It is remarkable that Plato's account of mind at the end of the Laws
goes beyond Anaxagoras, and beyond himself in any of his previous
writings. Aristotle, in a well-known passage (Met.) which is an echo of
the Phaedo, remarks on the inconsistency of Anaxagoras in introducing
the agency of mind, and yet having recourse to other and inferior,
probably material causes. But Plato makes the further criticism, that
the error of Anaxagoras consisted, not in denying the universal agency
of mind, but in denying the priority, or, as we should say, the eternity
of it. Yet in the Timaeus he had himself allowed that God made the world
out of pre-existing materials: in the Statesman he says that there were
seeds of evil in the world arising out of the remains of a former chaos
which could not be got rid of; and even in the Tenth Book of the Laws he
has admitted that there are two souls, a good and evil. In the Meno, the
Phaedrus, and the Phaedo, he had spoken of the recovery of ideas from a
former state of existence. But now he has attained to a clearer point of
view: he has discarded these fancies. From meditating on the priority of
the human soul to the body, he has learnt the nature of soul absolutely.
The power of the best, of which he gave an intimation in the Phaedo
and in the Republic, now, as in the Philebus, takes the form of an
intelligence or person. He no longer, like Anaxagoras, supposes mind to
be introduced at a certain time into the world and to give order to
a pre-existing chaos, but to be prior to the chaos, everlasting and
evermoving, and the source of order and intelligence in all things. This
appears to be the last form of Plato's religious philosophy, which might
almost be summed up in the words of Kant, 'the starry heaven above and
the moral law within.' Or rather, perhaps, 'the starry heaven above and
mind prior to the world.'