The Metaphysical Foundation of Buddhism and Modern Science

Section IV. Plato’s contribution to the basis notions connecting Science
and Philosophy, as finally settled in the later portion of his life, has
virtues entirely different from that of Aristotle, although of equal use
for the progress of thought. It is to be found by reading together the
Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Timaeus, and the fifth and tenth books of
the Laws; and then by recurrence to his earlier work, the Symposium. He
is never entirely self-consistent, and rarely explicit and devoid of
ambiguity. He feels the difficulties, and expresses his perplexities. No
one could be perplexed over Aristotle’s classifications; whereas Plato
moves about amid a fragmentary system like a man dazed by his own
penetration.
A few main doctrines stand out and they are of priceless importance for
science, in the largest sense of that term. As to their coordination into a
system, he is undogmatic and can only tell ‘the most likely tale’. Indeed, in
his seventh Epistle (Cf.341, C.) he denounces the notion that a final
system can be verbally expressed. His later thought circles round the
interweaving of seven main notions namely, The Ideas, The Physical
Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical
Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for us now, as
they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations of
the old type were dying. From their point of view the Athenians were
right to condemn Socrates. After the coalescence of Greek and Semitic
thought the old order of life was doomed. Western Civilization acquired a
new intellectuality, clarified, humanized, moralized.