For we too hastily said that Plato in the Timaeus regarded all 'vices
and crimes as involuntary.' But the fact is that he is inconsistent
with himself; in one and the same passage vice is attributed to the
relaxation of the bodily frame, and yet we are exhorted to avoid it and
pursue virtue. It is also admitted that good and evil conduct are to be
attributed respectively to good and evil laws and institutions. These
cannot be given by individuals to themselves; and therefore human
actions, in so far as they are dependent upon them, are regarded by
Plato as involuntary rather than voluntary. Like other writers on this
subject, he is unable to escape from some degree of self-contradiction.
He had learned from Socrates that vice is ignorance, and suddenly the
doctrine seems to him to be confirmed by observing how much of the good
and bad in human character depends on the bodily constitution. So
in modern times the speculative doctrine of necessity has often been
supported by physical facts.

The Timaeus also contains an anticipation of the stoical life according
to nature. Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate his erring life
according to them. He is to partake of the repose of nature and of the
order of nature, to bring the variable principle in himself into harmony
with the principle of the same. The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed
up in the single idea of 'law.' To feel habitually that he is part of
the order of the universe, is one of the highest ethical motives of
which man is capable. Something like this is what Plato means when he
speaks of the soul 'moving about the same in unchanging thought of
the same.' He does not explain how man is acted upon by the lesser
influences of custom or of opinion; or how the commands of the soul
watching in the citadel are conveyed to the bodily organs. But this
perhaps, to use once more expressions of his own, 'is part of another
subject' or 'may be more suitably discussed on some other occasion.'

There is no difficulty, by the help of Aristotle and later writers, in
criticizing the Timaeus of Plato, in pointing out the inconsistencies
of the work, in dwelling on the ignorance of anatomy displayed by the
author, in showing the fancifulness or unmeaningness of some of his
reasons. But the Timaeus still remains the greatest effort of the human
mind to conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has
bequeathed to us.

*****

One more aspect of the Tim