Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/96

 Dean, who wrote in the margin of Browne's book, at such a passage, that there were "eighty-odd expresse places in the Bible affirming in plaine and overt terms the naturall and perpetuall motion of sun and moon" and that "a man should be affirighted to follow that audacious and pernicious suggestion which Satan used, and thereby undid us all in our first parents, that God hath a double meaning in his commands, in effect condemning God of amphibologye. And all this boldness and overweaning having no other ground but a seeming argument of some phenomena forsooth, which notwithstanding we know the learned Tycho, prince of astronomers, who lived fifty-two years since Copernicus, hath by admirable and matchlesse instruments and many yeares exact observations proved to bee noe better than a dreame."

Richard Burton (1576-1639) in The Anatomy of Melancholy speaks of the doctrine as a "prodigious tenent, or paradox," lately revive by "Copernicus, Brunus and some others," and calls Copernicus in consequence the successor of Atlas. The vast extent of the heavens that this supposition requires, he considers "quite opposite to reason, to natural philosophy, and all out as absurd as disproportional, (so some will) as prodigious, as that of the sun's swift motion of the heavens." If the earth is a planet, then other planets may be inhabited (as Christian Huygens argued later on); and this involves a possible plurality of worlds. Burton laughs at those who, to avoid the Church attitude and yet explain the celestial phenomena, invent new hypotheses and new systems of the world, "correcting others, doing worse themselves, reforming some and marring all," as he says of Roeslin's endeavors. "In the meantime the world is tossed in a blanket amongst them; they hoyse the earth up and down like a ball, make it stand and goe at their pleasure." He himself was indifferent.

Others more sensitive to the implications of this system, might exclaim with George Herbert (1593-1633):

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