Epitome of "On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus"

The treatise entitled "On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus" reports all that has been treated with care by Plato and the Platonists. It introduces also certain geometrical proportions and correspondences, bearing, as he supposes, upon the study of the soul, and likewise musical and arithmetical theorems.

He says that matter was given form by the soul; and he assigns a soul to the universe, and assigns also to each living creature the soul that governs it; and in one respect he presents this soul as ungenerated, in another as subject to generation. Matter he holds to be everlasting, and to have been shaped by the divine through the soul; and evil, he says, has come to be as an offshoot of matter, so that — as he puts it — the divine should not be thought the cause of evils.

Posidonius and his school did not set the soul far apart from matter, but, accepting that the substance of limits is spoken of in connection with bodies . . . as divisible, and mixing these limits with the intelligible, they declared that the soul is the form of that which is extended in every direction, composed according to number and embracing harmony. For mathematical objects, they say, are ranked between the first intelligibles and the things of sense; and since the soul has the everlasting from the intelligible and the passive from the perceptible, it is fitting that its substance should lie midway. But these thinkers too failed to notice that the god used the limits of bodies later, when the soul had already been wrought, for the shaping of matter, defining and confining its scattered and unconnected nature by the surfaces fitted together out of triangles. Still more absurd is it to make the soul a form; for the soul is ever in motion, but the form is motionless; the form is unmixed with the perceptible, but the soul is bound up with the body. And besides this, the god became an imitator of the form, taking it as his model, but the craftsman of the soul, as of a finished product. That Plato does not posit the substance of the soul as number, but as something ordered by number, has been stated before.

Common to both these views is this: that there is in the limits and in the numbers no trace whatever of that power by which the soul is naturally fitted to judge the perceptible. For mind and the power of thought were implanted in the soul by its participation in the intelligible principle; but its opinions and beliefs, and the imaginative and the passive faculties, came from the qualities connected with the body — and one would not conceive of these as arising simply from units or lines or surfaces. And indeed not only the souls of mortals have a power of knowing the perceptible, but he says that the soul of the cosmos too, revolving back upon itself whenever it comes into contact with something that has divisible substance and whenever with the indivisible, moving through the whole of itself, declares with what each thing is the same and from what it is different, and toward what especially, and in what way, and how, it comes to pass that things come into being in relation to one another, each to each, and are acted upon. In these words, while at the same time sketching the ten categories, he makes the matter still clearer in what follows. For he says that, when true reason comes to be about the perceptible, and the circle of the Different, running straight, announces this throughout the whole soul, opinions and beliefs arise that are firm and true; but when again it comes to be about the rational object, and the circle of the Same, running smoothly, makes these known, knowledge is of necessity brought to completion. And as to that in which these two come to be — if anyone should ever call it anything other than soul, he will say anything rather than the truth. From what source, then, did the soul get this perceptive and opinion-forming motion, distinct from that intellective motion which terminates in knowledge? It is hard to say, unless we lay it down firmly that here he is constituting not soul simply, but the soul of the cosmos, out of two underlying substances: the better and indivisible, and the worse — which he has called divisible in connection with bodies — this latter being nothing other than the opinion-forming, imaginative, and sympathetic motion of the things of sense, not generated but subsisting everlastingly, just as the other does. For nature, having the intellective, had also the opinion-forming; but the former is motionless and impassive and seated about the substance that ever abides, while the latter is divisible and wandering, since it is in contact with matter that is borne along and scattered. For the perceptible had not been allotted order, but was formless and indeterminate; and the power set over it had neither articulate opinions nor all its motions ordered, but most of them were dreamlike and erratic and disturbing to the corporeal, save such as fell in by chance with the better. For it was midway between the two, and had a nature sympathetic and akin to both, clinging to matter by its perceptive part, and to the intelligibles by its discriminating part.

In some such way too Plato makes the matter clear by his very terms. For he says: "Let this account, reckoned by my vote, be given in summary: that being, and place, and generation are three, in three modes, even before the heaven came to be." For he calls matter "place," as it were a seat, and sometimes a "receptacle"; "being" he calls the intelligible; and "generation," while the cosmos has not yet come to be, none other than the substance that is in changes and motions, ranked midway between that which imprints and that which is imprinted, transmitting here the images that come from there. For these reasons, then, it was called divisible — and also because the perceiving must be distributed along with the perceptible, and the imagining along with the imagined, and must keep pace with them; for the perceptive motion, being proper to the soul, moves toward the perceptible outside it. But the mind itself was, in itself, stable and motionless; yet, coming to be in the soul and gaining the mastery, it turns the soul back upon itself and brings to completion its circular movement, which most of all touches upon being, ever abiding. For this reason their union became hard to blend, mixing the divisible with the indivisible, and that which is movable in every way with that which is in no way movable, and forcing the Different to come together into the Same. But the Different was not motion, just as the Same was not rest, but the principle of difference and unlikeness. For each descends from its own principle, the Same from the One, the Different from the Dyad; and they were first mixed here, about the soul, bound together by numbers and ratios and harmonic means; and the Different, coming to be in the Same, produces difference, while the Same in the Different produces order, as is plain in the first powers of the soul — and these are the discriminating and the moving. The motion, then, at once displays itself about the heaven: in sameness, otherness, by the revolution of the fixed stars; in otherness, sameness, by the order of the planets. For in the former the Same prevails, but in the things about the earth the contrary. Judgment has two principles: mind, from the Same, directed toward universals, and sense-perception, from the Different, directed toward particulars. And reason has been mixed of both, becoming intellection among the intelligibles and opinion among the perceptibles, employing as intermediate instruments the imaginations and the memories; and of these the one produces the Different in the Same, the other the Same in the Different. For intellection is the motion of the thinker about that which abides, while opinion is the rest of the perceiver about that which moves. And imagination, being an interweaving of opinion with perception, fixes the Same in memory; while the Different sets it in motion again, in the difference between before and now, touching upon otherness and sameness at once.

We must take the fusion that came to be about the body of the cosmos as an image of the proportion in which he fitted together the soul. For there the extremes were fire and earth, having a nature hard to blend with each other — or rather, wholly unmixable and uncombinable; whence, setting between them air before fire and water before earth, he first blended these with one another, and then through these blended and fitted together the extremes both with these and with each other. And here again he brought together the Same and the Different, contrary powers and opposing extremes, not through themselves, but by means of two other substances set between them — the indivisible before the Same, and the divisible before the Different — ranking each as suited to each; then, by blending himself with those once they had been mixed, he wove together in this way the whole form of the soul, making, so far as was possible, a thing alike out of unlike, and one out of many.