Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/56

 see; for at the close of the sixteenth century, the Copernican doctrine had few avowed supporters. The Roman Church was still indifferent; the Protestants clinging to the literal interpretation of the Bible were openly antagonistic; the professors as a whole were too Aristotelian to accept or pay much attention to this novelty, except Kepler and his teacher Mæstlin (though the latter refused to uphold it in his text-book); while astronomers and mathematicians who realized the insuperable objections to the Ptolemaic conception, welcomed the Tychonic system as a via media; and the common folk, if they heard of it at all, must have ridiculed it because it was so plainly opposed to what they saw in the heavens every day. In the same way their intellectual superiors exclaimed at the "delirium" of of those supporting such a notion. One thinker, however was to see far more in the doctrine than Copernicus himself had conceived, and by Giordano Bruno the Roman Church was to be aroused.

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