immobility; he knows (so we are required to believe) that Plato not only holds the same doctrine, but has expressly affirmed it in the Timæus: he might have produced Plato as an authority in his favour, and the passage of the Timæus as an express declaration; yet he prefers to pervert, knowingly and deliberately, the meaning of this passage, and to cite Plato as a hostile instead of a friendly authority--simply "to give himself the pleasure of contemptuously refuting Plato's opinion!" But this is not all. M. Martin tells us that the arguments which Aristotle produces against the doctrine are, after all, very feeble. But he farther tells us that there was one argument which might have been produced, and which, if Aristotle had produced it, would have convicted Plato of "an enormous contradiction" (p. 88) in affirming that the earth revolved round the cosmical axis. Aristotle might have said to Plato--"You have affirmed, and you assume perpetually throughout the Timæus, the diurnal revolution of the outer sidereal sphere; you now assert the diurnal revolution of the earth at the centre. Here is an enormous contradiction; the two cannot stand together."--Yet Aristotle, having this triumphant argument in his hands, says not a word about it, but contents himself with various other arguments which M. Martin pronounces to be very feeble. Perhaps M. Martin might say--"The contradiction exists; but Aristotle was not sharpsighted enough to perceive it; otherwise he would have advanced it." I am quite of this opinion. If Aristotle had perceived the contradiction, he would have brought it forward as the strongest point in his controversy. His silence is to me a proof that he did not perceive it. But this is a part of my case against M. Martin. I believe that Plato admitted both the two contradictory doctrines without perceiving the contradiction; and it is a strong presumption in favour of this view that Aristotle equally failed to perceive it--though in a case where, according to M. Martin, he did not scruple to resort to dishonest artifice. It appears to me that the difficulties and anomalies, in which we are involved from supposing that Aristotle either misunderstood or perverted the meaning of Plato--are far graver than those which would arise from admitting that Plato advanced a complicated theory involving two contradictory propositions, in the same dialogue, without perceiving the contradiction; more especially when the like failure of perception is indisputably ascribable to Aristotle--upon every view of the case. M. Cousin maintains the same interpretation of the Platonic passage as Boeckh and Martin, and defends it by a note on his translation of the Timæus (p. 339). The five arguments which he produces are considered both by himself and by Martin to be unanswerable. As he puts them with great neatness and terseness, I here bestow upon them a separate examination.