of earth. In these sensations, as they
accumulate into a kind of habitual or unreasoned knowledge or opinion,
he discovers elements which have been active to {152} correlate the
sensations, which have from the first exercised a governing influence
upon the sensations, without which, indeed, no two sensations could be
brought together to form anything one could name. These regulative,
underlying, permanent elements are Ideas, _i.e._ General Forms or
Notions, which, although they may come second as regards time into
consciousness, are by reason known to have been there before, because
through them alone can the sensations become intelligibly possible, or
thinkable, or namable. Thus Plato is led to the conception of an order
the reverse of our individual experience, the order of creation, the
order of God's thought, which is equivalent to the order of God's
working; for God's thought and God's working are inseparable.

Of course Plato, in working out his dream of creation absolutely
without any scientific knowledge, the further he travels the more
obviously falls into confusion and absurdity; where he touches on some
ideas having a certain resemblance to modern scientific discoveries, as
the law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the quantitative
basis of differences of quality, etc., these happy guesses are apt to
lead more frequently wrong than right, because they are not kept in
check by any experimental tests. But taken as a 'myth,' which is
perhaps all that Plato intended, the work offers much that is
profoundly interesting.

{153}

With the _Timaeus_ is associated another dialogue called the _Critias_,
which remains only as a fragment. In it is contained a description of
the celebrated visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the
pillars of Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury and power, a land
also of gentle manners and wise orderliness. "The fiction has
exercised a great influence over the imagination of later ages. As
many attempts have been made to find the great island as to discover
the country of the lost tribes. Without regard to the description of
Plato, and without a suspicion that the whole narrative is a
fabrication, interpreters have looked for the spot in every part of the
globe--America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Sardinia, Sweden. The
story had also an effect on the early navigators of the sixteenth
century" (Jowett, _Plato_, vol. iii. p. 679).

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