to personify mind or God, and he therefore naturally inclines to view
creation as the work of design. The creator is like a human artist who
frames in his mind a plan which he executes by the help of his servants.
Thus the language of philosophy which speaks of first and second causes is
crossed by another sort of phraseology: 'God made the world because he was
good, and the demons ministered to him.' The Timaeus is cast in a more
theological and less philosophical mould than the other dialogues, but the
same general spirit is apparent; there is the same dualism or opposition
between the ideal and actual--the soul is prior to the body, the
intelligible and unseen to the visible and corporeal. There is the same
distinction between knowledge and opinion which occurs in the Theaetetus
and Republic, the same enmity to the poets, the same combination of music
and gymnastics. The doctrine of transmigration is still held by him, as in
the Phaedrus and Republic; and the soul has a view of the heavens in a
prior state of being. The ideas also remain, but they have become types in
nature, forms of men, animals, birds, fishes. And the attribution of evil
to physical causes accords with the doctrine which he maintains in the Laws
respecting the involuntariness of vice.

The style and plan of the Timaeus differ greatly from that of any other of
the Platonic dialogues. The language is weighty, abrupt, and in some
passages sublime. But Plato has not the same mastery over his instrument
which he exhibits in the Phaedrus or Symposium. Nothing can exceed the
beauty or art of the introduction, in which he is using words after his
accustomed manner. But in the rest of the work the power of language seems
to fail him, and the dramatic form is wholly given up. He could write in
one style, but not in another, and the Greek language had not as yet been
fashioned by any poet or philosopher to describe physical phenomena. The
early physiologists had generally written in verse; the prose writers, like
Democritus and Anaxagoras, as far as we can judge from their fragments,