things generally, the specialist will still be able to find us some
earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. The most
elementary act of mental analysis takes time to do; the most
rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so simple that
we can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow, and with
difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation,
its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful
generalisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as [6] that of
Heraclitus--"Panta rhei,"+ all things fleet away--may startle a
particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all
along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half-
developed instincts of the human mind itself.

Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of
philosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or
turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or the
Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical
literature. His encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge is
more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for
compass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's
achievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of
the mind's history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was
already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the
oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the
processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he
breathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.

In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures less
as the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of
older ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory.