[14] “Quocirca Timæus non dialecticé disserens inducitur, sed loquitur ut hierophanta, qui mundi arcana aliunde accepta grandi ac magnificâ oratione pronunciat; quin etiam quæ experientiæ suspicionem superant, mythorum ac symbolorum involucris obtegit, eoque modo quam ea certa sint, legentibus non obscuré significat.” — Stallbaum, Prolegg. ad Platon. Timæum, c. iv. p. 37.
Fundamental distinction between Ens and Fientia.
Timæus begins by laying down the capital distinction between — 1. Ens or the Existent, the eternal and unchangeable, the world of Ideas or Forms, apprehended only by mental conception or Reason, but the object of infallible cognition. 2. The Generated and Perishable — the sensible, phenomenal, material world — which never really exists, but is always appearing and disappearing; apprehended by sense, yet not capable of becoming the object of cognition, nor of anything better than opinion or conjecture. The Kosmos, being a visible and tangible body, belongs to this last category. Accordingly, it can never be really known: no true or incontestable propositions can be affirmed respecting it: you can arrive at nothing higher than opinion and probability.
Plato seems to have had this conviction, respecting the uncertainty of all affirmations about the sensible world or any portions of it, forcibly present to his mind.
Postulates of Plato. The Demiurgus — The Eternal Ideas — Chaotic Materia or Fundamentum. The Kosmos is a living being and a God.
He next proceeds to assume or imply, as postulates, his eternal Ideas or Forms — a coeternal chaotic matter or indeterminate Something — and a Demiurgus or Architect to construct, out of this chaos, after contemplation of the Forms, copies of them as good as were practicable in the world of sense. The exposition begins with these postulates. The Demiurgus found all visible matter, not in a state of rest, but in discordant and irregular motion. He brought it out of disorder into order. Being himself good (says Plato), and desiring to make everything else as good as possible, he transformed this chaos into an orderly Kosmos.[15] He planted in its centre a soul spreading round, so as to pervade all its body — and reason in the soul: so that the Kosmos became animated, rational — a God.
[15] Plato, Timæus, pp. 29-30.
The Demiurgus not a Creator — The Kosmos arises from his operating upon the random movements of Necessity. He cannot controul necessity — he only persuades.
The Demiurgus of Plato is not conceived as a Creator,[16] but as a Constructor or Artist. He is the God Promêtheus, conceived as pre-kosmical, and elevated to the primacy of the Gods: instead of being subordinate to Zeus, as depicted by Æschylus and others. He represents provident intelligence or art, and beneficent purpose, contending with a force superior and irresistible, so as to improve it as far as it will allow itself to be improved.[17] This pre-existing superior force Plato denominates Necessity — “the erratic, irregular, random causality,” subsisting prior to the intervention of the Demiurgus; who can only work upon it by persuasion, but cannot coerce or subdue it.[18] The genesis of the Kosmos thus results from a combination of intelligent force with the original, primordial Necessity; which was persuaded, and consented, to have its irregular agency regularised up to a certain point, but no farther. Beyond this limit the systematising arrangements of the Demiurgus could not be carried; but all that is good or beautiful in the Kosmos was owing to them.[19]
[16] “The notion of absolute Creation is unknown to Plato, as it is to all Grecian and Roman antiquity” (Brandis, Gesch. der Griech. Röm. Philos. vol. ii. part 2, p. 306).