f that
fictitious _Primum Mobile_, which is higher, deeper, and still more
immeasurable. Moreover, this inconceivable _Primum Mobile_ ought to be
material and of enormous depth, far surpassing all inferior nature in size:
for nohow else could it conduct from East to West so many and such vast
bodies of stars, and the universe even down to the Earth: and it requires
us to accept in the government of the stars a universal power and a
despotism perpetual and intensely irksome. That _Primum Mobile_ bears no
visible body, is nohow recognizable, is a fiction believed in by those
people, accepted by the weak-minded folk, who wonder more at our
terrestrial mass than at bodies so vast, so inconceivable, and so far
separated from us. But there can be no movement of infinity and of an
infinite body, and therefore no diurnal revolution of that vastest _Primum
Mobile_. The Moon being neighbour to the Earth revolves in 27 days; Mercury
and Venus have their own moderately slow motions; Mars finishes a period in
two years, Jupiter in twelve years, Saturn in thirty. And those also who
ascribe a motion to the fixed stars make out that it is completed in 36,000
years, according to Ptolemy, in 25,816 years, according to Copernicus'
observations; so that the motion and the completion of the journey always
become slower in the case of the greater circles. And would there then be a
diurnal motion of that _Primum Mobile_ which is so great and beyond them
all immense and profound? 'Tis indeed a superstition and in the view of
philosophy a fable now only to be believed by idiots, deserving more than
ridicule from the learned: and yet in former ages, that motion, under the
pressure of an importunate mob of philosophizers, was actually accepted as
a basis of computations and of motions, by mathematicians. The motions of
the bodies (namely planets) seem to take place eastward and following the
order of the signs. {217} The common run of mathematicians and philosophers
also suppose that the fixed stars in the same manner advance with a very
slow motion: and from ignorance of the truth they are forced to join to
them a ninth sphaere. Whereas now this first and unthinkable _Primum
Mobile_, a fiction not comprehended by any judgment, not evidenced by any
visible constellation, but devised of imagination only and mathematical
hypothesis, unfortunately accepted and believed by philosophers, extended
into the heaven and beyond all the stars, must needs with