re to be found in the
writings of Plato, although the importance of number as a form and also
an instrument of thought is ever present to his mind. Both Philolaus
and Plato agree in making the world move in certain numerical ratios
according to a musical scale: though Bockh is of opinion that the two
scales, of Philolaus and of the Timaeus, do not correspond...We appear
not to be sufficiently acquainted with the early Pythagoreans to know
how far the statements contained in these fragments corresponded with
their doctrines; and we therefore cannot pronounce, either in favour
of the genuineness of the fragments, with Bockh and Zeller, or, with
Valentine Rose and Schaarschmidt, against them. But it is clear that
they throw but little light upon the Timaeus, and that their resemblance
to it has been exaggerated.

That there is a degree of confusion and indistinctness in Plato's
account both of man and of the universe has been already acknowledged.
We cannot tell (nor could Plato himself have told) where the figure or
myth ends and the philosophical truth begins; we cannot explain (nor
could Plato himself have explained to us) the relation of the ideas to
appearance, of which one is the copy of the other, and yet of all things
in the world they are the most opposed and unlike. This opposition is
presented to us in many forms, as the antithesis of the one and many,
of the finite and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the
unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the divisible, of
the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative mind and the primeval
chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many aspects of the great
opposition between ideas and phenomena--they easily pass into one
another; and sometimes the two members of the relation differ in
kind, sometimes only in degree. As in Aristotle's matter and form the
connexion between them is really inseparable; for if we attempt
to separate them they become devoid of content and therefore
indistinguishable; there is no difference between the idea of which
nothing can be predicated, and the chaos or matter which has no
perceptible qualities--between Being in the abstract and Nothing. Yet
we are frequently told that the one class of them is the reality and the
other appearance; and one is often spoken of as the double or reflection
of the other. For Plato never clearly saw that both elements had an
equal place in mind and in nature; and hence, especially when