Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/196

“Here is the goal, whence motion on his race
Starts: motionless the centre, and the rest
All moved around. Except the soul divine,
Place in this heaven is none; the soul divine,
Wherein the love, which ruleth o'er its orb,
Is kindled, and the virtue, that it sheds:
One circle, light and love, enclasping it.
As this doth clasp the others; and to Him,
Who draws the bound, its limit only known.
Measured itself by none, it doth divide
Motion to all, counted unto them forth,
As by the fifth or half ye count forth ten.
The vase, wherein time's roots are plunged, thou seest:
Look elsewhere for the leaves.”

It was not till 240 years after these verses had been written that Copernicus propounded his system of the motion of the earth and the other planets round the sun; and that system only gradually won its way to acceptance, even in scientific minds, and with the aid of the demonstrations of Galileo. Till the end of the seventeenth century the Aristotelian system—further elaborated by the Alexandrian Ptolemy and by King Alphonso X. of Castile (1252-1284 A.D.)—maintained its influence, and filled the literature of all Europe with a particular train of associations.^[1] Shakespeare lived and died in the faith of the older system. Milton had been bred in it as a boy, and the plan of his universe in the 'Paradise Lost' was drawn accord-

1. When Shakespeare wrote—

   "And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,"

   he was referring to the Ptolemaic or Alphonsine spheres. The common metaphor of a person's "sphere" is a survival of the same notion.