52 Baron Cuviei''s Lectures on the Natural Sciences. 



fiction more than the sciences of observation and calculation. 

 Yet he retained, in consequence of his connexion with the Py- 

 thagoreans, a great respect for geometry, and intended that it 

 should form an introduction to philosophy. It is not always 

 easy to determine what are his peculiar doctrines, for he has not 

 explained them in a didactic manner. It may, however, be 

 supposed that in his Dialogues, in which he generally introduces 

 Socrates as interlocutor, the opinions he places in the mouth of 

 his master were, for the most part, his own. 



Plato, in most of his writings, speaks of the human faculties, 

 the formation of ideas, and the nature of the soul. Although 

 he borrowed many metaphysical ideas from Anaxagoras, the 

 Pythagoreans, and even from the Elean School, yet the greater 

 part of his doctrine is new. He admits, for example, that the 

 general ideas in man are not formed by the method of abstrac- 

 tion, but that they are a recollection of those our mind had when 

 it was united to the Divine mind, of which it is an emanation. 

 The general ideas, therefore, pre-exist in the Divinity. At a 

 certain period, they penetrate matter, which was itself eternal, 

 and from this impregnation results the soul of the world, and 

 the soul of the different organized beings. 



It will easily be seen that, with bases like these for his philo- 

 sophy, Plato would necessarily be led to an a priori system of 

 physics and natural history, which would consequently be very 

 far from the truth. The results of his speculations on these 

 matters are given in the Timceus, a treatise which, although 

 somewhat obscure, is interesting, because it is the oldest that re- 

 mains to us of all those written by the Greek philosophers on 

 the natural sciences. 



The Dialogue commences with a recital which Critias sup- 

 poses to have been made to Solon, by an old priest of Sais, a 

 city of Lower Egypt, considered in Greece as the country of 

 C.ecrops. This priest, therefore, relates, that Sais had been 

 founded 10,000 years before by a colony which had issued from 

 Athica. Since this time, said he, numerous deluges had super- 

 vened and destroyed all the monuments of men ; but, in the 

 midst of these disasters, Egypt alone had been spared and still 

 preserved her annals. It is not necessary to shew all the ab- 

 surdity which there is in supposing that a country scarcely ele- 



