V. THE PLATONIC PHYSICS. 1. NATURE.—The connection between the Physics and the Dialectics of Plato lies principally in two points—the conception of becoming, which forms the chief property of nature, and that of real being, which is at once the all sufficient and good, and the true end of all becoming. Because nature belongs to the province of irrational sensation we cannot look for the same accuracy in the treatment of it, as is furnished in dialectics. Plato therefore applied himself with much less zest to physical investigations than to those of an ethical or dialectical character, and indeed only attended to them in his later years. Only in one dialogue, the Timæus, do we find any extended evolution of physical doctrines, and even here Plato seems to have gone to his work with much less independence than his wont, this dialogue being more strongly tinctured with Pythagoreanism than any other of his writings. The difficulty of the Timæus is increased by the mythical form on which the old commentators themselves have stumbled. If we take the first impression that it gives us, we have, before the creation of the world, a Creator as a moving and a reflecting principle, with on the one side the ideal world existing immovable as the eternal archetype, and on the other side, a chaotic, formless, irregular, fluctuating mass, which holds in itself the germ of the material world, but has no determined character nor substance. With these two elements the Creator now blends the world-soul which he distributes according to the relation of numbers, and sets it in definite and harmonious motion. In this way the material world, which has become actual through the arrangement of the chaotic mass into the four elements, finds its external frame, and the process thus begun is completed in its external structure by the formation of the organic world.