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Updated: May 29, 2025
Finding him in a strait of this description, the English ambassador in Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, in the year 1620, besought Kepler to come over to England, where he assured him that he would obtain a favourable reception, and where, he was able to add, Kepler's great scientific work was already highly esteemed. But his efforts were unavailing; Kepler would not leave his own country.
But the Inquisition now took up the matter as heretical and contrary to the express words of Scripture; and in 1616, Copernicus's work, "De Revolutionibus," Kepler's "Epitome," and some of Galileo's own letters, were placed on the list of prohibited books; and he himself, being then in Rome, received formal notice not to teach that the earth revolves round the sun.
He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler's, especially the law of the planetary motions.
"You know the meaning of this mystic phrase, 'as the squares of the distance. You understand that it means the attraction at two feet is only one-fourth the attraction at one foot; at four feet only one-sixteenth; at eight feet, only one sixty-fourth. "But who knows or cares for Kepler's great law of Repulsion, or Apergy?
The regularly arranged hollows between the hills and the longitudinal valley suggested to his fertile imagination that he had at last found a veritable city in the moon possibly the metropolis of Kepler's Subvolvani, who were supposed to dwell on that hemisphere of our satellite which faces the earth.
In tracing the route which he followed, it is easy for those who live under the light of modern science to say that his fancies were often wild, and his labour often wasted; but, in judging of Kepler's methods, we ought to place ourselves in his times, and invest ourselves with the opinions and the knowledge of his contemporaries.
It has been the error of Newton and his successors up to our own day, to try to conceive the world dynamically within the limits of their spectator-consciousness and thus to form a dynamic interpretation of the universe based on its heliocentric aspect. This was just as repellent to Goethe as Kepler's attitude was attractive.
Once we have rid ourselves of the false conception that Kepler's law implies Newton's interpretation of the physical universe as a dynamic entity ruled by gravity, and gravity alone, we are free to ask what this law can tell us about the nature of the universe if in examining it we try to remain true to Kepler's own approach.
His demonstration of the three fundamental laws of planetary motion was the most strict and complete theory that had ever been attempted. It has been often suggested that the revival by Copernicus of the notion of a moving earth was a help to Kepler. No one who reads Kepler's great book could hold such an opinion for a moment.
Only, the power of the greatest human intellect is so utterly feeble that the meaning of the words in Kepler's three laws could not be understood until expounded by the logic of Newton's dynamics. The joy with which Kepler contemplated the final demonstration of these laws, the evolution of which had occupied twenty years, can hardly be imagined by us.
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