Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/27

Rh Considerations of this sort should make us very tolerant of the blunders of our brothers of past time. It is so easy for any one of us to make a list of the follies, errors and crimes of his own century, and so hard to find excuses for them, that it should give us pause in distributing indiscriminating blame to the men of the middle ages as is often done in books of the warfare-of-science-and-theology sort. Among us, as of old, the ignorant are the most harsh. To us, as to the middle ages, the phrase Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner applies in its fullest force and scope.

During the whole of the middle ages there was never a time when a philosopher was not free to put forth his scientific conclusions hypothetically—as theories to account for observed phenomena. He could not, however, directly attack religion, or even roughly handle received opinion on religious matters. At many epochs the first breath of heresy was fatal. Our own age is not very tolerant of attacks upon cherished beliefs. It is in a great degree its indifference to a certain class of inquiries that gives us our present liberty. Had Copernicus lived, his doctrine would not have given rise to scandal in the church, because it was put forth as a distinctly scientific opinion quite detached from theological suggestions. It was not until 1616 that his book was placed upon the index, and then only as a consequence of the personal enmities that Galileo's bitter satires had excited. If Roger Bacon had been willing to follow the methods of Copernicus the long miseries of his life would have been spared and the world might have been saved from three centuries of wandering in devious and ill-directed paths. If Galileo had done the same he would have lived in peace; we should have owed our present freedom to another martyr.

It is the custom of our minds to escape difficulties by accepting symbols to stand for ideas, types to stand for men, and we stand in danger of losing realities in the types and symbols. The sculpture of the Greeks is summarized to us by a couple of names; but there were many great sculptors in Greece beside Phidias and Praxiteles. The astronomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can show a large list of noted names; but it is epitomized in Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler and Galileo. It is commonly taken for granted that Copernicus burst forth from darkness and made a new epoch. He stands, indeed, for a new epoch; but he was no less the product of his time than Darwin, another Bahnbrecher. There was great activity among astronomers in the decade just preceding the publication of his great book in 1543. Copernicus was the child of universities; the schools of Italy which he frequented for years were alive with inquiry. The epoch for a revision of accepted theory had arrived. It was the encouragement of his friends and scholars that brought about the promulgation of his theories, all of which were fully comprehended by them, before even a