faith! And we may say that only by an effort of metaphysical imagination
can we hope to understand Plato from his own point of view; we must not ask
for consistency. Everywhere we find traces of the Platonic theory of
knowledge expressed in an objective form, which by us has to be translated
into the subjective, before we can attach any meaning to it. And this
theory is exhibited in so many different points of view, that we cannot
with any certainty interpret one dialogue by another; e.g. the Timaeus by
the Parmenides or Phaedrus or Philebus.

The soul of the world may also be conceived as the personification of the
numbers and figures in which the heavenly bodies move. Imagine these as in
a Pythagorean dream, stripped of qualitative difference and reduced to
mathematical abstractions. They too conform to the principle of the same,
and may be compared with the modern conception of laws of nature. They are
in space, but not in time, and they are the makers of time. They are
represented as constantly thinking of the same; for thought in the view of
Plato is equivalent to truth or law, and need not imply a human
consciousness, a conception which is familiar enough to us, but has no
place, hardly even a name, in ancient Greek philosophy. To this principle
of the same is opposed the principle of the other--the principle of
irregularity and disorder, of necessity and chance, which is only partially
impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We may observe by the way,
that the principle of the other, which is the principle of plurality and
variation in the Timaeus, has nothing in common with the 'other' of the
Sophist, which is the principle of determination.) The element of the same
dominates to a certain extent over the other--the fixed stars keep the
'wanderers' of the inner circle in their courses, and a similar principle
of fixedness or order appears to regulate the bodily constitution of man.
But there still remains a rebellious seed of evil derived from the original
chaos, which is the source of disorder in the world, and of vice and