Note 40 — Chapter I · THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Reading edition
Philolaus worked out an elaborate hypothesis which placed an immobile fire, the Hearth of the Universe, the seat of divinity, in the center of the cosmic system. Around this fire revolves our earth; an anti-earth counterbalances our earth on the opposite side of the fire, but man can never see either the Hearth or the anti-earth because he dwells on the side of our earth that is always turned outward from the center. See Duhem, Système, vol. i, pp. 11–21. Hicetas and Ecphantus modified the system of Philolaus by doing away with the anti-earth and placing our earth in the middle of the universe, enclosing the central fire within it. They accounted for day and night by a diurnal rotation of the earth around its axis (ibid., vol. i, pp. 21–27).