ified 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 explana