Ir is pleasant to be recalled by Mr. Grote to the consideration of the longdefunct cosmical systems of the ancients. His instructive pamphlet shows us, perhaps more strikingly than a more elaborate work, the point of departure in modern philosophy from the ancient line of march, and reminds us of the vast accessions made to physical science since its emancipation from an à priori way of treatment that was questionable even in metaphysics. We learn from him that several very eminent continental writers are employing their pens upon the cosmical mechanics of the ancients. It may not, perhaps, be unwelcome to some *Plato's Doctrine respecting the Rotation of the Earth; and Aristotle's Comment upon the Doctrine, By GEORGE GROTE, Esq. London: Murray. 1860. The Platonic Dialogues for English Readers. By WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D. London. 1860. VOL LV.-NO. 4 OF THE ANCIENTS.* of our own countrymen to renew their recollection of some of those old-world hypotheses, which, though long since overthrown, have satisfied the inquisitive credulity of mankind, have given color to some of the noblest flights of human imagination, and are to be regarded as a part, though not an integral part, of the mighty edifice of ancient philosophy. Plato and Aristotle thought that the sun moved round the earth. Dante constructed the whole scenery and mechanism of his sublime poem upon the geocentric theory. What has given color to the speculation of such lofty genius retains an interest independent of its physical truth. The cosmical theory of the ancients, as exhibited in Plato, is very grand. The earth is rotund, not flat, as the earlier poets thought; and is placed in the center of the Cosmos: the heavenly bo 28 spheres were identified with the several dies revolve about in various concentric fied their minds by philosophy. After spheres. The outermost sphere is that of the introduction of Christianity, the the fixed stars; and this sidereal sphere whirls round all the interior spheres, which have their own motions in addition to this revolution. The sidereal sphere was what became known to later philosophers as primum mobile, which was supposed to give the diurnal motion to the heavens. It forms the eighth heaven in the Paradise of Dante, and has its place in the more imperfect system of the universe, shadowed out by Milton in the fourth book of the Paradise Lost. The whole conception of a number of spheres inclosing 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 immovably 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. 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 mold, 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 puri Such was the cosmical theory of the Greeks, which has prevailed, with various modifications, during the greater part of the history of civilized man. "In orbs The devout reader of the sublime myths and flights of speculation in which the system is enshrined, can not 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, as one stood by the river of Chebar. But the Greek conception was pantheistic: in the words of Mr. Grote, "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 center, 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." Bearing this fact in mind, we can not 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 skepticism 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 impersonal things that were 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 di vine, so eternal. 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 inmutable and divine nature of a thing is its definition, may be added as immediately precursive of Plato. How much more comprehensive, as a theory, is the ideal system of Plato, 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 im parted, and physical conjecture banished; as the truths of the human mind, for inThis Pantheism Plato attempted to re-vestigation of which the same facilities fine 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 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 jejune, 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 any thing 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. Dialectic was the method or science which discovers the Ideas; the Ideas themselves His were the divine, external, immutable element in the nature both of men and of things. It is remarkable that Aristotle uses his most contemptuous expression toward the Ideas of Plato when he regards them as an explanation of the physical universe. He appears to 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 true it is that the greatest minds are never able to escape from 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, as it were, a stone's throw or a bow-shot 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 can not rise beyond its hight, 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. 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 conception 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 skeptical 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 speculations 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 ourselves the way in which the faith of mankind has been dependent on imagi. nation. Imagination shaped the creeds of primeval 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, imagination exceeded her just limits, and took the place of rigid observation. Perhaps the finest and most highlywrought of the Platonic mythes is that which relates the experience of Er, the Armenian, in the other world, from which he had been permitted to return among 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: "After four more days, they reached a place where they saw stretched out from above, across the whole heaven and earth, a line of light like a column, very much resembling a rainbow, only more bright and pure. They reached this object itself next day; and there, in the midst of the light, they saw the ends of the extended bands of heaven, appearing from out of it; for this light is the band of heaven, and holds together its whole circumference, like the undergirth in ships. And out of these ends proceeded, in a lengthily produced line, the Spindle of Necessity, by means of which all the revolving bodies perform their circuits. The shaft and winch of the Spindle are of adamant, while the spool is composed of this and other substances. The shape of the spool resembles what we employ; but, according to Er, we are to conceive of it as though one large spool was scooped out so as to form a hollow cylinder, and within this another such like one, but smaller, were adjusted, like barrels that fit into one another; within this again a third, and so a fourth; and after them four more: so that there are eight spools in all, inclosed one within another, presenting circular edges from above, but an unbroken surface, as of a single spool, around the Spindle, which goes right through the center of the eighth. of Necessity, and the spindle revolves in her lap. Then come the three daughters of Necessity; and to them, rather incongruously, the Sirens are added. The provisions for moving the cosmical spheres and axis are thus made more complicated than the scheme itself of the Cosmos. All is quite characteristic of the mode of thought in vogue in Plato's time. A question of some moment is discussed in the pamphlet of Mr. Grote. Did Plato admit the revolution of the earth around its own axis? If so, how did he reconcile this with the general revolution of the spheres around the earth as their center? We had better allow Mr. Grote to give his own statement and elucidation of the question. He says in the next words of the passage already quoted : "The revolutions of the exterior or sidereal "As the cylinder turns, a revolving motion is communicated to the whole. But while the whole sphere (circle of the same) depend on, and are is revolving, the seven interior circles slowly determined by, the revolutions of the solid cylrotate in the opposite direction. Of these, the inder or axis, which traverses the Kosmos in eighth is the swiftest in motion, next to this its whole diameter. Besides these, there are the seventh, sixth, and fifth, all with the same various interior spheres or circles, (circles of velocity; thus, as it seemed, the fourth, the the different,) which rotate by distinct and third, and, lastly, the second. The Spindle variable impulses in a direction opposite to the turns in the lap of Necessity. And carried sidereal sphere. This latter is so much more round with the circles, one resting upon the powerful than they, that it carries them all upper surface of each, and uttering one single round with it: yet they make good, to a cernote, were Sirens, whose eight voices together tain extent, their own special opposite movecompose a harmony. Moreover, at equal in- ment, which causes their positions to be ever tervals around, sat, each upon a throne, in changing, and the whole system to be compli white robes, and with chaplets on their heads, cated. But the grand, capital, uniform, overNecessity's three daughters, the Fates, Lache-powering, movement of the Kosmos consists in sis and Clotho and Atropos; and to the harmony of the Sirens, Lachesis sang of the Past, Clotho of the Present, Atropos of the Future. And at times Clotho turned the uttermost circle round the spindle by a touch of her right hand; and Atropos, in like manner, with her left hand turned those within; while Lachesis, with either hand, touched both in her turn."-Republic, x. pp. 616, 617. In this passage we have the geocentric theory set forth with the utmost splendor of imagination; and it is remarkable to what an extent Plato permits his representation of a philosophical system to be adorned by the popular creations of imagination. The system is complete in itself, without investing allegorical personages with motive powers. But the system is in itself an allegory, a mystical representation of a theory; and there is, therefore, no defense against its becoming allegorical in form. The spindle had been termed in the outset, "The spindle of Necessity:" from this phrase presently arises an impersonation the revolution of the solid axis, which determines that of the exterior sidereal sphere. The impulse or stimulus to this movement comes from the cosmical soul, which has its root in the center. Just at this point is situated the earth, the oldest and most venerable of intrakosmic deities,' packed round the center of the axis, and having for its function to guard and regulate those revolutions of the axis, and through them those of the outer sphere, on which the succession of day and night depends -as well as to nurse mankind. "In all this we see that the ruling principle and force of the Kosmos is made to dwell in and emanate from its center."-P. 34. If the earth be "closely packed" round a revolving axis, it must partake in the revolution; if the word be taken in its other sense, the question is at once answered in the affirmative. Plato took the conception of the revolution of the earth around a central point from the old Pythagorean doctrine of a central fire, round which the earth and sidereal spheres alike revolved. |