The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, Volume 1

viz. “Thee, father of the worlds, father of the æones,[8] artificer of the Gods, it is holy to praise. Thee, O king, the intellectual Gods sing, thee, O blessed God, the Cosmagi, those fulgid eyes, and starry intellects, celebrate, round which the illustrious body [of the world] dances. All the race of the blessed sing thy praise, those that are about, and those that are in the world, the zonic Gods, and also the azonic,[9] who govern the parts of the world, wise itinerants, stationed about the illustrious pilots [of the universe,] and which the angelic series pours forth. Thee too, the renowned genus of heroes celebrates, which by occult paths pervades the works of mortals, and likewise the soul which does not incline to the regions of mortality, and the soul which descends into dark terrestrial masses.”

The substance of which is, “that incorruptible intellect which is wholly an emanation of divinity, is totally diffused through the whole world, convolves the heavens, and preserves the universe with which it is present distributed in various forms. That one part of this intellect is distributed among the stars, and becomes, as it were, their charioteer; but another part among the angelic choirs; and another part is bound in a terrestrial form.”

I confess I am wholly at a loss to conceive what could induce the moderns to controvert the dogma, that the stars and the whole world are animated, as it is an opinion of infinite antiquity, and is friendly to the most unperverted, spontaneous, and accurate conceptions of the human mind. Indeed, the rejection of it appears to me to be just as absurd as it would be in a maggot, if it were capable of syllogizing, to infer that man is a machine impelled by some external force when he walks, because it never saw any animated reptile so large.

The sagacious Kepler, for so he is called even by the most modern writers,[10] appears to have had a conception of this great truth; but as he was more an astronomer than a philosopher, he saw this truth only partially, and he rather embraced it as subservient to his own astronomical opinions, than as forming an essential part of the true theory of the universe. But from what I have of the writings of Kepler, I have no doubt, if he had lived in the time of the Greeks, or if he had made the study of the works of Plato and Aristotle the business of his life, he would have become an adept in, and an illustrious and zealous champion of their philosophy. Kepler then (in Harmonices Mundi, lib. 4, p. 158) says, “That he does not oppose the dogma, that there is a soul of the universe, though he shall say nothing about it in that book. He adds, that if there is such a soul, it must reside in the centre of the world, which, according to him, is the sun, and from thence by the communication of the rays of light, which are in the place of spirits in an animated body, is propagated into all the amplitude of the world.”[11] In the following passages also he confidently asserts that the earth has a soul. For he says, “That the globe of the earth is a body such as is that of some animal; and that what its own soul is to an animal, that the sublunary nature which he investigates will be to the earth.”[12] He adds, “That he sees for the most part every thing which proceeding from the body of an animal testifies that there is a soul in it, proceeds also from the body of the earth.