Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/350

346 their way as Galileo demonstrated them triumphantly to friends and enemies. Arguments of all sorts were brought against them and against the heliocentric theory which they supported.

Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs and muscles, therefore it does not move. It is angels who make Saturn, Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn round. If the earth revolved, it must, also, have an angel in the center to set it in motion; but only devils live there; it would therefore be a devil who would impart motion to the earth. . . . (Scipio Chiaramonti.)

Since it can be certainly gathered from Scripture that the heavens move above the earth, and since a circular motion requires something fixed around which to move. . . the earth is at the center of the universe. (Polocco, 1644.)

If the earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done especially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Savior?

The last paragraph is probably an answer to Galileo's opinion (December, 1612) that the moon and planets may be inhabited, though by creatures different from ourselves. Galileo writes to Kepler (August, 1610):

You are the first and almost the only person who. . . has given entire credence to my statements. . . . We will not trouble ourselves about the abuse of the multitude. . . . In Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Padua many have seen the planets; but all are silent on the subject and undecided. . . . What is to be done?. . . I think, my Kepler, we will laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the multitude. What do you say to the leading philosophers of the faculty here, to whom I have offered a thousand times to show my studies, but who. . . have never consented to look at planets, nor Moon, nor telescope? Verily, just as serpents close their ears, so do these men close their eyes to the light of truth. . . . People of this sort think that philosophy is a kind of book like the Aeneid or the Odyssey and that the truth is to be sought, not in the universe, not in nature, but (I use their own words) by comparing texts! How you would laugh, he goes on, if you heard the first philosopher of Pisa trying to ‘argue the new planets out of heaven.’

While Galileo was teaching the elements of Euclid at Padua his colleague, Cremonini, was expounding Aristotle's de Cœlo. It was Cremonini who refused to look at the newly discovered satellites of Jupiter through the telescope, alleging as a reason that their existence was quite contrary to Aristotle's philosophy. It was the same Cremonini who, in 1619, with a dignity and firmness that must be sincerely admired, flatly refused to change the substance of his university lectures at the demand of the Grand Inquisitor of Padua. His duty was to expound the words of Aristotle as he found them, he said; he declined to teach as Aristotle's any doctrine that he did not sincerely believe to be the master's. Let this manly stand be counted off against his refusal to be convinced against authority. He is reputed to have