Dialogues

either ignored by Plato or referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with more favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number applied to the distances of the planets reappear in the “Timaeus.” It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth century BC, there were already some who, like Plato, made the earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The four elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices of the “Timaeus” may also be compared with his πόροι. The passage of one element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the Ionian philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not after the manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he borrows from others are fused and transformed by his own genius. On the other hand we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or Eleatic speculation. He does not imagine the world of sense to be made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on the will of the creator (41 A, B). Instead of maintaining the doctrine that the void has a necessary place in the existence of the world, he rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum, as in the “Sophist” he also denies the reality of not-being (compare Aristotle Metaphysics I 4, § 9). But though in these respects he differs from them, he is deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he differs from them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the “generous depth” of Parmenides (“Theaetetus” 183 E).

There is a similarity between the “Timaeus” and the fragments of Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to create a suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is known to us from the “Phaedo” of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher residing at Thebes in the latter half of the fifth century BC, after the dispersion of the original Pythagorean society. He was the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who became disciples of Socrates. We have hardly any other information about him. The story that Plato had purchased three books of his writings from a relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful way in which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and the “Phaedo.” That there really existed in antiquity a work passing under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the “Timaeus,” as well as of the “Phaedrus” and “Philebus.” When the writer says (Stobaeus Eclogues I 22, 7) that all things are either finite (definite) or infinite (indefinite), or a union of the two, and that this antithesis and synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are reminded of the “Philebus” (23 and following). When he calls the centre of the world ἑστία, we have a parallel to the “Phaedrus” (247 A). His distinction between the world of order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the world of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and the earth, approximates to Plato’s sphere of the Same and of the Other. Like Plato (“Timaeus” 62 C and following), he denied the above and below in space, and said that all things were the same in relation to a centre. He speaks also of the world as one and indestructible: “for neither from within nor from without does it admit of destruction” (compare “Timaeus” 33). He mentions ten heavenly bodies, including the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (ἀντίχθων), and in the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which they are moving⁠—this is hidden from the earth by the counter-earth. Of neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes the earth the centre of his system. Philolaus magnifies the virtues of particular numbers, especially of the number 10 (Stobaeus Eclogues I 2, 3), and descants upon odd and even numbers, after the manner of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy of remark that these mystical fancies are nowhere 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 Böckh 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 Böckh 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