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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Dante Alighieri believed our earth to be a motionless globel in the midst of nine spheres,2 revolved by Intelligences called angels.8 Surrounding these nine spheres is the motionless Empyrean, wherein is God, from whom all being comes.4 At the centre of the earth was the bottom of Hell,6 the point to which all weights are drawn.6 At the summit of our hemisphere stood Jerusalem,7 and exactly opposite were the Antipodes, or rather the Terrestrial Paradise, and this was surrounded by sea.8 In the Terrestrial Paradise God created Adam,9 for Adam was not born. Adam was created on the sixth day, and God's reason for beginning mankind was to offset the loss suffered in Heaven by the fall of about a tithe of the angels, who sinned almost as soon as they were created.10 1 Parad. XXII, 133-138. Conv. HI, v, 53-65. Conv. II, vi, 99-102. Inf. XXXII, 8. Conv. II, ii, 48-5. Inf. XXXIV, 11o-1ll. Conv. lll, vi, 46. Epist. X, xx, xxi. T Inf. XXXIV, 113-115. 1 Parad. IX, 84. Cf. B. Latini, Tresor, p. 151, 'Terre est ceinte et environne'e de mer ... ce est la grant mer qui est apele'e Oceane.' Purg. I, 22-24; XXVIII,91-94. Tresor, p. 161, 'En Inde est Paradis terrestre. ... Et sachiez que apres le pechie' dou premier home cest leus fa clos a touz autres.' Cf. Purg. I, 130-132. 10 L.ii: -. II, vi, 95-99- See chapter on 'The Angels, ' p. 26. Unlike that of the brutes and plants, man's soul is the breath of God; for, as soon as the articulation of the brain is perfect, God, the ' first mover, ' joyfully turns to the unborn child and breathes into it a new spirit full of virtue.1 Thus come immortality and that intelligence which sets man over the other animals. Not every one believed in immortality in Dante's time. It is safe to say that in no earlier medie