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If Milton, having abandoned his earlier Arthurian scheme, and chosen in preference these antique Biblical protagonists, had therewith placed them on the contemporary cosmogonic stage of the Renaissance he would have perpetrated, as he must have felt, a hideous incongruity of geocentric and heliocentric conceptions, and set himself a task which could only work out absurdly.
Such was the view of most of the ancient philosophers, and such continued to be the opinion of the majority of mankind long after the time of Copernicus. We must not forget that even so great an observing astronomer as Tycho Brahe, so late as the seventeenth century, declined to accept the heliocentric theory, though admitting that all the planets except the earth revolve about the sun.
The commentary of Rhaeticus gives us the interesting information that it was the observation of the orbit of Mars and of the very great difference between his apparent diameters at different times which first led Copernicus to conceive the heliocentric idea.
The old geocentric system once shaken, the way was gradually smoothed for the heliocentric system, which Copernicus, still hampered by tradition, did not quite reach. He was hardly a practical astronomer in the observational sense.
Scarcely any great work was ever so exclusively the work of one man as was the heliocentric system the work of the retiring sage of Frauenburg.
It required about a century for the heliocentric doctrine of Copernicus to begin to make its way. In this age of steam and electricity, progress is more rapid, and the greatest scientific conception of the nineteenth century, the Darwinian theory, may be said to have made something that approaches an absolute conquest within less than half a century.
According to the Copernican conception, however, only the moon rotates round the earth, whereas the apparent yearly progression of the sun is actually caused by the earth's motion round the sun. This raises the question of how far the Copernican, heliocentric aspect is valid in a science which strives to embrace the astral realm of the universe in its inquiries.
This was the result of a recognition of the sun's amazing distance, and therefore of his enormous size. The heliocentric system, thus regarding the sun as the central orb, degraded the earth to a very subordinate rank, making her only one of a company of six revolving bodies.
At this point the geocentric doctrine is being abandoned and the heliocentric takes its place. As the circle is the most perfect of forms, the movements of the planets are circular. They maintained that the moon is inhabited, and like the earth, but the people there are taller than men, in the proportion as the moon's periodic rotation is greater than that of the earth.
There had been great astronomers before Copernicus. In the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa and Regiomontanus had hinted at the heliocentric theory; but 1512 marks an epoch in the history of science, since for all time Copernicus put the problem in a way that compelled acquiescence.
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