The Geocentric Theory.

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Paradise Lost, The whole conception of a number of spheres enclosing one another, of ethereal substance, holding the various orders of stars embedded in them, was found to offer a fair explanation of celestial phenomena. Certain stars were observed to hold an unvarying position to one another: such were supposed to be revolving in the same sphere. Other stars, which shifted their positions with regard to one another, were explained to belong to different spheres, and to move under different laws. Some were observed to revolve at greater speed than others, in consequence, of course, of the various velocity of the several spheres. The heavenly bodies, so far as observation could go, always presented the same side to the earth; it was, therefore, concluded that they had no revolution round their own axis, but were fixed immoveably in the sphere which carried them round. Aristotle, who adopted the theory, defends it by an amusing argument. The stars, he says, being globes, are of the form worst adapted for motion: they must, therefore, be carried round by some other power; and it is for this reason that they are fixed in the spheres,

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This venerable cosmical theory was adorned, after the fashion of the Greeks, with most beautiful poetical embellishments. Every one has heard of the music of the spheres; few may recall that, in its origin, this music referred not to the spheroid bodies which we watch in their nightly courses through the sky, but to the harmonious motion of the hollow cylinders of ethereal mould, revolving one within another, and bearing round the wandering fires of heaven, These were from of old peopled by the souls of the good; and the loftiest of them and the most happy habitations are in the Phado assigned to those who on earth had purified their minds by philosophy. After the introduction of Christianity, the spheres were identified with the several heavens in which the faithful were to enjoy the various degrees of eternal felicity. It deserves mention, as an illustration of the spiritual element of Christianity, even in the midst of superstitions, that two new ones were added by the Christian poets to complete the number of the ten heavens; and that the nature of these two was different from the material, though sublimed, substance of the eight mundane, spheres. They belonged to the intelligential, not the material world. The lower of them is sometimes apparently confounded with the primum mobile, or sidereal sphere; in, Dante it is the Angelic sphere, or Globus Cælestium Ordinum divided into nine circles according to dignity, each circle exere cising a mysterious influence upon one of the lower mundane spheres. The highest of all was the Empyrean, the abode

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of purest light of fire, tenanted only by the highest sacred intelligences, and next to the throne of Deityds must not, however, be supposed, that philosophers always contented themselves with the eight spheres assigned by Plato (In the Republic, libx. p. 616) The astronomer Callipus assumed not less than thirty-three. Aristotle adopted his views, with a further addition of twenty-two.

Such was the cosmical theory of the Greeks, which has prevailed, with various modifications, during the greater part of the history of civilized man.

The devout reader of the sublime myths and flights of speculation in which the system is enshrined, cannot fail to be reminded of the inspired vision of the wheels within the wheels, with the spirit of the living creatures in them, which came from the north was one stood by the river of Chebar. But the Greek conception was pantheistic in the words of Mr. Grote,!,blton Grote, blow out ni tuotanto no ting suizih mult

Plato conceives the Kosmos as one animated and intelligent being or god, composed of body and soul. Its body is moved and governed by its soul, which is fixed or rooted in the centre, but stretches, to the circumference on all sides, as well as all round the exterior. It has a perpetual movement of circular rotation in the same unchanged place, which is the sort of movement most worthy of a rational and intelligent being. trop rows ompar has crura orgood ads me of ok Bearing this fact in mind, we cannot longer be surprised that physics and metaphysics were inextricably mingled in ancient philosophy. In modern conceptions the world of matter stands apart from the world of mind. We have difficulty in realizing the views of a Greek of the Platonic age and temper. Several almost contradictory elements were to be reconciled in his estimate of the sum of things. The popular worship of the gods gave him the idea of personal force exerted upon material things. And yet scepticism inclined him to think lightly of the popular religion: He was driven elsewhere to seek for an account of force, or motion, that necessary premise to an intelligent theory as to how existing things came into being. Where could he find this? If not in the personal agency of the gods, it must be in the things themselves; the universe was its own creator and guardian. No other conclusion was possible. Motion must either reside in personal agents, or be a property of the

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impersonal things that wore moved. But if motion were inherent in things themselves, then these must be full of divine life, Such was the Pantheism into which an intelligent Greek must necessarily have fallen. It was of the completest kind. Divinity not only belonged to, but was inseparable from, the Cosmos and the present constitution of things was, as divine, so eternal. ord-quows lo robbe dire O This Pantheism Plato attempted to refine and exalt by his great system of the Ideas, The Ideas may perhaps be best understood as a suggestion to explain the divine nature of the Cosmos. The attempt was in a natural direction. Plato included man in the universe not merely as a spectator, but as a participator in the divine life that filled and moved it. In other words, he interrogated the human consciousness for an account of the great causes of the origin and constitution of the world. He investigated what was divine in man's nature; and, having found it, argued that what was divine in the world, must be identical with this. Now the divine in man he discovered to be the ideas of goodness, beauty, truth, which exist within him independently of individual character. He concluded the same ideas to be the divine part or element in the world, by participating in which all its phenomena are determined. Hence, although it is commonly said that the psychology of Plato was realistic, it would be nearer the mark to explain that the realism of Plato became psychological. He argued from man to the universe, but not until the universe had driven him to man. Philosophy in his hands fully assumed the dialectical or logical character, to which from of old she had been gradually tending. So to say, she became more and more humanized. Plato is usually described as a realist. He is so only in comparison with Aristotle. He is far less realistic than any of his predecessors. The distance between him and the earliest speculators is in this respect very great. The Ionic or physical school propounded some element of nature as the cause of things. Plato propounds the ideas of the human mind. The links between the two are Anaxagoras, who, with a foresight which excited the astonishment of Aristotle, laid down mind as the author of being; and Pythagoras, who held that numbers are the essences of things. The Socratic doctrine of definition, that the immutable and divine nature of a thing is its definition, may be added as immediately precursive of Plato. How

ideal system of pch more comprehensive as a theory is the

we need scarcely remark; but it is so only inasmuch as the subjective or human complexion is more fully brought out as the logical character is more fully imparted, and physical conjecture banished; as the truths of the human

jejune,

mind, for investigation of which the same facilities have existed in every age, were more boldly substituted for inquiries into nature, the means for conducting which did not then exist. The mind of Anaxagoras was vague, the numbers of Pythagoras june, the definition of Socrates incomprehensible, in comparison of the system of the Ideas, elaborated by the invention, and adorned by the eloquence, of Plato. He gave to psychology a transcendental character, by employing it in solution of the mysteries of being; while, in fact, he was employed in subjecting the universe to the laws of human consciousness. This was a mistake, but it could not appear to be anything but the truth in the age of Plato; investigation having no other open path. We might fairly describe the philosophy of Plato as a transcendental logic. His Dialectic was the method or science which discovers the Ideas; the Ideas themselves were the divine, eternal, immutable element in the nature both of men and of things.

It is remarkable that Aristotle uses his most contemptuous expression towards the Ideas of Plato when he regards them as an explanation of the physical universe. Tà yàp eion xaipeltw, * εἴδη TEPETIOμATA Yάp Cori. (Anal. Post, 1. 22. 4.) He appears to τερετίσματα γάρ ἐστι. have discovered the weak point in the system to have been that it was no explanation of nature. And yet even in departing from his master, he was only continuing his master's work, as we shall presently observe; and was himself in turn unable to go beyond the limits imposed by the unripeness of his times, or to alter the direction given to thought by previous inquirers. So greatest minds are never able the atmosphere of thought in which they live. If they advance upon some position lying beyond the actual reach of men, it is only because they have been accompanied part of the way by their fellows they are but, a stone's throw or as it were a bowshot beyond the rest the forlorn hope could not go forth alone, without the camp, to the assault, had not the whole army sat down before the hostile towers. Or, to borrow a figure from the sublime conception under which these very sages explained the visible universe, the brightest stars of human intellect can but rotate in the impalpable ethereal sphere of general human attainment and thought where they have been placed: they have no motion nor brightness apart from this; they cannot rise beyond its height, nor escape from its circumambient grasp; music of other spheres they shall not hear; nor, if they would rebel against this law of the intelligential universe, shall they have other fate than that of the Son of the Morning, bright meteoric catastrophe and quick extinction.

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Popular Belief represented in the Platonic Mythes.
Plato, then, as well as Aristotle, to whom we have not yet
come, was the servant of all, because greatest among them. He
embraced, whilst he amplified, the conjectures of his eminent
predecessors, Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, and probably did more
justice than he could make appear to the calmly abstract con-
ception of the latter. But there was another element of common
thought which had to be represented in his philosophy. The
intelligent Greeks of his day, however sceptical as to the popular
culture of the gods, could never eliminate the notion of personal
causation derived therefrom. Plato never thoroughly cleared his
philosophy from the same conception. Although, therefore, his
basis is logically Pantheistic, and he regarded the different parts
of the universe as gifted with divine motion, and the whole as a
mighty, living, and self-subsisting mass, yet he assigns a place
to the agency of the gods, and we find in his severest specula-
tions a continual slipping back into the forms of popular belief.
Hence the great importance to be attached to his mythes, which
Occur usually as a kind of summing up of his arguments, at the
end of a discussion, for example, and held the important office
of reconciling his own opinions, so far as may be, with those of
the general public. Whether the mythes of Plato were of his
own invention, or, as is more likely, adopted with alterations
from some great cycle of imaginative tradition which may have
marked the passing of poetry into philosophy, they are of immense
value as expositions of the convictions of the day. They are
also remarkable as monuments of a thing that has struck our-
selves, the way in which the faith of mankind has been de-
pendent on imagination. Imagination shaped the creeds of
primæval date; and when philosophy arose, it was the legitimate
function of that awful faculty to explore the secrets of the human
spirit, and lay the foundation of psychology. But in the
share occupied in the physical theories of the ancients, imagi-
nation exceeded her just limits, and took the place of rigid
observation.

Perhaps the finest and most highly wrought of the Platonic
mythes is that which relates the experience of Er, the Armenian,

the other world, from which he had been permitted to return amongst men. It refers in the main to the rewards and punishments of souls after death; but contains besides an account of the appearance presented by the physical Cosmos from a superior position. As we shall have occasion to refer to this part of the mythe again, we will quote in this place the most important sentences in it :