Cosmos, Vol. 5

its surface can be described. We are thereby tempted to believe that a few pages from ancient history books regarding the formation of the Earth's body have become legible to us; and we continue, as long as free thought is granted its right, with all the more joyful courage in the endeavor to explain the changes in matter—insofar as they are entirely separable from the thinking, spiritual nature of the human soul—through natural causes, that is, through the activity of matter itself.

Since I have ventured to place the word Cosmos From the Greek 'Kosmos', originally meaning order or ornament. at the head of my work's title, taken in the sense of the Pythagorean school for World Order, I have also gathered in the 1st volume (pp. 61 and 76–78) everything that was linked to its etymology at various times within the circles of Hellenic linguistic context. The same subject has been treated (at the end of the year 1856) by Dr. Leo Meyer, a private lecturer in Göttingen, with ingenuity and in a desirable generality. "Phonetically," says the author of the treatise on the word-meaning of Cosmos in the oldest (Homeric) monuments of the Greek language, "phonetically, the comparison with original: 'sudh' 'to be pure, to be purified' original: 'purificari' could certainly be justified, and this would result in 'purity, brilliance' as the basic meaning for the word; and the word kosmeo original: κοσμέω; meaning to arrange or adorn. derived directly from it would first mean 'to clean, to make shining'; thereafter 'to adorn,' and only later also 'to order.' However, the history of the word absolutely contradicts these transitions of meaning; it points toward a completely different basic meaning. This basic meaning is to divide, to partition; and a single