PLATO. 477 



emunctories when obstructed, and dissipate or 

 resolve tumours by fomentations or cataplasms. 



If we pass in review the leading doctrines of 

 the different philosophical sects that arose from 

 the Ionian and Italian schools, we shall find that, 

 while on some points they differed from Thales 

 and Pythagoras, they nearly all maintained that 

 heat is a self-active principle, and the noblest of 

 the elements. Plato, who was born thirty years 

 after Hippocrates, regarded the soul of the world 

 as an all-pervading fire ; and he argues in the 

 Timaeus, that it is endowed with intelligence, or 

 it could not produce animal motion, sensation, 

 and cogitation, in organized bodies. 



But he maintains elsewhere, that the first 

 Mover is an incorporeal, immutable, and eternal 

 intelligence, not appreciable by the senses, the 

 Being of beings, and the Fountain of all law that 

 the visible forms of nature have been organized 

 by an active principle, possessing the power 

 of moving itself, and of generating organized 

 bodies, after the model of certain ideal arche- 

 types that reside in, or emanate from, the UN- 

 CREATED, SUPERESSENTIAL, AND ALL BEAUTEOUS 



MIND ; by which it is probable, he meant to 

 represent the eternal conceptions of the Infinite 

 Mind in framing the laws of the universe. At 

 one time he refers the origin of evil to the creation 

 of the world by inferior divinities; at another, to 

 an inherent stubbornness, or imperfection of 



