" [1]
[Footnote 1: _Harmonices Mundi._]
On this avowal he was branded as a hypocrite, heretic, and atheist.
To Maestlin he wrote:--"What is to be done? I think we should imitate
the Pythagoreans, communicate our discoveries _privatim_, and be silent
in public, that we may not die of hunger. The guardians of the Holy
Scriptures make an elephant of a gnat. To avoid the hatred against
novelty, I represented my discovery to the Rector of the University as
a thing already observed by the ancients; but he made its antiquity a
greater charge against it than he could have made of its novelty."
And, indeed, the devotion to truth in that age, as in others, required
an heroic heart. Copernicus kept back the publication of his "De
Revolutionibus Orbium Caeslestium" for thirty-six years, and received a
copy of it only on his death-bed. Galileo tasted the sweets of the
Inquisition. Tycho Brahe was exiled. And Kepler himself was persecuted
all his life, hounded from city to city. And yet the sixteenth century
will ever be memorable in the history of the human mind. The breaking
down of external authority, the uprise of the spirit of inquiry, of
skepticism, and the splendid scientific conquests that came in
consequence, inaugurated a mighty movement which separates the present
promises of mankind from all past periods by an interval so vast as to
make it not merely a great historical development, but the very birth
of humanity.
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