ratios according to a musical scale: though Bockh is of opinion
that the two scales, of Philolaus and of the Timaeus, do not
correspond...We appear not to be sufficiently acquainted with the
early Pythagoreans to know how far the statements contained in
these fragments corresponded with their doctrines; and we
therefore cannot pronounce, either in favour of the genuineness
of the fragments, with Bockh and Zeller, or, with Valentine Rose
and Schaarschmidt, against them. But it is clear that they throw
but little light upon the Timaeus, and that their resemblance to
it has been exaggerated.
That there is a degree of confusion and indistinctness in Plato’s
account both of man and of the universe has been already
acknowledged. We cannot tell (nor could Plato himself have told)
where the figure or myth ends and the philosophical truth begins;
we cannot explain (nor could Plato himself have explained to us)
the relation of the ideas to appearance, of which one is the copy
of the other, and yet of all things in the world they are the
most opposed and unlike. This opposition is presented to us in
many forms, as the antithesis of the one and many, of the finite
and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the
unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the
divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative
mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many
aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomena—they
easily pass into one another; and sometimes the two members of
the relation differ in kind, sometimes only in degree. As in
Aristotle’s matter and form the connexion between them is really
inseparable; for if we attempt to separate them they become
devoid of content and therefore indistinguishable; there is no
difference between the idea of which nothing can be predicated,
and the chaos or matter which has no perceptible
qualities—between Being in the abstract and Nothing. Yet we are
frequently told that the one class of them is the reality and the
other appearance; and one is often spoken of as the double or
reflection of the other. For Plato never clearly saw that both
elements had an equal place in mind and in nature; and hence,
especially when we argue from isolated passages in his writings,
or attempt to draw what appear to us to be the natural inferences
from them, we are full of perplexity. There is a similar
confusion about necessity and free-will, and about the state of
the soul after death. Also he sometimes supposes that God is
immanent in the world, sometimes that he is transcendent. And
having no distinction of objective and subjective, he passes
imperceptibly from one to the other; from intelligence to soul,