We are led by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the centre or
inmost shrine of the edifice, but as a detached building in a different
style, framed, not after the Socratic, but after some Pythagorean model.
As in the Cratylus and Parmenides, we are uncertain whether Plato is
expressing his own opinions, or appropriating and perhaps improving
the philosophical speculations of others. In all three dialogues he is
exerting his dramatic and imitative power; in the Cratylus mingling a
satirical and humorous purpose with true principles of language; in
the Parmenides overthrowing Megarianism by a sort of ultra-Megarianism,
which discovers contradictions in the one as great as those which
have been previously shown to exist in the ideas. There is a similar
uncertainty about the Timaeus; in the first part he scales the heights
of transcendentalism, in the latter part he treats in a bald and
superficial manner of the functions and diseases of the human frame. He
uses the thoughts and almost the words of Parmenides when he discourses
of being and of essence, adopting from old religion into philosophy the
conception of God, and from the Megarians the IDEA of good. He agrees
with Empedocles and the Atomists in attributing the greater differences
of kinds to the figures of the elements and their movements into and out
of one another. With Heracleitus, he acknowledges the perpetual flux;
like Anaxagoras, he asserts the predominance of mind, although admitting
an element of necessity which reason is incapable of subduing; like the
Pythagoreans he supposes the mystery of the world to be contained in
number. Many, if not all the elements of the Pre-Socratic philosophy
are included in the Timaeus. It is a composite or eclectic work of
imagination, in which Plato, without naming them, gathers up into a kind
of system the various elements of philosophy which preceded him.

If we allow for the difference of subject, and for some growth in
Plato's own mind, the discrepancy between the Timaeus and the other
dialogues will not appear to be great. It is probable that the relation
of the ideas to God or of God to the world was differently conceived
by him at different times of his life. In all his later dialogues we
observe a tendency in him 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 hel