Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/91

 triple motion of the earth he abolished epicycles and eccentrics. What before so many Atlases could not support, this one Hercules has dared to carry. Would that he had kept himself within the limits of his hypothesis!"

His conclusions seem to show that only his position as a Jesuit restrained him from being a Copernican himself. "I. If the celestial phenomena alone are considered, they are equally well explained by the two hypotheses [Ptolemaic and Copernican]. II. The physical evidence as explained in the two systems with exception of percussion and the speed of bodies driven north or south, and east or west, is all for immobility. III. One might waver indifferently between the two hypotheses aside from the witness of the Scriptures, which settles the question. IV. There are in addition plenty of other motives besides Scriptural ones for rejecting this system."(!) But with the Scriptural evidence he adduces the decree of the Index under Paul V against the doctrine, and the sentence of Galileo, so that "the sole possible conclusion is that the earth stands by nature immobile in the center of the universe, and the sun moves around it with both a diurnal and an annual motion."

Even this great book was as insufficient to stop the criticism of the action of the Congregations, as it was to stop the spread of the doctrine. So once again the father took up the cudgels in defense of the Church. The full title of his Apologia runs: "An Apologia in behalf of an argument from physical mathematics against the Copernican system, directed against that system by a new argument from the reflex motion of falling weights." (Venice, 1669). He states in this that his Almagestum Novum had received the approbation of professors of mathematics at Bologna, of one at Pisa, and of another at Padua, and he quotes the conclusion from Nicetas Orthodoxus ("a diatribe by Julius Turrinus, doctor of mathematics, philosophy, medicine, law, and Greek letters"): "That the sun is revolved by diurnal and by annual motion, and that the earth is at rest I firmly hold, infallibly believe, and openly confess, not because of mathematical reasons,

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