The creation described in the Timæus is a transparent parable. Elements which ethical reflection distinguishes in the field of experience are turned in that dialogue, with undisguised freedom of fancy, into so many half-personified primitive powers; the Ideas, the Demiurgos, Chaos, the Indeterminate, and the "gods of gods." Plato has not forgotten the lessons of Socrates and Parmenides. He distrusts as much as they any natural or genetic philosophy of existence. He virtually tells us that, if we must have a history of creation, we can hardly do better than to take ideal or moral principles, combine them as we might so many material elements, and see how the intelligible part of existence may thus receive a quasi-explanation. God remains the creator of the good only, because what he is mythically said to create is merely that in Nature which spontaneously resembles him or conforms to his idea; only this element in Nature is intelligible or good, and therefore the principle of goodness may be said to be its cause. Thus, for example, if we chose to write an Anatomy of Melancholy, we might attribute to the Demon of Spleen or to the Blue Devils only the sombre elements of that soulful compound, which, however, the evil imps would eternally tend to make as absolutely dyspeptic and like unto themselves as its primordial texture would allow. In exactly such a way Plato, in his allegorical manner, constructed a universe with a poetical machinery of moral forces, personified and treated as agents. When the thin veil of allegory is drawn aside, there remains nothing but a splendid illustration of the Socratic philosophy; we are taught that the only science is moral science, and that, if we wish to understand the world, we must bend our minds to the definition of its qualities and values, which are all that is intelligible in it. Essences and values alone are knowable and fixed and amenable to science. If we insist on history and cosmogony, we must be satisfied with having them presented to us in allegorical form, and made to follow ethics as the Timæus follows the Republic. Natural philosophy can be nothing but a sort of analytic retrospect by which we trace the first glimmerings and the progressive manifestation in Nature of those ideas which have authority over our own minds.