Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/240

 would be! It is evident then that all the heavenly bodies set as if in destined places are there formed into sphæres, that they tend to their own centres, and that round them there is a confluence of all their parts. And if they have motion, that motion will rather be that of each round its own centre, as that of the Earth is; or a forward movement of the centre in an orbit, as that of the Moon: there would not be circular motion in the case of a too numerous and scattered flock. Of these stars some situate near the Æquator would seem to be borne around at a very rapid rate, others nearer the pole to have a somewhat gentler motion, others, apparently motionless, to have a slight rotation. Yet no differences in point of light, mass or colours are apparent to us: for they are as brilliant, clear, glittering and duskish toward the poles, as they are near the Æquator and the Zodiack: those which remain set in those positions do not hang, and are neither fixed, nor bound to anything of the nature of a vault. All the more insane were the circumvolution of that fictitious Primum Mobile, which is higher, deeper, and still more immeasurable. Moreover, this inconceivable Primum Mobile ought to be material and of enormous depth, far surpassing all inferior nature in size: for nohow else could it conduct from East to West so many and such vast bodies of stars, and the universe even down to the Earth: and it requires us to accept in the government of the stars a universal power and a despotism perpetual and intensely irksome. That Primum Mobile bears no visible body, is nohow recognizable, is a fiction believed in by those people, accepted by the weak-minded folk, who wonder more at our terrestrial mass than at bodies so vast, so inconceivable, and so far separated from us. But there can be no movement of infinity and of an infinite body, and therefore no diurnal revolution of that vastest Primum Mobile. The Moon being neighbour to the Earth revolves in 27 days; Mercury and Venus have their own moderately slow motions; Mars finishes a period in two years, Jupiter in twelve years, Saturn in thirty. And those also who ascribe a motion to the fixed stars make out that it is completed in 36,000 years, according to Ptolemy, in 25,816 years, according to Copernicus' observations; so that the motion and the completion of the journey always become slower in the case of the greater circles. And would there then be a diurnal motion of that Primum Mobile which is so great and beyond them all immense and profound? 'Tis indeed a superstition and in the view of philosophy a fable now only to be believed by idiots, deserving more than ridicule from the learned: and yet in former ages, that motion, under the pressure of an importunate mob of philosophizers, was actually accepted as a basis of computations and of motions, by mathematicians. The motions of the bodies (namely planets) seem to take place eastward and following the order of the signs.