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A MEDICAL ESSAY on the TIMAEUS by JONATHAN WRIGHT, M.D

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A MEDICAL ESSAY on the TIMAEUS by JONATHAN WRIGHT, M.D A MEDICAL ESSAY ON THE TIMAEUS By JONATHAN WRIGHT, M.D. PLEASANTVILLE, N. Y. ONE cannot read Aristotle without the hands of a perfect Workman. All the being struck with the part the environment was used up in the perfect philosophy he ascribes to Emped- globe He made out of it. It is the pleasuie of ocles plays in much of his dis- Plato here to speak of the world in the terms course. While this is very much less true of an animal. The Demiurge made the globe for Plato, nevertheless it comes into promi- smooth all around and gave him no eyes, nence in the “Timaeus.” In Plato, much for what was there to see if everything was more than in Aristotle, we find the sources used up, or to hear or feel? No use for the of his thought not specifically referred to; senses at all; no respiration for there was but here in the “Timaeus,” when we find nothing to respire; no neecfpf food, for every the creator of the world has the four ele- thing was in him and nothing came from ments: air, fire, water, earth, from which him; no legs, for he had no place to go; no to shape the universe, we remember that arms; no implements for he had nothing to Aristotle (though others also) points to use them on; very singular animal, this. Empedocles as the oiiginator of the This animal the Creator created was self- doctrine, at least as the one who gave it sufficient and had no need for bodily organs. its earliest and greatest development. Thus I suspect Plato is joking, ridiculing a at this place in the “Timaeus” we find Plato doctrine of some one before him, but the drawing on the idea characteristic of Emped- idea persisted long after him, chiefly through ocles, when he says that God mixed all him. these together, “which are in number four The world is thus the child of God and by and out of these elements the world was virtue of this heritage becomes a god, created in harmony and therefore having while in repiesenting the world as an animal the spirit of friendship.” The last has the Plato may be ridiculing or bowing to the indubitable imprint of Empedocles. It is Pythagoreans or the Egyptians, for to the the primordial symbolizaton of the funda- latter very many animals are divine. They mental physicochemical forces of the cos- are the caskets of the divine spirit and the mos, Love and Hate, that is, the attraction modern societies for the care of animals are and repulsion of the old chemistry, the plus the offspring of that sentiment, which in and minus signs of the old electrophysics, eastern lands, modern India and ancient the kation and anion of the newer chemistry, Egypt, has been and still is a religious the proton and the electron whirling around cult. Perhaps Plato was not joking, but it is it in the new physics. It still rules the bio- not hard to conjecture whence he borrowed chemistry of modern science. the fantastic simile to an animal for some- It is true Plato subsequently says the soul thing that is in no way similar to an animal. was created first, but in the making of the Whether joking or not the idea is essentially world the Creator in the “Timaeus” used pantheistic and mysticism pervades the all the elements up. There was nothing whole of it. It makes everything possible. It of them left when he got through. The world is vastly superior to Aristotle’s entelechy, was to be a perfect animal and have neither for that is always a special application of a disease nor old age. Inasmuch as man suffers mystic principle in physiological action from the impact of his environment, we which Plato virtually makes universal. must remember the ills to which flesh is heir. He endows the world with a soul, but what It could not be thus with a world fresh from he makes it out of when the material is all used up is the first thing that occurs to the part of the “Timaeus,” where the physi- reader; then he remembers it is immaterial ology and pathology of man are dealt with, anyhow, but Plato catches himself up as though we must always remember that in though he had forgotten to mention that Plato’s cosmos the reasons for things, like God made the world soul first. It may well the ideas, take precedence of the processes be that went without saying, for Plato had in which they are involved. We forget as the cardinal point in his philosophy that that Plato really forged the word idea for us the idea of all things that are existed before and we have perverted its original meaning the things themselves. There seems (to the in so far that no conception of “form” ordinary man even) no escape from this clings to it. There was that much of except to imagine a demiurge who worked materialism to Plato’s ideas. They were without plan or specifications from any forms, though images of the mind, and the architect, and it takes much more than word came from a root meaning something the ordinary man to fathom the depths of you can see. It was an order of thought Plato’s thought in the “Timaeus.” which forced the reason for things to the However we are getting a good way, on fore and placed the things themselves in the the track of this animal, from medical inter- rear. The corporeal had only then begun to ests, and this, the thing we scientists as be separated from the incorporeal in con- materialists all shy at, gives us warning it ception, the material from the immaterial. is time to get back to them. Very probably Modern primitive man still does not know it was from or through Parmenides, as the difference. Robin says,1 that Plato had the idea of the This is the teleology which we find Plato sphere being the most perfect work of God, applying constantly to man as a part of the but that tenet of Pythagorean doctrine was cosmos, and Galen, who was as much the apparently widespread in Plato’s day. God pupil of Plato in this as he was of Hippoc- makes the world spherical, like an ameba at rates in medical science, passed on this rest, wanting nothing, seeking nothing and teleology with its minutiae, much more therefore devoid of anything Plato would worked out in detail, to fifty generations of call organs and senses and we have to invent medical men after him. The history of medi- an incomprehensible term for them, the cine during this long dreary time after Galen irritability of protoplasm. With the help of is the history of the lasting influence of the Darwin and Haeckel and Conklin we have teleological doctrine of Plato. When his all sprung away from something as near as kind of man came to be manufactured, the we can imagine to Plato’s idea of the world. legs and arms were for practicing motions There is vastly more than this to Plato’s in the six directions space had for Plato. conception of the creation of the world by It extended to right and left, up and God’s demiurge. He goes into the matter in down, forward and back, a purely anthro- vastly more detail than the author of the pological conception, with man at the first chapter of Genesis, whose demiurge center. We dismissed the purely anthropo- seems to have spent the first week chiefly in logical concept long ago and reduced direc- naming things. The ideas, if not the names, tions to three, but lately a fourth dimension were ready made and at hand for the has been added with which we are hardly demiurge of Plato’s God. He on the contrary as yet on speaking terms. The gods thought is a very busy god and the reasons for his the front part of man more honorable than actions are even more minutely described his hinder parts and the dome of the cal- than his methods. But we can pause no varium nearer heaven, and they gave him a longer and must pass directly to the latter forward motion. The eyes were contrived to 1 Robin, L. La Pensee Grecque, et les origines de give light as a sort of reflection of the pure I’esprit scientifique. Paris, 1923. fire within us all. Like that of the firefly we are to suppose it was moderated so as not to In the process of explaining how the soul burn, the cold light whose mystery we have of the world shapes the world which contains not solved, at least not succeeded in dupli- it (a very dark corner indeed of the cating. It is, we acknowledge, a very “Timaeus”) Plato begins at once with the superior and economical kind of light elements as they are, though he is in full which even yet God alone makes and which possession of the idea his predecessors have we cannot even imitate very closely. Of of their transmutation. He shows how any course I have not found this analogy in one may be seen to be converted into Plato, but we can let it go in support of his another. It is needless to mention how water theory of a light-producing source in man, turns into ice which has the hardness of the and perhaps he too was reminded of it by earth.
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