very simple facts, or an inability to understand the necessary and obvious deductions from geometrical figures or movements. Of the causes of day and night the pre-Socratic philosophers, and especially the Pythagoreans, gave various accounts, and therefore the question can hardly be imagined to have escaped him. On the other hand it may be urged that the further step, however simple and obvious, is just what Plato often seems to be ignorant of, and that as there is no limit to his insight, there is also no limit to the blindness which sometimes obscures his intelligence (compare the construction of solids out of surfaces in his account of the creation of the world, or the attraction of similars to similars). Further,
Mr. Grote supposes, not that
ἰλλομένην means “revolving,” or that this is the sense in which Aristotle understood the word, but that the rotation of the earth is necessarily implied in its adherence to the cosmical axis. But (a) if, as
Mr. Grote assumes, Plato did not see that the rotation of the earth on its axis and of the sun and outer heavens around the earth in equal times was inconsistent with the alternation of day and night, neither need we suppose that he would have seen the immobility of the earth to be inconsistent with the rotation of the axis. And (b) what proof is there that the axis of the world revolves at all? (c) The comparison of the two passages quoted by
Mr. Grote (see his pamphlet on “The Rotation of the Earth”) from Aristotle
De coelo, Book
II (
c. 13,
ἔνιοι—γέγραπται, and
c. 14,
ἡμεῖς—μέσον) clearly shows, although this is a matter of minor importance, that Aristotle, as Proclus and Simplicius supposed, understood
ἴλλεσθαι in the “Timaeus” to mean “revolving.” For the second passage, in which motion on an axis is expressly mentioned, refers to the first, but this would be unmeaning unless
ἴλλεσθαι in the first passage meant rotation on an axis. (4) The immobility of the earth is more in accordance with Plato’s other writings than the opposite hypothesis. For in the “Phaedo” the earth is described as the centre of the world, and is not said to be in motion. In the
Republic the pilgrims appear to be looking out from the earth upon the motions of the heavenly bodies; in the “Phaedrus,” Hestia, who remains immovable in the house of Zeus while the other gods go in procession, is called the first and eldest of the gods, and is probably the symbol of the earth. The silence of Plato in these and in some other passages (
Laws X 893 B) in which he might be expected to speak of the rotation of the earth, is more favourable to the doctrine of its immobility than to the opposite. If he had meant to say that the earth revolves on its axis, he would have said so in distinct words, and have explained the relation of its movements to those of the other heavenly bodies. (5) The meaning of the words “artificer of day and night” is literally true according to Plato’s view. For the alternation of day and night is not produced by the motion of the heavens alone, or by the immobility of the earth alone, but by both together; and that which has the inherent force or energy to remain at rest when all other bodies are moving, may be truly said to act, equally with them. (6) We should not lay too much stress on Aristotle or the writer De Caelo having adopted the other interpretation of the words, although Alexander of Aphrodisias thinks that he could not have been ignorant either of the doctrine of Plato or of the sense which he intended to give to the word
ἰλλομένην. For the citations of Plato in Aristotle are frequently misinterpreted by him; and he seems hardly ever to have had in his mind the connection in which they occur. In this instance the allusion is very slight, and there is no reason to suppose that the diurnal revolution of the heavens was present to his mind. Hence we need not attribute to him the error from which we are defending Plato.
After weighing one against the other all these complicated probabilities, the final conclusion at which we arrive is that there is nearly as much to be said on the one side of the question as on the other, and that we are not perfectly certain, whether, as Böckh and the majority of commentators, ancient as well as modern, are inclined to believe, Plato thought that the earth was at rest in the centre of the universe, or, as Aristotle and Mr. Grote suppose, that it revolved on its axis. Whether we assume the earth to be stationary in the centre of the universe, or to revolve with the heavens, no explanation is given of the variation in the length of days and nights at different times of the year. The relations of the earth and heavens are so indistinct in the “Timaeus” and so figurative in the “Phaedo,” “Phaedrus” and Republic, that we must give up the hope of ascertaining how they were imagined by Plato, if he had any fixed or scientific conception of them at all.
§ V
The soul of the world is framed on the analogy of the soul of man, and many traces of anthropomorphism blend with Plato’s highest flights of idealism. The heavenly bodies are endowed with thought; the principles of the same and other exist in the universe as well as in the human mind. The soul of man is made out of the remains of the elements which had been used in creating the soul of the world; these remains, however, are diluted to the third degree; by this Plato expresses the measure of the difference between the soul
