The Timaeus of Plato

Distinction
between
perceiving
and thinking.
Plato
works in
whatever
is valid in
Herakleitos,
Parmenides
and Anaxagoras.
Deficiencies
of the
earlier
Platonism.
Herakleitos
and
Parmenides
not
yet conciliated.
18 JNTROD UCTION.
both thought and speech and rose triumphant to the sphere of the
'colourless and formless and intangible essence which none but
reason the soul's pilot is
permitted to behold.'
And as the material and immaterial are for the first time
distinguished, so between perception and thought
is the line for
the first time clearly drawn. Perception is the soul's activity as
conditioned by her material environment ; thought her unfettered
action according to her own nature :
by the former she deals with
the unsubstantial flux of phenomena, by the latter with the
immutable ideas.
Plato then recognises and already seeks to conciliate the
conflicting principles of Herakleitos and Parmenides. He satisfies
the demand of the Eleatics for a stable and uniform object of
cognition, while he concedes to Herakleitos that in the material
world all is
becoming, and to Protagoras that of this material
world there can be no knowledge nor objective truth. He also
affirms with Anaxagoras that mind or soul is the only motive
power in nature soul alone having her motion of herself is the
cause of motion to all things else that are moved. Thus we see
that Plato has taken up into his philosophy the great principles
enounced by his forerunners and given them a significance and
validity which they never had before.
1 8. Now had Plato stopped short with the elaboration
of the philosophical scheme of which an outline has just been
given, his service to philosophy would doubtless have been
immense and would still
probably have exceeded the performance
of any one man besides. But he does not stop short there nay,
he is barely half way on his journey. We have now to consider
what defects he discovered in the earlier form of his theory, and
how he set about amending them.
First we must observe that the conciliation of Herakleitos
and Parmenides is
only just begun. It is in fact clear that Plato,
although recognising
the truth inherent in each of the rival
theories, had, when he wrote the Republic, no idea how completely
interdependent were the two truths. For in the Republic his concern
is, not how he may harmonise the Herakleitean and Eleatic
principles as parts of one truth, but how, while satisfying
the just
claims of Becoming, he may establish a science of Being. He
simply makes his escape from the Herakleitean world of Becoming
into an Eleatic world of Being. And the world of Becoming
is for him a mere superfluity, he does not recognise
it as an