(Greek) of the one philosopher answers to
the circular movement (Greek) of the other. But unlike Anaxagoras, Plato
made the sun and stars living beings and not masses of earth or metal.
The Pythagoreans again had framed a world out of numbers, which they
constructed into figures. Plato adopted their speculations and improved
upon them by a more exact knowledge of geometry. The Atomists too made
the world, if not out of geometrical figures, at least out of different
forms of atoms, and these atoms resembled the triangles of Plato in
being too small to be visible. But though the physiology of the Timaeus
is partly borrowed from them, they are either ignored by Plato or
referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with more
favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number applied to the
distances of the planets reappear in the Timaeus. It is probable that
among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth century B.C., there were
already some who, like Plato, made the earth their centre. Whether he
obtained his circles of the Same and Other from any previous thinker is
uncertain. The four elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices
of the Timaeus may also be compared with his (Greek). The passage of one
element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the Ionian
philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not after the
manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he borrows from
others are fused and transformed by his own genius. On the other hand
we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or Eleatic speculation. He
does not imagine the world of sense to be made up of opposites or to
be in a perpetual flux, but to vary within certain limits which are
controlled by what he calls the principle of the same. Unlike the
Eleatics, who relegated the world to the sphere of not-being, he admits
creation to have an existence which is real and even eternal, although
dependent on the will of the creator. Instead of maintaining the
doctrine that the void has a necessary place in the existence of the
world, he rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum,
as in the Sophist he also denies the reality of not-being (Aristot.
Metaph.). But though in these respects he differs from them, he is
deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he differs from
them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the 'generous depth' of
Parmenides (Theaet.).

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