as he saw in nature, a cosmic staging of the search for salvation.

Genesis and eschatology represent respectively the complication and solution of the plot. Genesis, the tale of origins, is treated most completely in the Timaeus; cosmic justice and its judgments is the theme of the speculative cosmology of Socrates in the Phaedo and of the vision of Er in the Republic. In these and in allied passages Plato draws for us his world emblem.

Plato begins his genesis, in the Timaeus, with an assertion of dualism. "First," says Timaeus, "we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is." In its inception this dualism is a logical one, hypostatized into the familiar Platonic antithesis of the World of Sense and the World of Ideas. But very speedily we perceive that the moral antithesis of good and evil is in it also. The kernel of Plato's thought is the old philosophical dualism of Nous and Chaos, and even the older mythic dualism of Heaven and Earth; and, as does the earlier thought, he identifies Mind and Light with Goodness, and Disorder and Darkness with Evil.

"God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other. Now the deeds of the best could never be or have been other than the fairest; and the creator, reflecting on the things which are by nature visible, found that no

unintelligent creature taken as a whole was fairer than the intelligent taken as a whole; and that intelligence could not be present in anything which was devoid of soul. For which reason, when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and best. Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God."

In these words of Timaeus, Plato outlines his conception of creation. God, perceiving the disorder of Chaos, designs to redeem it by imparting to it the image of mind, of Cosmos, order. He creates it, therefore, in the likeness of a perfect animal (παντελές ζῷον), “the very image of that whole of which all other animals both individually and in their tribes are portions." First he created its soul, the anima mundi, "to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject," organized from the categories of thought, from identity and difference and essence, in harmony of number. Afterwards he gave it body, interfusing with the visible body the rational soul, so that the whole universe of being became one animal endowed with soul (ζῷον ἔμψυχον).

"And he gave to the world the figure which was suitable and also natural. Now to the animal which was to comprehend all animals, that figure was suitable which comprehends within itself all other figures. Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the center, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike. This he finished off, making the surface smooth all round for many reasons; in the first place because the living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside of him to be seen; nor of ears

when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing that went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him.... And, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him,....and he made the universe a circle moving within a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god."

"When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time." Time came into being with the heavens which measure it, and will be dissolved with them, says Plato; but space is of another origin. For besides the reason which gives cosmic form there is another cause of being, a principle of limitation which Plato calls necessity. We must conceive, he says, of three natures: first, that which is in process of generation, and this would be the world of nature as we experience it; second, that in which the generation takes place, and this is the recipient or

matrix of nature; and third, that of which the generated world is an image, and this is the cosmic reason or form. "We may liken the receiving principle to a mother, and the source or spring to a father, and the intermediate nature to a child," he says, and we think immediately of the mythopoetic union of Earth and Heaven and of the Life of Nature which is its offspring. But for Plato this is a mere trope; he does not rest without being scientifically explicit. There are three kinds of being: that which is uncreated and indestructible, changeless, eternal, imperceptible to any sense, open only to the contemplation of the intelligence, and this is the principle of the Father, the ideal or formal essence of the world; again, that which is sensible and created and always in motion, the Child, the world of change and life; and finally, there is a third nature, the Mother, which, like the Father, is eternal and admits not of destruction, which provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended "without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is indeed hardly real." This nature is space, and we "beholding as in a dream, say of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence."

This mothering space which is hardly real, yet is the cause of the determinism of nature, Plato identifies as the material element of being. As pure matter it is purely indeterminate, but it is receptive of all determinations. The four elements, earth, air, fire and water, are formed from it, for "the mother substance becomes earth and air, in so far as she receives the impressions of them." Plato's conception of the formation of these elements from the original substance was as purely mathematical as are our modern physical notions. "God fashioned them by form and number," he says; and the forms which he assigned were the forms of the regular solids. Thus the form of the fiery

element is the pyramid, of air the octahedron, of water the icosahedron, of earth the cube. The fifth solid, the dodecahedron is the form of the universe as a whole, or perhaps one might say the scaffold upon which the spherical universe is constructed. Further, these elements are themselves compounded of simpler mathematical forms, the pyramid, octahedron and icosahedron of scalene, the cube of equilateral triangles; so that if we regard the elements as molecules, we may view the triangles as atoms of the material substrate.

Doubtless it was this geometrical account of matter which gave rise to the saying ascribed to Plato that "God always geometrizes,"-for God, says Plutarch in his commentary on the saying, made the world in no other way than by setting terms to infinite and chaotic matter. But it is not with the mathematical aspect of Plato's theory that we are here most concerned, but with its moral bearings. For it is in matter that Plato finds the root of evil, and, if we may so put it, the villainy of the world. In framing the inhabitants of the world, according to the account of Timaeus, the Creator made first the race of gods, perfect and immortal; but of the race of men he made only the souls, their bodies were handed over to the created gods to be composed of perishable matter. "The part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and is the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and you (the gods)—of that divine part I will myself," saith the Creator, "sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye then interweave the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget living creatures, and give them food, and make them to grow, and receive them again in death."

And having made souls equal in number to the stars, and having assigned each soul to a star, and there placed