The Timaeus of Plato

Greek thought.
I 2
INTRODUCTION. 3
how far
have they amalgamated these into a systematic theory of
existence ?
In the endeavour to answer these questions
I think we can
hardly fail to discern amid the goodly company of those early
pioneers certain men rising by head and shoulders above their
fellows :
Herakleitos, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, these three. Each
one of these bequeathed to his successors a great principle
peculiarly his own; a principle of permanent importance, with
which Plato was bound to deal and has dealt. And save in so
far as the Pythagorean theory of numbers may have influenced
the outward form of his exposition, there is hardly anything in
the early philosophy before Sokrates, outside the teaching of
these three men, which has seriously contributed to
Plato's store
of raw material. The synthesis of their one-sided truths required
nothing less than the whole machinery of Plato's metaphysical
:
system it is from their success and their failure that he takes
his start the success of each in enunciating his own truth, the
failure of each to recognise its relations.
Since these three men, as I conceive, furnished Plato with
his base of operations or, more correctly perhaps, raised the
problems which he must address himself to solve, it is incumbent
on us to determine as precisely as we can the nature of the
contributions they severally supplied.
3. The old Ionian physicists were all unknowingly working The
their way to the conception of Becoming. They did not know
this, because they knew not that matter, with which alone they kleitos
were concerned ! , belonged altogether to the realm of Becoming.
Nor yet did they reach this conception, for they had not been
able to conceive continuity in change that is to say, they had
not conceived Becoming. They imagined the indefinite diversity
of material nature to be the complex manifestations of some
uniform underlying element, which, whether by condensation and
expansion or by some more fundamental modification of its substance,
transmuted itself into this astonishing multiplicity of dissimilar
qualities. But according to their notion this underlying
element, be it water or air or some indefinable substrate, existed
at any given place now in one form, now in another ;
that is, it
abode for a while in one of its manifestations, then changed and
abode for a while in another. Air is air for a time ;
then it is
1
Of course the antithesis of matter and spirit had not yet presented itself to