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So, when we turned our back at last on lovely Boscobel, itself shut out, as the common phrase goes, "from the world" by serried ramparts of maple, elm, acacia and catalpa, we knew well that that enceinte of leafage enclosed many little worlds of its own winged microcosms, epicycles of the grand cycle of dateless life which man in his humility assumes to be merely a subsidiary appendage of his own orbit.
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene. What! It is she that calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by certain imaginary epicycles, but by natural and manifest reasons.
To explain what I mean, let me compare the advance of knowledge among mankind to the course taken by a planet. The false paths on which humanity usually enters after every important advance are like the epicycles in the Ptolemaic system, and after passing through one of them, the world is just where it was before it entered it.
Had he done so, perhaps he might have reflected, like Aristarchus before him, that it seems absurd for our earth to hold the giant sun in thraldom; then perhaps his imagination would have reached out to the heliocentric doctrine, and the cobweb hypothesis of epicycles, with that yet more intangible figment of the perfect circle, might have been wiped away. But it was not to be.
It is difficult to imagine just how the various epicycles were supposed to revolve without interfering with the major spheres, but perhaps this is no greater difficulty than is presented by the alleged properties of the ether, which physicists of to-day accept as at least a working hypothesis.
He thought that these discoveries proved the truth of the Copernican theory of the Earth's motion; and he urged this view on friends and foes alike. Although in frequent correspondence with Kepler, he never alluded to the New Astronomy, and wrote to him extolling the virtue of epicycles.
Copernicus had introduced two epicycles on the lunar orbit in the hope of obtaining a better accordance between theory and observation; and he was not too ambitious, as his desire was to get the tables accurate to ten minutes. Tycho Brahe found that the tables of Copernicus were in error as much as two degrees.
And with these larger cycles, epicycles of minor fasts and feasts, multiplex, not to be overlooked, from the fast of the ninth of Ab fatal day for the race when they sat on the ground in shrouds, and wailed for the destruction of Jerusalem, to the feast of the Great Hosannah when they whipped away willow-leaves on the Shool benches in symbolism of forgiven sins, sitting up the whole of the night before in a long paroxysm of prayer mitigated by coffee and cakes; from the period in which nuts were prohibited to the period in which marriages were commended.
And, lastly, we must add to these all hypothetical modes of merely representing or describing phenomena; such as the hypothesis of the ancient astronomers that the heavenly bodies moved in circles; the various hypotheses of eccentrics, deferents, and epicycles, which were added to that original hypothesis; the nineteen false hypotheses which Kepler made and abandoned respecting the form of the planetary orbits; and even the doctrine in which he finally rested, that those orbits are ellipses, which was but an hypothesis like the rest until verified by facts.
But the great minds, who really bring the race further on its course do not accompany it on the epicycles it makes from time to time. This explains why posthumous fame is often bought at the expense of contemporary praise, and vice versa. An instance of such an epicycle is the philosophy started by Fichte and Schelling, and crowned by Hegel's caricature of it.
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