n 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