THE COMMENTARIES OF PROOLTJS
286
an
calculation; but, he says, they remain only specialist calculators,
who miss
affair
of
the nature of the whole,
which Plato alone laid hold on^. Returning to the subject, he admits their usefulness as means of analysing complex motions into simple ones'. In this they are not vain, although no such mechanisms exist in nature'- What he desires is to arouse attention and to stir up more exact inquiry*. His own suggestion is that, without any such hypotheses, we may suppose the planets, in accordance with their intermediate position in the universe, to revolve according to types of
motion intermediate between the circular and the rectilinear. For cause, he can only assign regularly changing impulses from the planetary souls ^. The philosophic insight, as in the case of Bruno and Kepler, whose astronomical conceptions were of course larger but whose causal explanations are not in advance of this, was in discarding the external contrivances. A genuinely scientific explanation was not reached before Newton; and this, when it came, had what Proclus calls the simplicity of divine things.
With Proclus, the
divinity of the earth
of faith as the divinity of the stars.
is
as
much an article
The Earth, he
argues*,
cannot be a mere inanimate mass. If it were such, of course it would not be divine; for, as Theophrastus says ovSev rifuov :
avev
yjrvxr]!;''
Plato calls
.
it,
From the mind of the Earth, "our nurse," as our own mind receives impulses*. Taking up
the phrase of Plato, that
it is
"the
within the heaven," Proclus shows
first
and
eldest of the gods
how the element
though darker and more material, as some
insist,
of earth,
exceeds the
other elements in the comprehensiveness with which ^
iii.
96, 31-32:
Twv oKay 2
iii.
' iii.
airra
/caXfj /iiiv
are
erlvoia xal -^vxaii iimpiwovaa \oyiKaii, t^s Se
Acrroxoi <pi<rews, ^s /iivos ovTeXi^eTO IlXdrui',
148-149.
» iii.
149, 5-8: aXX4 ToCra
roU
146.
/tiv im<rTd<reuJs 4|ia, icoi Sid.
toOto koJ irXeoviKU
ipcXoBeAfioaiv els iirlaKe^iv irjmreivu Kai dpeyelpu 4v aiiTOts kcU t4s irepl
Toirav aKpi/Sctrr^pas = iii.
147.
'
136,
iii.
ii
all
xaravo'^creis. « iu.
1.
Cf.
ii.
122, 16,
135-136.
where the same quotation from Theophrastus
occurs ' iii.
136, 26-28:
v6e!, Kar' ixeifa
el yap 5i) rineripa rpo^ds iffnv, o£ Se optios riiieis ^vxad Kal hv /idXiffTa reXeatovpybs finQv eir], riiv rnUrepov Ktvovaa vovv.