As I have said, the course of creation is explained through myth in the Timaeus and the Statesman.[213] In the former God is represented as creating first the gods of heaven which are the fixed stars and planets, from whom sprang the gods of popular mythology. The Creator had already conceived of creatures of the air, sea, and land; but these he did not himself create, for then they would have been on equality with the gods; he rather commissioned the gods to create man and the lower animals, while he furnished the divine part, the soul. Man’s soul therefore is of the same nature as the universal soul, but his body is material, made of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, and it is imperfect, being subject to the passions. In the Statesman Plato sets forth his theory of the development of man from an earlier stage to the present: the significant thing for us at the moment is his explanation of man’s falling away from virtue as due to the admixture of matter in him, that this fall was “inherent in the primal nature which was full of disorder.” This, then, will at least suggest Plato’s view as to the origin of evil in the world. His language is that of myth, and it seems evident that he did not formulate his explanation perfectly even in his own mind. We shall best regard it as one of his guesses at truth. It is, of course, easy to find weaknesses in his thought on this question and to show that the explanation which he suggests is not satisfactory. But we shall do better to remember the difficulty of the problem and to recognize the value of his attempt to reach its solution. The greatest service, however, which Plato did was to establish by means of his doctrine of ideas a rational relation between the invisible world of reason and the visible world of the senses; and by pointing out that the rational part of man’s soul is of the same substance as the ideas and therefore of the same substance as the Absolute, to give an intellectual basis to the doctrine of a natural striving on the part of man after the supreme Good. Hardly second to this was his service in the field of ethics, where he showed that man’s spiritual advance depends upon the constant curbing of the passions and the body. The greatness of his genius is shown by the fact that throughout antiquity the highest religious thought of paganism had its source in his work and was only a development of it. Before we have finished these lectures we shall gain some hints of his profound influence on Christianity. * * * * * Platonic philosophy by attributing to the ideas an existence apart from things, and conversely by denying all existence to anything but the ideas, had removed all reality to the supernatural world. It was inevitable that this view should be promptly attacked. The challenge came from Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle.