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Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves in prison. All the medieval sages even Albertus Magnus- -were stigmatised as magicians.
The defender, who was aware of this favourable change in her case, became the accuser, and, in July 1620, Catherine Kepler was sent to prison, and condemned to the torture. The moment this event reached the ears of her son, he quitted Linz, and arrived in time to save her from punishment.
But what did Herschel learn regarding these awful depths of space and the stars that people them? That was what the world wished to know. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, had given us a solar system, but the stars had been a mystery.
Of this prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.
It also appears that he had studied theoretical branches of astronomy so far as to be conversant with the application of mathematics to somewhat abstruse problems. Up to the time of Kepler, philosophers had assumed almost as an axiom that the heavenly bodies must revolve in circles and that the motion of the planet around the orbit which it described must be uniform.
Moestlin, the old preceptor of Kepler, had generously declined any compensation for his instructions. Kepler never forgot this act of kindness, and, in the midst of his poverty, he found means to send to Moestlin a handsome silver cup in token of his gratitude.
It must be remembered that these Orders are composed of non-Christians people that the average Christian would call "heathens," and that therefore this testimony must be regarded as free from bias toward Christianity or the corroboration of its legends. The great astronomer Kepler first made this calculation in the year 1604, and it has been since verified by modern calculations.
When Kepler expressed the regularity which exists in the observed motions of the heavenly bodies, by the three general propositions called his laws, he, in so doing, pointed out three simple suppositions which, instead of a much greater number, would suffice to construct the whole scheme of the heavenly motions, so far as it was known up to that time.
Kepler interpreted Galileo's anagram of the "triple" Saturn in this sense; they were perceived by Micromégas on his long voyage through space; and the Laputan astronomers had even arrived at a knowledge, curiously accurate under the circumstances, of their distances and periods. But terrestrial observers could see nothing of them until the night of August 11, 1877.
He had the most profound respect for the knowledge, skill, determination, and perseverance of the man who had reaped such a harvest of most accurate data; and though Tycho hardly recognised the transcendent genius of the man who was working as his assistant, and although there were disagreements between them, Kepler held to his post, sustained by the conviction that, with these observations to test any theory, he would be in a position to settle for ever the problem of the solar system.
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