ted 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