should
assimilate the thinking being to the thought, renewing his original
nature, and having assimilated them should attain to that perfect life
which the gods have set before mankind, both for the present and the
future.

Thus our original design of discoursing about the universe down to the
creation of man is nearly completed. A brief mention may be made of the
generation of other animals, so far as the subject admits of brevity;
in this manner our argument will best attain a due proportion. On the
subject of animals, then, the following remarks may be offered. Of the
men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous
lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of
women in the second generation. And this was the reason why at that time
the gods created in us the desire of sexual intercourse, contriving
in man one animated substance, and in woman another, which they formed
respectively in the following manner. The outlet for drink by which
liquids pass through the lung under the kidneys and into the bladder,
which receives and then by the pressure of the air emits them, was so
fashioned by them as to penetrate also into the body of the marrow,
which passes from the head along the neck and through the back, and
which in the preceding discourse we have named the seed. And the seed
having life, and becoming endowed with respiration, produces in that
part in which it respires a lively desire of emission, and thus creates
in us the love of procreation. Wherefore also in men the organ of
generation becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient
to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute
sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of
women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and
when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented
and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up
the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives
them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease, until at length the
desire and love of the man and the woman, bringing them together and
as it were plucking the fruit from the tree, sow in the womb, as in a
field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form;
these again are separated and matured within; they are then finally
brought out into the light, and thus the generation of animals is
completed.

Thus were created women and the female sex in general. But the race of
birds was created out of innocent light-minded men, who, although their
minds were directed toward heaven, imagined, in their simplicity, that
the clearest demonstration of the things above was to be obtained by
sight; these were remodelled and transformed into birds, and they grew
feathers instead of hair. The race of wild pedestrian animals, again,
came from those who had no philosophy in any of their thoughts, and
never considered at all about the nature of the heavens, because they
had ceased to use the courses of the head, but followed the guidance of
those parts of the soul which are in the breast. In consequence of these
habits of theirs they had their front-legs and their heads resting upon
the earth to which they were drawn by natural affinity; and the crowns
of their heads were elongated and of all sorts of shapes, into which the
courses of the soul were crushed by reason of disuse. And this was the
reason why they were created quadrupeds and polypods: God gave the more
senseless of them the more support that they might be more attracted to
the earth. And the most foolish of them, who trail their bodies entirely
upon the ground and have no longer any need of feet, he made without
feet to crawl upon the earth. The fourth class were the inhabitants
of the water: these were made out of the most entirely senseless and
ignorant of all, whom the transformers did not think any longer worthy
of pure respiration, because they possessed a soul which was made impure
by all sorts of transgression; and instead of the subtle and pure medium
of air, they gave them the deep and muddy sea to be their element of
respiration; and hence arose the race of fishes and oysters, and other
aquatic animals, which have received the most remote habitations as a
punishment of their outlandish ignorance. These are the laws by which
animals pass into one another, now, as ever, changing as they lose or
gain wisdom and folly.

We may now say that our discourse about the nature of the universe has
an end. The world has received animals, mortal and immortal, and is
fulfilled with them, and has become a visible animal containing the
visible--the sensible God who is the image of the intellectual, the
greatest, best, fairest, most perfect--the one only-begotten heaven.





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