cerity again. But Cromwell's age was one of almost abject reliance on the words and letter of Scripture; and the religion of the time was therefore necessarily narrow and Judaising, and unjust to the various culture handed down to us from the classical nations, and the habits of Saxon ancestors.

It would be idle to expect that this phase of national faith could pass away, and be replaced by one resting on the broader foundations of the whole divine education of the ages which had gone before, without a long intervening period of vacillating opinion, external creeds, and dogmatic indifference, telling as much on the political as on the theological atmosphere. Still the springs of political faith remain. Dr. Newman used to preach that the English race, with all its great qualities, has no vivid sense of the supernatural. This may be in some sense true; but by the deep English love for that Order, political and social, the roots of which travel far and wide into the spiritual world, we have often already in our history been brought back to feel and know, as well as unconsciously obey, the Eternal Will in which the unity of the nation is centred; and by the same craving we may be brought to realise it as vividly, and less fanatically, again.

ART. X.-PLATO: HIS PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS.

Plato's Doctrine respecting the Rotation of the Earth, and Aristotle's Comment upon the Doctrine. By George Grote, Esq. London,

1860.

The Platonic Dialogues for English Readers. By William Whewell, D.D. London, 1859-60.

Platon's Sämmtliche Werke: übersetzt von Hieronymus Müller, mit Einleitungen begleitet von Karl Steinhart. 7 Bände. 7 Bände. Leipzig,

1850-59.

Ir is curious that, in spite of the peculiar definiteness attaching to physical conceptions, there are as many undetermined questions respecting the kosmical mechanics of the ancients as respecting their ethics and metaphysics. There is no greater literary paradox than this, that writers trained in the Greek geometry, and thinking in the pure and simple lines of Greek imagination, should have transmitted to our hand treatises on the system of the universe, in which the relations of its primary bodies are gathered into no clear picture. To the wellknown question of the Oxford Examiner, "Does the earth move round the sun, or the sun round the earth?" a discreet desire

to be on the safe side accounts for the answer, "Why, sir, sometimes the one, and sometimes the other." But that Plato, on being asked, "Whether day and night arise from the earth's spinning under the heaven, or the heaven spinning over the earth?" should reply to Mr. Grote, "Why, sir, from both," is less easy to explain; indeed, is so surprising, that we wonder whether the examinee has been heard aright, and regret more than ever that he cannot be recalled to answer again. How glad he would have been to tell us his thought, and how sagaciously he foresaw the sort of odd opinions that would be fathered on his words, we know from his humorous lament over the imperfection of literary expression as compared with the living voice. "There is this disadvantage, Phædrus, in Writing, which brings it into exact analogy with Painting. The Artist's productions stand before you as if they were alive; but if you ask them any thing, they keep a solemn silence. Just so with an author's language: you would fancy it actually charged with the thoughts it speaks; but if you ask it about something which you want to have explained, it only looks at you with the same invariable sign. And, when once reduced to the litera scripta, every discourse is tossed about every where, in the hands alike of the competent and of those who have no business with it, and cannot tell who ought to read it and who not. And, when disparaged and wrongfully reproached, it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to defend and help itself."* Against the wrongs of prejudice and incompetency, Plato, in the hands of Boeckh, the first of living philologists, and of Grote, the first of living historians, is secure enough; but when such critics are totally at variance with each other about his doctrine of the earth, it plainly "needs its father to help it."

Yet, apart from the disposition to claim too much, or allow too little, to the Platonic astronomy, we doubt whether the loca probantia, when cleared of the critical tangle which has grown around them, involve any irresolvable obscurity or contradiction. The most important of them runs thus: "The earth, our nurse, folded round the axis which runs through the universe, He formed to be guardian and maker of night and day, first and eldest of the gods that came into the phenomenal world within the heaven."+ For the phrase "folded round the axis," substitute, with Gruppe, the translation, “revolving round the axis," and you make Plato teach the modern

Phædr. 275 D.

† Γῆν δὲ τροφὸν μὲν ὑμετέραν, εἱλλομένην δὲ περὶ τὸν διὰ παντὸς πόλον τεταμένον φύλακα καὶ δημιουργὸν νυκτός τε καὶ ἡμέρας ἐμηχανήσατο, πρώτην καὶ πρεσβυτάτην θεῶν, ὅσοι ἐντὸς οὐρανοῦ γεγόνασι. Timmus (Stallbaum), p. 40 B, C.

doctrine of the earth's rotation. Let the word stand as a description, not of motion, but of mere position, round the imaginary line from celestial pole to pole, and, with Boeckh, you obtain the picture of a stationary earth at the centre of a daily revolving heavenly sphere. Modify this conception on a single point; crystallise the geometrical axis of the universe into a solid cylinder, carrying the earth's matter as an excrescence integral with itself; and Mr. Grote's doctrine emerges, that, according to Plato, the same diurnal revolution from east to west affected earth and sky, yet caused the alternation of day and night. That this partnership of rotation would annul all relative motion and sacrifice the phenomenon which it is adduced to explain, is obvious enough to our modern physics; but would not, in Mr. Grote's opinion, occur to even the most accomplished philosophers of ancient Greece.

The Natural Science of the ancients, especially in its dynamical conceptions, must assuredly not be tried by our standards. But their Plane Astronomy was not so foolish that we may charge them with puerilities without limit: and Plato's evident familiarity with the phenomena of relative motion, and repeated use of them in explanation of celestial appearances, constitute a presumption against Mr. Grote's hypothesis, which only the clearest positive evidence can avail to remove. What, then, is the evidence adduced? It resolves itself, so far as Plato's own writings are concerned, into these two positions: (1.) It appears, from a kosmical description in the Republic (x. p. 616, 617), that the axis of the universe was conceived as a solid shaft, whose movement carried the spheres ; (2.) As the earth's matter was supposed to be packed round this shaft, it could not escape having the same motion attributed to it. Each of these positions is maintained with ample skill and learning; yet on neither can we rest as thoroughly established.

The sketch of the Kosmos, at the end of the Republic, forms part of a highly-wrought myth, descriptive of the retributions reserved for souls beyond the limits of this life. A human witness having been permitted to cross the boundary of death and return to the world without drinking the waters of forgetfulness, relates what he observed in his journey through the unearthly scenes; and, among other things, he reports the look of the milky-way, and of the several planetary and stellar spheres, seen from an extrazodiacal position. For our present purpose, the most essential sentences are these:

*

"Now when they had spent each seven days in that meadow, they

* Spoken of, however, not as "spheres," but as of drum-like form, or as spools.

were obliged on the eighth to break up, and move on; and after four days more, they reached a spot where they saw spread out from above across the whole heaven and earth, a line of light like a column, or most of all resembling a rainbow, only brighter and purer. This itself they reached with the advance of another day's journey: and there, in the middle of the light, they saw the ends of the stretched bands of heaven appearing out of it: for this light is the band of heaven, holding together its whole circumference, like the undergirth of ships. And out of these ends in elongated line proceeded the Spindle of Necessity, by means of which all the revolving bodies perform their circuits; the shaft and winch being of adamant, but the spool a compound of this and other materials. Now the nature of the spool is as follows: in shape it is like what we employ ; but, according to his account, we are to think of it as if in the hollow of one large spool, scooped out all through in the interior, were adjusted another smaller one of the same kind, like barrels that fit one within another: and then, further within, a third and a fourth, with afterwards four more: for there are eight spools in all, lying one within another, presenting circular edges as seen from above, but a surface quite continuous, as of a single spool around the spindle which goes right through the centre of the eighth. . . . . In the turning of the spindle the same revolving motion is given to the whole. But while the whole is carried round, the seven interior circles glide with slow rotation in the opposite direction: and of these the quickest in its motion is the eighth; next come, all having the same velocity, the seventh, sixth, and fifth; after that, as it seemed to them, the cycle of the fourth; then the third; and, last of all, the second. The spindle turns in the lap of Necessity. And, carried round with the circles, one resting on the upper surface of each, and uttering one single note were Sirens, whose eight voices together compose a harmony. Moreover, at equal intervals around sat, each upon a throne, in white robes and with chaplets on their heads, Necessity's three daughters, the Fates, Lachesis and Klotho and Atropos: to the Sirens' harmony they sung-Lachesis, the Past-Klotho, the Present-Atropos, the Future. And from time to time Klotho, with the touch of her right hand, turned the spindle's outermost circle, and Atropos with the left, moved in like manner those within; while Lachesis with either hand, touched both in turn." (De Rep. x. p. 616 в, p. 617 c.)

This passage undoubtedly sustains Mr. Grote's assertion that the rotation of the stellar sphere is made dependent on the turning of an adamantine axis to which it is attached. And his inference, that all other bodies stuck upon the spindle, including

The zodiacal space, within which all the orbits of the then known planets are found, would present, when seen edgewise from a remote station outside, the appearance of a cylinder's side. Seen from a station vertically above, the same space would look like a cylinder's top: or, supposing each planet to mark its path by a track of light, like a system of cylinder-tops, one within another. The different "breadth" of apparent edge, assigned in the text to the spools, depends on the inclination of the orbits, and of the equator to the ecliptic.

the earth's mass at the mid-point, must share the same motion, seems natural enough. Yet it is invalidated by the very terms of the description just quoted: according to which even the outermost sphere owes its movement, not simply to the spindle, but in part to the touch of Klotho's hand; and all the planetary cylinders, though on the same axis, are actually driven by the finger of Atropos in the reverse direction, with five different rates of speed. The bodies on the axis are not therefore made so fast to it as to preclude their slipping back upon it in all required degrees; and no argument can be founded upon the idea of material cohesion between them and their adamantine bearer. Our citation, it will be observed, does not mention the earth at all; and to fix it at the mid-point of this spindle, Mr. Grote has to import it from the Timæus, where no spindle is named. Supposing this fusion of two accounts to be legitimate, is there any thing in the earth's attachment to the axis, as described in the Timæus, which makes its case different from that of the sliding planets in the Republic? Does the word einλoμévny,—" folded," "wrapped," "packed,” round the axis,-imply solid compression and integration, or only circular arrangement, of material? The latter we believe to be the essential idea, with perhaps the additional conception of gathering" or "huddling" together about a given point, as a routed host would gather about a place of refuge. When we have made the most of this "close packing," we get only a condensation of the particles inter se, so as to form a solid mass, without any implied incorporation of them with the line of direction around which they collect. The text, we conceive, thus leaves the earth as free as the planetary verticils, upon the spindle that carries them all.

But this "spindle" (Tрaктos) of adamant,-are we really to accept it, with Mr. Grote, as part of the Platonic physics? On the evidence of this myth (and we know of no other) are we to attribute to a mathematician and idealist like Plato the belief in a solid axillary cylinder running through the universe? If so, we can hardly stop here. The spindle cannot well dispense with the winch; or work, without Necessity, using her hands and "knees," and helped by her three daughters; or serve any purpose, without the planetary drums that keep

• Mr. Grote's case depends, in fact, not so much on the exact meaning of the single word είλλομένην, as on the proper interpretation of είλλομένην περί τι. He does not claim for the verb the meaning "rotatory movement," but deduces the rotation as a secondary inference from the tight-fastening or packing of the earth on to a solid revolving cylinder. We may fully accept his definition of the word; yet may not feel convinced that to pack material together round about a shaft is the same thing as to fasten it tight on to the shaft. The packing-stuff of a pistonrod is eixoμévn Tepí the rod; yet the rod will slide through it.