p 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 constru