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Updated: May 29, 2025
I only object to the inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, and yet affect to look down with a contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting the Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who exclaim "Wonderful!" when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor.
In 1609 he perfected a telescope, which, although hardly more powerful than a present-day opera glass, showed unmistakably that the sun was turning on its axis, that Jupiter was attended by revolving moons, and that the essential truth of the Copernican system was established.
"The Copernican system" is the name now generally given to the almost universal scientific belief that the earth and the planets revolve around the sun, though the system carried out and perfected by Kepler, Newton, Halley, Laplace, and others is by no means perfectly identical with the theory of the German astronomer.
He was ordered to renounce that heresy, on pain of being imprisoned. He was directed to desist from teaching and advocating the Copernican theory, and pledge himself that he would neither publish nor defend it for the future. Knowing well that Truth has no need of martyrs, he assented to the required recantation, and gave the promise demanded. For sixteen years the Church had rest.
He attributes it to passion and to ignorance, not by direct assertion, but by insinuations ascribed to others; and he announces his intention to defend the Copernican system, as a pure mathematical hypothesis, and not as an opinion having an advantage over that of the stability of the earth absolutely. The dialogue is conducted by three persons, Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio.
As we know, Milton who had once met the blind Galileo and always venerated his memory viewed Copernican astronomy with evident sympathy, even in Paradise Lost itself dismissing the Ptolemaic cosmogony with contempt. Yet it is precisely on the basis of that discredited cosmogony that the whole structure of Paradise Lost is built.
For our part, we have never found nearly so much difficulty in any of the incongruities connected with the relations between spirit and matter, or in any confusion of the Copernican with the Ptolemaic system, as in the constant wrenching of our moral sympathies, which the poet demands for the Powers of Good, but which his own delineation of Satan, as a hero waging a Promethean war against Omnipotence, compels us to give to the Powers of Evil.
The assertion that 'the advancement of Spaniards is evidenced by the facility with which the theory of Copernicus... was accepted in Spain, when it was rejected elsewhere' is in the nature of an over-statement. Whatever may have been Zúñiga's reasons for qualifying his early adhesion to the Copernican theory, it seems safe to think that timidity was not one of them. His nerve was unshaken.
Again and again, in the attacks made by clericals and theologians upon the Copernican theory, this lamentable consequence was insisted upon. It was naturally only by a slow progression that men were able to advance into the domain spread before them by the Copernican theory, and to recognise the real minuteness of the earth both in space and time.
No man of sense believes that the Ptolemaic system was true for a while, and that then the Copernican became true. We say that the former only seemed true, and that the enthusiasm of its adherents was a mistaken enthusiasm. It is well to remember that philosophies are brought forward because it is believed or hoped that they are true.
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