in the Phædrus, the souls, in their circuitous route through the universe, for the purpose of contemplation, start from the house of the gods, in which Hestia alone remains behind, and climb up, upon it, to the highest sub-celestial arch; breaking through this, they come at last to the super-celestial region, where they contemplate the formless and pure essence of things, that is, the ideas here mythically represented. Not intending again to defend all particulars referring to this point, contained in an earlier essay, I am nevertheless compelled to recognise it as perfectly Philolaic; not, however, in such a sense as that Philolaus said exactly the same, but as grounded upon the Philolaic conception of the form of the universe. Hestia remains alone in the house of the gods: is not the Pythagorean Hestia, the house of Zeus, clearly enough indicated here of that Zeus, I say, who in Plato leads the procession of the gods? Is not, on the other hand, the supracelestial region exactly the Olympus of Philolaus? Observe, moreover, that these conceptions are perfectly unplatonic. Plato himself considers the earth as the centre-point, as is said in the Timæus; he knows nothing in his system of such a dwelling of the gods as we find in the Phædrus; but that in the Phædrus the earth is not the dwelling of the gods and the earth of the world he is clear at once from this, that those souls which cannot follow the gods in that procession, fall down upon the earth, which must therefore, certainly, be something different from the dwelling of the gods; and that this conception also may be explained without obscurity, and without confusion, out of the Philolaic system of the world, I have shown in the treatise de Platonico systemate cœlestium globorum et de verâ indole astronomia Philolaicæ, (p. 27-32). Then again the assumption of a super-celestial region is quite as little Platonic; for as Aristotle remarks, (Phys. III. 4.) the developed Platonic doctrine places nothing without the heavens, not even the ideas, which are not indeed in space at all; some foreign matter, therefore, predominates in the Phædrus, of which Plato availed himself for the purposes of a mythical composition; but, though foreign, not unsuitable. For in the Pythagorean super-celestial region is the Unlimited, a formless entity, the pure first origin; and it is precisely the formless, pure essence of things which, according to the Phædrus, the

souls contemplate there. But enough of this. Moreover, it appears from what has been said, that in the Timæus no coincidence with the Philolaic doctrine is to be found; and the only point they have in common is, that in the Timæus the soul of the world proceeds from the centre, and the whole universe is again enveloped in it, and Philolaus also regards the central fire as the chief seat of the soul, or the divine principle, and represents the All as surrounded with the soul. It is not therefore my opinion that Philolaus, as, according to some authors quoted in Simplicius, was the case with certain Pythagoreans, considered the central fire as the formative power, situate in the centre of the earth, and nourishing it from thence, and the counter-earth (άvτíx0wv) as the moon; which, when applied to Philolaus is perfectly unsuitable: but it can scarcely be overlooked, that the central fire has the same relation to the soul of the world, which, according to some physical conceptions, the brain, according to others, the heart, has to the human soul."