The immortal soul is in the head, the mortal in the breast.
There is some curious physiology, as, that the purpose of the intestines is to prevent gluttony by
keeping the food in, and then there is another account of transmigration. Cowardly or unrighteous
men will, in the next life, be women. Innocent light-minded men, who think that astronomy can be
learnt by looking at the stars without knowledge of mathematics, will become birds; those who
have no philosophy will become wild land-animals; the very stupidest will become fishes.
The last paragraph of the dialogue sums it up:
We may now say that our discourse about the nature of the universe has an end. The world has
received animals, mortal and immortal, and is fulfilled with them, and has become a visible
animal containing the visible--the sensible God who is the image of the intellectual, the greatest,
best, fairest, most perfect--the one onlybegotten heaven.
It is difficult to know what to take seriously in the Timaeus, and what to regard as play of fancy. I
think the account of the creation as bringing order out of chaos is to be taken quite seriously; so
also is the proportion between the four elements, and their relation to the regular solids and their
constituent triangles. The accounts of time and space are obviously what Plato believes, and so is
the view of the created world as a copy of an eternal archetype. The mixture of necessity and
purpose in the world is a belief common to practically all Greeks, long antedating the rise of
philosophy; Plato accepted it, and thus avoided the problem of evil, which troubles Christian
theology. I think his world-animal is seriously meant. But the details about transmigration, and the
part attributed to the gods, and other inessentials, are, I think, only put in to give a possible
concreteness.
The whole dialogue, as I said before, deserves to be studied because of its great influence on
ancient and medieval thought; and this influence is not confined to what is least fantastic.