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To Maestlin he wrote: "What is to be done? I think we should imitate the Pythagoreans, communicate our discoveries privatim, and be silent in public, that we may not die of hunger. The guardians of the Holy Scriptures make an elephant of a gnat.
The Landgrave of Hesse was a practical astronomer, who produced a catalogue of fixed stars which has been compared with that of Tycho Brahe. He was assisted by Rothmann and by Justus Byrgius. Maestlin, the preceptor of Kepler, is reputed to have been the first modern observer to give a correct explanation of the light seen on portions of the moon not directly illumined by the sun.
An arrangement had been suggested by which Kepler should obtain two years' leave of absence from Gratz on full pay, which, because of the higher cost of living in Prague, should be supplemented by the Emperor; but before this could be concluded, Kepler threw up his professorship, and thinking he had thereby also lost the chance of going to Prague, applied to Maestlin and others of his Tübingen friends to make interest for him with the Duke of Wurtemberg and secure the professorship of medicine.
But the doors of the ministry being presently barred to him, he turned with enthusiasm to the study of astronomy, being from the first an ardent advocate of the Copernican system. His teacher, Maestlin, accepted the same doctrine, though he was obliged, for theological reasons, to teach the Ptolemaic system, as also to oppose the Gregorian reform of the calendar.
His astronomical tutor, Maestlin, encouraged him to devote himself to his newly adopted science, and the first result of this advice appeared before very long in Kepler's "Mysterium Cosmographicum". The bent of his mind was towards philosophical speculation, to which he had been attracted in his youthful studies of Scaliger's "Exoteric Exercises". He says he devoted much time "to the examination of the nature of heaven, of souls, of genii, of the elements, of the essence of fire, of the cause of fountains, the ebb and flow of the tides, the shape of the continents and inland seas, and things of this sort". Following his tutor in his admiration for the Copernican theory, he wrote an essay on the primary motion, attributing it to the rotation of the earth, and this not for the mathematical reasons brought forward by Copernicus, but, as he himself says, on physical or metaphysical grounds.
Maestlin and others of Kepler's friends took the opposite view.
After a preliminary training he attended the university at Tubingen, where he came under the influence of the celebrated Maestlin and became his life-long friend. Curiously enough, it is recorded that at first Kepler had no taste for astronomy or for mathematics.
What a sad tragedy do these words, in a letter to Maestlin, reveal: "I stand whole days in the antechamber, and am nought for study." And then he adds the sublime compensation: "I keep up my spirits, however, with the thought that I serve, not the Emperor alone, but the whole human race, that I am laboring not merely for the present generation, but for posterity.
While at Tuebingen, under the mathematician Maestlin, he had eagerly seized all the hints his master threw out of the doctrines of Copernicus, integrating them with interior authorities of his own. "The motion of the earth, which Copernicus had proved by mathematical reasons, I wanted to prove by physical, or, if you prefer it, metaphysical reasons."
He explained this as not due to any proper light of the moon itself, but as light reflected from the earth. Certain of the Greek philosophers, however, are said to have given the same explanation, and it is alleged also that Leonardo da Vinci anticipated Maestlin in this regard.
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