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