The first of these doctrines appears to us the most reasonable because it is founded on the primordial rôle of the sun in our world. It was born in the East when the Chaldean priests deprived the moon of the pre-eminence originally ascribed to it, and recognised the unequalled importance of the sun in the cosmic system.[239] These astronomical theologians deduced from this recognition a theory which includes something like an anticipation of universal gravitation, and which was to prove seductive both by its greatness and by its logic. It spread through the ancient world in the second and first centuries B. C. There are some signs that the Pythagoreans, who were much addicted to the study of the heavenly bodies, were the first to adopt it, and with the propagation of Oriental astrology it obtained a wide diffusion in the West. The sun, placed in the fourth rank or the middle of the planetary spheres,[240] like a king surrounded by his guards, was believed alternately to attract and repel the other celestial bodies by the force of his heat, and to regulate their harmonious movements as the coryphaeus directed the evolutions of a chorus. But since the stars were looked upon as the authors of all the physical and moral phenomena of the earth, he who determined the complicated play of their revolutions was the arbiter of destinies, the master of all nature. Placed at the centre of the great cosmic organism, he animated it to its utmost limits, and was often called the “heart of the world” whither its heat radiated. But this well-ordered universe could not be directed by a blind force, and therefore the sun was an “intelligent light” (φῶς νοερόν). The pagan theologians looked upon him as the directive reason of the world (_mens mundi et temperatio_). The Pythagoreans saw in him Apollo Musagetes, the leader of the chorus of the Muses, who were placed in the nine circles of the world and whose accord produced the harmony of the spheres. Thus he became the creator of individual reason and director of the human microcosm. The author of generation, he presided over the birth of souls, while bodies developed under the influence of the moon. The radiant sun constantly sent down sparkles from his flaming circle to the beings he animated. The vital principle which nourished men’s material envelope and caused its growth was lunar, but the sun produced reason.