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Updated: June 29, 2025
It seems to matter exceedingly little, in general, whether a person take up the geocentric or the heliocentric conception of the cosmic structure, or even whether he adopt an optimistic or pessimistic view of life and its capabilities.
Recent researches among the ruins of ancient cities have developed the fact that several centuries before the beginning of our era the astronomers had invented the telescope, and discovered the true or heliocentric system of nature; but for the reason that religion had been based upon the false, or geocentric system, it was deemed prudent not to teach it to the masses.
The narrow ideas of the old geocentric theology, which made the earth God's especial footstool, and man his only rational creature, fall away from him like a veil that had obscured his vision; they are impossible in the presence of what he sees above. Thus the natural tendency, in the light of modern progress, is to regard the universe as everywhere filled with life.
It is only when we endeavor to extend the range of theoretical astronomy, and to gain a correct conception of the mechanism of the universe as a whole, that the essentially faulty character of the geocentric conception becomes apparent. And so it is in many another field; the false generalizations and hasty inductions serve a temporary purpose.
The Ptolemaic system is, therefore, essentially a geocentric system. It left the earth in her position of superiority, and hence gave no cause of umbrage to religious opinions, Christian or Mohammedan.
We shall see that before the Alexandrian school lost its influence a geocentric scheme had been evolved which fully explained all the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies. All this, then, makes us but wonder the more that the genius of an Aristarchus could give precedence to scientific induction as against the seemingly clear evidence of the senses.
Its transcendental aspirations still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell were as foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.
This is the title of an address delivered by Du Bois-Reymond on 25th January 1883, in the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and afterwards published in his Collected Addresses (vol. ii. 1887). As the author himself mentions in a note (p. 500) that this gave rise, "most unmeritedly," to great excitement, and called down upon him the violent attacks of the clerical press, I may be allowed to point out here that it contained nothing new, I myself, fifteen years previously, in my lectures on "The Origin and Genealogy of the Human Race," having carried out in detail the comparison between Darwin and Copernicus, and the service rendered by these two heroes in putting an end to the anthropocentric and geocentric views of the world. (See the Third Series in Virchow and Holtzendorff's Collection of Popular Scientific Lectures, Nos. 53 and 54, 1868, 4th ed., 1881.) When Du Bois-Reymond says, "For me, Darwin is the Copernicus of the organic world," I am the more pleased to find that he agrees (partly in identical words) with my way of thinking, as he himself, quite unnecessarily, takes up an attitude of opposition towards me. The same is the case with regard to the explanation of innate ideas by Darwinism, which he has attempted in his address on "Leibnitzian Ideas in Modern Science" (vol. i. of the Collected Addresses). Here also he is most agreeably at one with me in what, four years before, I had elaborated in my General Morphology (vol. ii. p. 446), and in my Natural History of Creation . "The laws of heredity and adaptation explain to us how it is that
While the geocentric and anthropocentric illusions have been dispelled, the illusion of the immobility and eternity of classes still persists.
Take Cicero's book de Officiís, or the Divina Commedia of Dante, and you will find that to them the earth is the center of creation, that the infinite stars circle around it, and that man is the king of animals: a geocentric and anthropocentric illusion inspired by immeasurable conceit.
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