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Updated: June 5, 2025
They call to mind the odd custom of wearing "clothes"; the incredible error of Copernicus and other wide and wild guesses of ancient "science"; the lost arts of telegramy, steam locomotion, printing, and the tempering of iron.
And can we deny the real existence of the genealogy of genius? Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton! this is a single line of descent! ARISTOTLE, HOBBES, and LOCKE, DESCARTES, and NEWTON, approximate more than we imagine. The same chain of intellect which ARISTOTLE holds, through the intervals of time, is held by them; and links will only be added by their successors.
Even Copernicus himself, knowing the power of custom, and unwilling to create confusion in our comprehension, continues to talk of the rising and setting of the sun and stars and of variations in the obliquity of the zodiac. Whence it is to be noted how necessary it is to accommodate our discourse to our accustomed manner of understanding.
Thus, for example, we tell the story of Copernicus and Galileo, bringing the record of cosmical and mechanical progress down to about the middle of the seventeenth century, before turning back to take up the physiological progress of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Copernicus believed that, if certain stars did move, they moved by some unalterable law of their own. In riding on a boat he observed that the shores seemed to be moving past, and he concluded that a part, at least, of the seeming movements of planets might possibly be caused by the moving of the earth.
"Sic um, Touser, sic um! Where is he, boy?" Up the stairs went Copernicus two steps at a time. He dashed into the anteroom, pale and breathless. "Lie down on the floor!" he shouted. "Lie down or ye'll get throwed down. I'm agoin' to start her!" By this time he had opened the engine-room door. The two women promptly lay flat on their backs on the carpet.
There was one man, Copernicus, who, at least partially, struck through the traditionary atmosphere in which nature was enveloped, and to his insight we owe the foundation of astronomical science; but otherwise the whole intellectual atmosphere was charged with occult views.
The illustrious names of Copernicus, Galileo, Gassendi, Kepler, Halley and Newton impress us with awe; and, if the astronomy they have opened before us is a romance, it is at least a romance more seriously and perseveringly handled than any other in the annals of literature.
If the conception of Copernicus improved by Kepler had, as we have just seen, introduced a striking improvement into the mechanism of the heavens, it still remained to discover the motive force which, by altering the position of the terrestrial axis during each successive year, would cause it to describe an entire circle of nearly 50° in diameter, in a period of about 26,000 years.
There were those who believed that the sun, not the earth, is the centre of the great circle in which the heavenly bodies perform their evolutions; but the Ptolemaic hypothesis had the ascendency beyond all doubt; and with this hypothesis Copernicus could not rest satisfied. It appeared to him beset with insuperable difficulties.
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