Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
The treatise entitled 'On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus' reports everything that Plato and the Platonists have zealously contended for. It also introduces certain geometrical analogies and likenesses, which, as its author supposes, bear upon the contemplation of the soul, and indeed musical and arithmetical theorems as well. He says that matter was given its form by the soul, and that the soul is given both to the universe as a whole and to each living creature, as the power that governs it; and in one respect he represents this soul as ungenerated, in another as subject to becoming, while matter is eternal and was given its shape by the divine through the soul. He also says that vice arose as an offshoot of matter, so that, as he puts it, the divine should not be thought the cause of evils.
Next, that the followers of Posidonius did not remove the soul far from matter, but, having accepted that the substance of the limits is spoken of, in the case of bodies, as divisible, and mixing this with the intelligible, they declared the soul to be an idea of that which is extended in every direction, constituted according to number and containing a harmony within it. For the objects of mathematics are ranked between the primary intelligibles and the objects of perception; and since the soul has, through the intelligible, the eternal, and through its perceptive part, the passible, it is fitting that its substance should occupy an intermediate position.
For it escaped their notice too that god, in shaping matter, made use of the limits of bodies only later, after the soul had already been fashioned, defining and enclosing matter's scattered and unconnected character by means of the surfaces fitted together out of triangles. But it is still more absurd to make the soul an idea; for the one is ever in motion, the other unmoved, and the one is unmixed with the perceptible, the other bound up with body. Moreover, god became an imitator of the idea, as of a model, but a craftsman of the soul, as of a product that he brought to completion. That Plato does not posit number as the substance of the soul, but rather something ordered by number, has been said before.
Common to both of these views is this: that neither in the limits nor in numbers is there present any trace of that faculty by which the soul is naturally suited to judge the perceptible. For its participation in the intelligible principle has produced in it mind and the capacity for thought; but opinions, beliefs, imagination, and passibility come from the qualities connected with body - something no one could simply conceive as arising out of monads, lines, or surfaces.
Moreover, not only the souls of mortal creatures possess the power of knowing the perceptible, but also, he says, 'the soul of the universe,' revolving upon itself, whenever it comes into contact with something whose substance is scattered, and whenever with something indivisible, is said, moving through the whole of itself, to declare with what a thing is the same and from what it is different, and in what respect especially, and where, and how this comes about, and how the things that come to be stand, and are affected, in relation to each thing.
In these words, while at the same time sketching an outline of the ten categories, he makes the matter still clearer in what follows. 'For when an account,' he says, 'concerns the perceptible, and the circle of the Different, moving rightly, carries the report through the whole soul, then opinions and beliefs become firm and true; but again, when it concerns the rational, and the circle of the Same, running smoothly, makes them known, knowledge is necessarily brought to completion. And as for that in which these two come to be present among existing things - if anyone should ever call it anything other than soul, he would say anything rather than the truth.'
Whence, then, did the soul acquire this power of apprehending and forming opinion about the perceptible - a motion distinct from that intellective motion which culminates in knowledge? It is hard to say, unless one firmly grants that here he is constructing, not soul in the simple sense, but the soul of the universe, out of an underlying substance that is both superior and indivisible, and an inferior substance, which he has called, in relation to bodies, divisible - this being none other than the opinative, imaginative, and sympathetic motion directed toward perceptible things, a motion not generated but subsisting eternally, just like the other.
For nature, in possessing the intellective, possessed the opinative as well; but the former is unmoved and unaffected, established around a substance that remains forever the same, while the latter is divisible and wandering, inasmuch as it comes into contact with matter that is being borne along and scattered. For the perceptible had not yet obtained order but was shapeless and indeterminate, and likewise the faculty ordered in relation to it had neither articulate opinions nor all its motions in order, but for the most part dream-like, distracted motions that disturbed the corporeal element, except insofar as some of them chanced by luck to fall in with the better. For it was situated midway between the two and had a nature sympathetic and akin to both, clinging by its perceptive part to matter and by its discriminative part to the intelligibles.
In this way, too, Plato somehow makes the matter clear by his very terminology. 'For let this account,' he says, 'reckoned according to my vote, be given in summary: that being, and space, and becoming are three, in three distinct ways, even before the heaven came to be.' For he calls matter 'space,' as it were a seat, and at times also a 'receptacle'; by 'being' he means the intelligible; and by 'becoming,' since the universe had not yet come to be, he means no other substance than that which exists in changes and motions, ranked between that which imprints and that which is imprinted, transmitting to this place the images from that other realm.
For these reasons, then, it was called 'divisible,' and also because that which perceives must necessarily be distributed together with, and coextend with, the perceptible, and that which imagines with the imagined; for the perceptive motion, being proper to the soul, moves toward the perceptible, which lies outside it. Mind, however, by itself and in itself, was stable and unmoved; but having come to be present in the soul and having gained mastery over it, it turns the soul back upon itself and brings to completion the circular motion, a motion which, revolving around what remains, most of all touches upon being. For this reason their union proved difficult to blend, mixing the divisible with the indivisible, and the wholly mobile with what is in no way moved, and forcing the one to come together with the other.
Now the Different was not motion, just as the Same was not rest, but rather a principle of difference and dissimilarity. For each of the two descends from a different first principle: the Same from the One, the Different from the Dyad; and it is here, in the region of the soul, that they are first mixed, bound together by numbers, ratios, and harmonic means. And the Different, coming to be present in the Same, produces difference, while the Same, present in the Different, produces order - as is clear in the primary faculties of the soul, which are the discriminative and the motive.
Motion at once displays itself in the heavens: as difference within sameness, through the revolution of the fixed stars, and as sameness within difference, through the order of the planets; for in the former the Same prevails, but in the region around the earth the opposite holds. Judgment, in turn, has two principles: mind, proceeding from the Same toward universals, and sense-perception, proceeding from the Different toward particulars. Reason is a mixture of both, becoming intellection among the intelligibles and opinion among the perceptibles, and employing as intermediate instruments imaginations and memories, of which some produce the Different within the Same, and others the Same within the Different.
For intellection is a motion of the intelligizing subject around what remains fixed, while opinion is a resting of the perceiving subject around what is in motion; and imagination, being an intertwining of opinion with sense-perception, is fixed in memory by the Same, while the Different, in turn, sets it moving again in the difference between before and now, touching upon otherness and sameness at once.
Now the blending that occurred with respect to the body of the universe must be taken as an image of the proportion by which god fitted the soul together. There, in the body, fire and earth stood at the extremes, having a nature difficult to blend with one another - or rather wholly unmixable and unstable. For this reason he placed between them air, before fire, and water, before earth, and first blended these with one another, and then, through them, mixed and fitted together the extremes both with these intermediates and with each other.
Here again, in the case of the soul, he brought together the Same and the Different - opposing powers and rival extremes - not directly through themselves, but through another substance placed between them: the indivisible before the Same, and the divisible before the Different, each ranked suitably in relation to the other. Then, mixing yet further with these once they had been blended, he wove together the entire form of the soul, so far as this was possible, fashioning something alike out of things different, and one thing out of many.