which carries the whole spectacle of the heavens regularly round the earth every twenty-four hours. More in detail, it was as follows: : of The earth at the centre: a small orb, with the element of air immediately around it. 1st sphere that of the moon, regarded as a planet. 2nd sphere : that of the planet Mercury. 3rd sphere that of the planet Venus. 4th sphere that of the sun, regarded as a planet: "the glorious planet sol," as Shakespeare calls him. 5th sphere that of the planet Mars. 6th sphere that of the planet Jupiter. : 7th sphere that of the planet Saturn (the last planet then known). 8th sphere that of all the fixed stars: differing from the preceding seven spheres in this, that, while each of those seven spheres had but one luminary in its circumference, to wit, its own particular planet, this 8th sphere was studded with stars multitudinously throughout. At this 8th sphere (which was called also the firmament, because it "walled in and steadied" all the inner spheres), Ptolemy and the ancients had stopped, reckoning the sphere of the fixed stars the outermost, and attributing to it the general diurnal motion which carried all the heavens round in twenty-four hours. Observed irregularities in the heavenly motions on that hypothesis, however, had required the addition, before the time of King Alphonso, of two extra spheres for the purposes of astronomical explanation, thus: 9th sphere the Crystalline. : 10th sphere: the PRIMUM MOBILE, or "C FIRST MOVED," enclosing all like a solid outermost shell, and causing the general diurnal wheeling of all the spheres, while the separate motions of the inner spheres accounted for other astronomical phenomena. This pre-Copernican system of the mundane universe was, certainly, a comfortable system. It afforded an explanation of phenomena which was satisfactory for the time, and yet the conception which it gave of the totality of things was pleasant and manageable. It was not unpleasant to think of oneself as living on a ball fixed at the very centre, and of ten successive heavens or spheres of space wheeling variously round this ball, most with their single lights, but one radiant with innumerable lights, and all strongly shelled in by the primum mobile. True, this primum mobile was vastly distant; but vast distance does not burst the imagination like infinitude, and here there was no infinitude. All was comfortably bounded. You could put your hand round the whole, as it were, and pat the primum mobile on the outside. There were compunctions and difficulties, nevertheless. There was some difficulty, for example, in imagining the nine inner spheres as concentric and yet independent spheres of mere transpicuous space, sliding and slipping complexly among each other at different angles and with different velocities, and only the tenth or outmost as having a certain shelly solidity, like that of opaque or dull-brown glass. There may have been some compunction also in the thought of so many vast motions of sun, planets, and stars round so small a body as the earth, and all merely for her particular convenience and pleasure. That compunction, it appears, was easily pacified. Did not the system of the ten revolving spheres round a fixed earth accord with the glory of man and of human nature? What better occupation for sun, planets, and stars, than to revolve round the little orb on which man, the monarch of the created universe, had his abode, delighting him by their changes among themselves, and exhibiting to him, every twenty-four hours, in most parts of the earth, the eternally repeated alternation of clear sunlit day and sapphire night with her jewels? A third difficulty was more important. The puzzle of infinitude still remained. Though the Ptolemaic system rather numbed and discouraged the sense of the boundlessness of space, by keeping men's thoughts mainly to the ongoings in the great visual round of things within the primum mobile, yet they could not really, if they did persist in thinking and imagining, be stopped by the primum mobile. They could send their thoughts beyond it, and could fancy the outer ocean of space, if space it could be called, beating and roaring against the opposing and excluding bosses of the last sphere of the mundane. This is what the pre-Copernicans could not avoid doing, and actually did. But even here they extracted a kind of relief for their reason out of the crude definiteness of their peculiar cosmology. It was a comfort to them to call all within the primum mobile by one name, regarding it as nature, the creation, the cosmos, the mundane universe, man's world of time and space and motion, about which he could speculate and have real knowledge, and to regard all beyond that boundary by a different name, voting it to be the motionless empyrean, the supernatural or metaphysical world, the universe of eternal mysteries, the home of Godhead, the restful heaven of heavens, into which the reason of man could never penetrate, and of which he could have glimpses only through faith and inspiration. This, accordingly, may pass as a supplementary diagram to that of the pre-Copernican cosmology : The inner circle is simply the previous circle of the ten spheres of the knowable, with the bounding lines of the inner spheres omitted. It is the entire cosmos or mundane universe of man, consisting of the orb of earth at the centre, the seven planetary heavens next to the earth, the eighth and more distant heaven of the fixed stars, the ninth or crystalline heaven beyond all the stars, and the tenth heaven or heaven of the primum mobile, including all. It represents, accordingly, that whole round of visible things which constitutes in a special sense THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH of Scripture and of common speech. But beyond all the mundane heavens is the EMPYREAN HEAVEN, or HEAVEN OF HEAVENS, the abode of Deity and of all eternal mysteries. That cannot be exhibited as bounded in any way by any geometrical figure or possible circumference. Let the outgoing rays of corona or sunflower round the primum mobile suggest at once the mystery and the infinitude. One thing more. The diagram represents infinitude after the universe of man, or the present cosmos of heavens and earth, had come into being. But that cosmos had not been always there. It had been created; and the creation of it, according to the Biblical belief, had been the work of six days at a certain definite epoch of past time. What had preceded the created cosmos in that part of infinitude which it now occupies? Was infinitude before the creation of the cosmos all one pure uninterrupted empyrean, or had there been anything intermediate, in the space of the present cosmos, between the pure aboriginal empyrean and the orderly heavens and earth that were to come? There does not seem to have been perfect uniformity of belief or imagination on this point; nor indeed did it come into discussion much among the ordinary holders of the pre-Copernican creed, but only among those who were not contented with the conception of the mundane universe as existing round them, but would speculate on the mode of its genesis. Among these the general belief, favoured by primeval and even classical tradition, and not out of accord with hints in Scripture, seems to have been that deity did not create the mundane universe immediately out of nothing, but out of a prior CHAOS, or huge aggregate of formless matter, which had been prepared for the purpose, and had been waiting for a time indefinite, in and round the predestined purlieus of the cosmos, for the consummating miracle of the six days. Perhaps as homely an expression of this traditional belief as can be found is that of Du Bartas in Sylvester's translation :— "As we may perceive That he who means to build a warlike fleet |