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During his residence at Rome in 1615 and 1616, Galileo had communicated his views on this subject to the Comte di Lemos, the Viceroy of Naples, who had presided over the council of the Spanish Indies.
Thomas Hobbes agreed with Bacon and Galileo that all knowledge starts from experience, and, carrying out the inductive method of Bacon, he produced his "Leviathan" in 1651. It was promptly attacked by the clergy of every country in Europe.
After the Inquisition had examined Galileo personally, they allowed him a reasonable time for preparing his defence. He felt the difficulty of adducing any thing like a plausible justification of his conduct; and he resorted to an ingenious, though a shallow artifice, which was regarded by the court as an aggravation of the crime.
Thus it became man's fate in the first phase of science, which fills the period from Galileo and his contemporaries up to the present time, that the very faculty which man needed for creating this science prevented him from recognizing its true foundations.
Pisa could not afford to supply Florence her men of genius let her depend upon production from home, or go without. Galileo became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior. One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell with a velocity proportioned to their weight.
From the measures which this tribunal had formerly pursued, it was not difficult to foresee the result of their present deliberations. They summoned Galileo to appear before them at Rome, to answer in person the charges under which he lay. The Tuscan ambassador expostulated warmly with the court of Rome on the inhumanity of this proceeding.
The first day of the century found us, not, indeed, where we were left by Galileo and Copernicus in the knowledge of the skies and in our ability to penetrate their depths, but it did find us advanced by only moderate stages from the sky-lore of the past.
Here he met Galileo, and from here he made the excursion to Vallombrosa which gave him some of his most famous lines. He also learned enough of the language to write love poetry to a lady in Bologna, although he is said to have offended Italians generally by his strict morality.
It was in vain that the advocates of this invaluable discovery exclaimed over their perverse and interested obstinacy, in vain that they called up the injured ghosts of Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus to shame that unbelieving generation; the Baillies and the Heberdens, men whose names have come down to us as synonymous with honor and wisdom, bore their reproaches in meek silence, and left them unanswered to their fate.
He had learned from Galileo that the air was a heavy fluid, and he was carried, therefore, directly to the further conclusion that the weight of the atmosphere was the counteracting cause in both cases; in the one, pressing upon the reservoir from which the water was drawn—and in the other, on the surrounding mercury in the basin.