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 Bockh 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.

Section 5.

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