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The Copernican astronomy was argued against in a former age and rejected; yet it has prevailed. Newton's law of gravitation was argued against and rejected by a whole generation of philosophers on the continent of Europe; yet it has prevailed. And now all school-boys and girls would call anybody a fool who should deny it.
Men of science have quarrelled with the Bible because it is not based upon the true astronomical system, but it is certainly open to the orthodox to say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody. If a single poem or a single story were really transfused with the Copernican idea, the thing would be a nightmare.
We can here leave out of account the fact that Roemer's reasoning is based on the assumption that the Copernican conception of the relative movements of the members of our solar system is the valid conception, an assumption which, as later considerations will show, cannot be upheld in a science which strives for a truly dynamic understanding of the world.
At all these points the immortal group of men who adopted the Copernican theory at the Renascence, began again where the Greeks had left off. But modern science starts with two capital improvements on the work of the Greeks.
On this account I have become very curious to penetrate to the very bottom of the subject." Systema Cosmicum, Dial. ii. p. 121. It appears, on the testimony of Galileo himself, that he taught the Ptolemaic system, in compliance with the popular feeling, after he had convinced himself of the truth of the Copernican doctrines.
Then you ought not to keep one. But why complain. There are always omnibuses within call." "Are you fond of riding in an omnibus?" "What an irrelevant question! Suppose I followed your example, and ask what you think of the Copernican system?" "You can't be ill-balanced if you try, and your question is not in the least irrelevant. The Copernican system is true, and illustrates my position exactly.
It was apparently one of his tricks, one of his philosophic feints: he prepared for himself some loophole, as when for instance he discovered a trick for denying the movement of the earth, while he was a Copernican in the strictest sense.
On inspecting the planet Jupiter, a still more striking revelation was made, as four tiny stars were observed to occupy an equatorial position near that planet, and were seen, when watched night after night, to be circling about the planet, precisely as the moon circles about the earth. Here, obviously, was a miniature solar system a tangible object-lesson in the Copernican theory.
And, to commence, let me elucidate mine own I mean the first, the head and front of this offending phalanx mine own, par excellence, 'An Authors Mind: such in sooth it shall be found, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse; not of selfish, but of common application; not so much individually of mine own, as generically of authors; a medley of crudities; an undigested mass, as any in the maw of Polypheme; a fermenting hotchpotch of half-formed things, illustrative, among other matters, of the Lucretian theory, those close-cohering atoms; a farrago of thoughts, and systems of thoughts, in most admired disorder, which would symbolize the Copernican astronomy, with its necessary clash of whirling orbs, about as well as the intangible chaos of Berkeleyan metaphysics.
Milton's conception of God is higher than Homer's, Virgil's, or Dante's, but the care of the Miltonic God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more impressive in Milton than in the others.
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