He was, as he tells us, "better furnished with talent than
knowledge." But, no doubt, things had conspired to forward him. While
at Tuebingen, under the mathematician Maestlin, he had eagerly seized
all the hints his master threw out of the doctrines of Copernicus,
integrating them with interior authorities of his own. "The motion of the
earth, which Copernicus had proved by mathematical reasons, I wanted
to prove by physical, or, if you prefer it, metaphysical reasons."
So he wrote in his "Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum,"
which he published two years after going to Graetz, that is, in his
twenty-fifth year. In this book his fiery and mystical spirit first
found expression, flaming forth in meteoric coruscations. The problem
which Kepler attempted to solve in the "Prodromus" was no less than
the determination of the harmonic relations of the distances of
the planets, which it was given him to solve more than twenty years
afterwards. The hypothesis which he adopted proved utterly fallacious;
but his primal intuition, that numerical and geometric relations
connect the velocities, periods, and distances of the planets, was none
the less fruitful and sublime.
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