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Updated: May 29, 2025
Of the two it would almost seem that Tycho thought himself the greater gainer, for in spite of his reputation for brusqueness and want of consideration, he not only made light of Kepler's apology in the matter of Reymers, but treated him with uniform kindness in the face of great rudeness and ingratitude.
The greater the man's genius and intellectual resource, the more numerous will be the ventures which he makes, and the great majority of those ventures are certain to be fruitless. They are in fact, the "chips." In Kepler's case the chips were numerous enough. They were of the most extraordinary variety and structure.
It is difficult to form any very intelligible idea of the nature and extent of Kepler's astrological opinions, and of the degree of credit which he himself placed in the opinions that he did avow. In his Principles of Astrology, published in 1602, and in other works, he rails against the vanity and worthlessness of the ordinary astrology.
Kepler himself was, at various times, to feel the restraint of ecclesiastical opposition, though he was never subjected to direct persecution, as was his friend and contemporary, Galileo. At the very outset of Kepler's career there was, indeed, question as to the publication of a work he had written, because that work took for granted the truth of the Copernican doctrine.
Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of progress, in its multiform manifestations, as the necessary consequence of some similarly universal principle.
For his biography, the chief source is the folio volume of Correspondence, published in 1718, by Hansch, who has prefixed to these letters between Kepler and his contemporaries a Life, in which his German heartiness beats even through the marble encasement of his Latinity. We have always admired, as a stroke of wit, the way Hansch takes to indicate Kepler's birthplace.
His astronomical tutor, Maestlin, encouraged him to devote himself to his newly adopted science, and the first result of this advice appeared before very long in Kepler's "Mysterium Cosmographicum". The bent of his mind was towards philosophical speculation, to which he had been attracted in his youthful studies of Scaliger's "Exoteric Exercises". He says he devoted much time "to the examination of the nature of heaven, of souls, of genii, of the elements, of the essence of fire, of the cause of fountains, the ebb and flow of the tides, the shape of the continents and inland seas, and things of this sort". Following his tutor in his admiration for the Copernican theory, he wrote an essay on the primary motion, attributing it to the rotation of the earth, and this not for the mathematical reasons brought forward by Copernicus, but, as he himself says, on physical or metaphysical grounds.
Kepler's glimpse at such a theory could have been no more than a glimpse, for he went no further with it.
It was thus that, hardly two centuries ago, that doctrine gathered immense force from the discovery of Newton that Kepler's laws, under which the movements of the planetary bodies are executed, issue as a mathematical necessity from a very simple material condition, and that the complicated motions of the solar system cannot be other than they are.
The absence of stellar parallax was the great objection to any theory of the earth's motion prior to Kepler's time. It is true that Kepler's theory itself could have been geometrically expressed equally well with the earth or any other point fixed.
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