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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: God, and from the Megarians the IDEA of good. He agrees with Empedocles
and the Atomists in attributing the greater differences of kinds to the
figures of the elements and their movements into and out of one another.
With Heracleitus, he acknowledges the perpetual flux; like Anaxagoras, he
asserts the predominance of mind, although admitting an element of
necessity which reason is incapable of subduing; like the Pythagoreans he
supposes the mystery of the world to be contained in number. Many, if not
all the elements of the Pre-Socratic philosophy are included in the
Timaeus. It is a composite or eclectic work of imagination, in which
Plato, without naming them, gathers up into a kind of system the various
elements of philosophy which preceded him.
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