CHAP. XII. EGYPTIAN NOTIONS FROM PLATO. 221 



denominate things which ought rather to be called 

 ineffable unfoldings into light, from the ineffable ; 

 for progeny implies a producing cause, and the one 

 must be conceived as something even more ex- 

 cellent than this. From this divine self-perfect 

 and self-producing multitude, a series of self-perfect 

 natures, viz. of beings, lives, intellects, and souls, 

 proceeds, according to Plato, in the last link of 

 which luminous series he also classes the human 

 soul*, proximatively suspended from the daemo- 

 niacal order ; for this order, he clearly asserts in 

 the Banquet t, " stands in the middle rank between 

 the divine and human, fills up the vacant space, 

 and links together all intelligent nature." 



According to Plato t, the Egyptians supposed 

 the world to be subject to occasional deluges and 

 conflagrations, as a punishment for the wickedness 

 of mankind ; and the returns of the great cata- 

 strophe were fixed by them according to the 

 period of their great year, "which Aristotle calls 

 the greatest, rather than the great," when the 

 Sun and Moon and all the planets returned to the 

 same sign whence they had started : " the winter 

 of whicli year was the deluge, and its summer 

 the conflagration of the world." § The notion of 

 the deterioration of man, and the fables of the 

 golden and iron ages, were also of Egyptian origin, 

 and the story of the Atlantic Island ll having been 



* Vide also Plato's Tinia'iis, p. 508. el srq. 



■f See Vol. III. p. 500. 8ee also a copious account of the nature 

 of daemons, in the note at the beginning of tiie first Alcihiades, Vol. I. 

 ^ Plato, Critias. § Censoriu. de Die Nat. 



II Plato, Tun. p. 4G0. Taylor's Transl. ; and Critias. 



