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Updated: May 15, 2025
We can see, however, what was the problem with which he was occupied, and it is not perhaps illegitimate to infer that he approached the question which still baffles speculation from the point of view that God's omnipotence, as we should call it, is limited by his goodness. This is a much more important limitation than that imposed by the existence of matter, to which Timaeus also refers.
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.
In consequence of this middle subsistence, the mundane soul, from which all partial souls are derived, is said by Plato in the Timaeus, to be a medium between that which is indivisible and that which is divisible about bodies, i.e. the mundane soul is a medium between the mundane intellect, and the whole of that corporeal life which the world participates.
A greater danger with modern interpreters of Plato is the tendency to regard the Timaeus as the centre of his system. We do not know how Plato would have arranged his own dialogues, or whether the thought of arranging any of them, besides the two 'Trilogies' which he has expressly connected; was ever present to his mind.
A deficiency of water was always a principal grievance in Attica, as we may learn from the laws of Solon relative to wells. Platon. Timaeus. Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, vol. i., p. 5. According to some they were from India, to others from Egypt, to others again from Phoenicia.
But he has not as yet defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between medicine and mathematics, and he would have felt that there was as great an impiety in ranking theories of physics first in the order of knowledge, as in placing the body before the soul. It is true, however, that the Timaeus is by no means confined to speculations on physics.
Again, in the Timaeus, endeavouring to teach us about the sublunary gods and their order, Plato flies to theologists, calls them the sons of the gods, and makes them the fathers of the truth about these divinities. And lastly, he delivers the orders of the sublunary gods proceeding from wholes, according to the progression delivered by theologists of the intellectual kings.
God is not, directly at least, the cause of all things, but it is not easy to discover the relation in which these other souls are thought of as standing to God. In the Timaeus, the matter is put in this way.
And hence we find the same sort of clumsiness in the Timaeus of Plato which characterizes the philosophical poem of Lucretius. There is a want of flow and often a defect of rhythm; the meaning is sometimes obscure, and there is a greater use of apposition and more of repetition than occurs in Plato's earlier writings.
The highest intelligible, therefore, is that which is the hyparxis of the gods; the second, that which is true being, and the first essence; the third, intellect, and all intellectual life; and the fourth, the order belonging to soul. Logismos, reasoning. When applied to divinity as by Plato in the Timaeus, signifies a distributive cause of things. Orectic.
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