Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

[8] Grote, iii, 290.

[9] Ibid., 287, 288.

[10] Grote, iii, 289.

[11] It should be stated that the passage from Macaulay's writings here commented on was written and first published in 1840, before the speculations of the scientists who maintain the doctrines of evolution had attracted much attention, or been promulgated in their present shape.

[12] Rotation was considered the movement most conformable to reason and intelligence, and it is impracticable to any figure but the spherical. Grote, iii, 253.

[13] The primitive gods of Plato's conception (in the "Timæus") are not to be confounded with the gods of the poetic and popular faith. As Mr. Grote has pointed out, there is nothing more remarkable in Plato's writings than the subtilty and skill with which he contrived to elude the charge of impiety and infidelity toward the gods of tradition and of the popular faith. In a passage of the "Timæus," on which Mr. Grote seems to be in doubt whether it was ironical or sincere, Plato boldly confronts the difficulty by saying that we must believe competent witnesses whose testimony we have, respecting the genesis of the remaining gods who have personal names and were believed in by his contemporaries. For his own part, he says, he does not pretend to account for their generation. The sons of the gods, the heroic and sacred families, who must have known their own fathers and all about their own family affairs, have given us their family traditions, and we must obey the law and believe. But concerning the primitive gods, the first progenitors of the remaining gods, we are at liberty to speculate. The ingenuity of this admission of authority where authority has spoken, reconcilable with speculation upon matters on which authority has not spoken, is admirable. Plato, as Mr. Grote has observed, was willing to incur the risk of one count of the indictment which was brought against his master Socrates, that of introducing new divine persons. In legal parlance he might have demurred to this count, as not charging any offense against the established religion. But the other count, for not acknowledging the gods whom the city acknowledged, he did not choose to encounter. As to them, he prudently, and perhaps sarcastically, accepts the testimony of witnesses who speak by inspiration and authority. But as to the primitive gods, the progenitors of the gods from whom were descended the heroic and sacred families of men, he expresses in the "Timæus" his own convictions, without appealing to authority and without intimating that he is speaking of mysteries beyond the comprehension of his reason. The boldness of this flight beyond all authority into the realms of pure reason is very striking, even if it does end in nothing but probability, which is all that Plato claims for his theory.

[14] It must be remembered that, in the formation of the cosmical soul, the ingredients were the eternal Ideas; of these there could be a remnant after the cosmical soul was formed. But the cosmical body, which was formed out of the material elements, comprehended the whole of them, and there could be no remnant or surplus of them remaining outside. But portions of them could be borrowed for a limited period of mortal existence, and would return to their place in the Kosmos when that existence terminated. If this distinction be carried along, Plato will not be found to be inconsistent with himself.

[15] It does not distinctly appear what was to become of the rational soul if it finally failed in the conflict with evil, at the lowest end of the transmigration. Being immortal, it could not perish. But in providing for it an opportunity of final success through all the forms of animal life to which it might be condemned, it would seem that Plato was pressed by a reluctance to encounter the idea of endless misery. This point, however, does not obscure his explanation of the process by which species of animals, and a succession of inferior animals, came to exist.

[16] Mr. Grote has pointed out that in his other writings, notably in the "Republic" and in the "Leges", Plato is not consistent with this idea that the gods are responsible for the evil that man causes to himself; and that in the "Timæus" he plainly makes the Demiurgus responsible, because he brings, or allows to be brought, an immortal soul down from its star, where it was living pure, intelligent, and in harmony with reason, and makes it incur corruption, disturbance, and stupidity, by junction with a mortal body and two mortal and inferior souls.

[17] I have omitted the description of the influence of disease induced by an over-indulgence of appetite, etc., in aiding the process of debasement from the primitive type. The reader can find this influence developed in Grote, or can consult the original Greek of the "Timæus." It would appear that Plato considered the effect of all the appetites, when too much indulged, as tending in the primitive non-sexual type toward the development of that lower kind of animal which the gods saw fit to treat as fit only to become woman.