longer sees or fancies that he sees God walking in the garden
or haunting stream or mountain. He feels also that he must put God as
far as possible out of the way of evil, and therefore he banishes him
from an evil world. Plato is sensible of the difficulty; and he often
shows that he is desirous of justifying the ways of God to man. Yet on
the other hand, in the Tenth Book of the Laws he passes a censure on
those who say that the Gods have no care of human things.

The creation of the world is the impression of order on a previously
existing chaos. The formula of Anaxagoras--'all things were in chaos or
confusion, and then mind came and disposed them'--is a summary of
the first part of the Timaeus. It is true that of a chaos without
differences no idea could be formed. All was not mixed but one;
and therefore it was not difficult for the later Platonists to draw
inferences by which they were enabled to reconcile the narrative of the
Timaeus with the Mosaic account of the creation. Neither when we
speak of mind or intelligence, do we seem to get much further in
our conception than circular motion, which was deemed to be the most
perfect. Plato, like Anaxagoras, while commencing his theory of the
universe with ideas of mind and of the best, is compelled in the
execution of his design to condescend to the crudest physics.

(c) The morality of the Timaeus is singular, and it is difficult to
adjust the balance between the two elements of it. The difficulty which
Plato feels, is that which all of us feel, and which is increased in our
own day by the progress of physical science, how the responsibility
of man is to be reconciled with his dependence on natural causes. And
sometimes, like other men, he is more impressed by one aspect of human
life, sometimes by the other. In the Republic he represents man as
freely choosing his own lot in a state prior to birth--a conception
which, if taken literally, would still leave him subject to the dominion
of necessity in his after life; in the Statesman he supposes the human
race to be preserved in the world only by a divine interposition; while
in the Timaeus the supreme God commissions the inferior deities to avert
from him all but self-inflicted evils--words which imply that all
the evils of men are really self-inflicted. And here, like Plato (the
insertion of a note in the text of an ancient writer is a literary
curiosity worthy of remark), we may take occasion to correct an error.