INTRODUCTION.

Vindication of the importance attached to the Timaeus by ancient authorities.

§ 1. OF all the more important Platonic writings, probably none has less engaged the attention of modern scholars than the Timaeus. Nor is the reason for this comparative neglect far to seek. The exceeding abstruseness of its metaphysical content, rendered yet more recondite by the constantly allegorical mode of exposition; the abundance of a priori original: "a priori" - based on theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation speculation in a domain which experimental science has now claimed for its own; the vast and many-sided comprehensiveness of the design—all have conspired to the end that only a very few of the most zealous students of Plato's philosophy have left us any considerable work on this dialogue. It has been put on one side as a fantastic, if ingenious and poetical, cosmogonical scheme, mingled with oracular fragments of mystical metaphysic and the crude imaginings of scarcely yet infant science.

But this was not the position assigned to the Timaeus by the more ancient thinkers, who lived "nearer to the king and the truth." Contrariwise, not one of Plato's writings exercised so powerful an influence on subsequent Greek thought; not one was the object of such earnest study, such constant reference. Aristotle criticizes it more frequently and copiously than any other dialogue, and perhaps has borrowed more from no other: Cicero, living amid a very stupor and paralysis of speculative philosophy, was moved to translate it into Latin: Apuleius gives for an account of the Platonic philosophy little else but a partial abstract of the Timaeus, with some ethical supplement from the Republic: Plutarch has sundry more or less elaborate disquisitions on several of the subjects handled in it. As for the Neoplatonic school, how completely their thought was dominated by the metaphysic of the Timaeus, despite the incongruous and almost...