Cosmos

The influence of narrow-minded views peculiar to the earlier ages of civilization led in all languages to a confusion of ideas in the synonymic use of the words 'earth' and 'world', while the common expressions 'voyages round the world', 'map of the world', and 'new world', afford further illustrations of the same confusion. The more noble and precisely-defined expressions of 'system of the world', 'the planetary world', and 'creation and age of the world', relate either to the totality of the substances by which space is filled, or to the origin of the whole universe. It was natural that, in the midst of the extreme variability of phenomena presented by the surface of our globe, and the aerial ocean by which it is surrounded, man should have been impressed by the aspect of the vault of heaven, and the uniform and regular movements of the sun and planets. Thus the word Cosmos, which primitively, in the Homeric ages, indicated an idea of order and harmony, was subsequently adopted in scientific language, where it was gradually applied to the order observed in the movements of the heavenly bodies, to the whole universe, and then finally to the world in which this harmony was reflected to us. According to the assertion of Philolaus, whose fragmentary works have been so ably commented upon by Böckh, and conformably to the general testimony p 69 of antiquity, Pythagoras was the first who used the word Cosmos to designate the order that reigns in the universe, or entire world.*