 5. Galileo and the Inquisition One sinister event occurred while Galileo was at Padua, some time before the era we have now arrived at, before the invention of the telescope, two years indeed after he had first gone to Padua, an event not directly concerning Galileo but which I must mention because it must have shadowed his life both at the time and long afterwards. It was the execution of Giudano Bruno for heresy. This eminent philosopher had travelled largely, had lived some time in England, and had acquired new and heterodox views on a variety of subjects, and did not hesitate to propound them even after he had returned to Italy. The Copernican doctrine of the motion of the earth was one of his obnoxious heresies. Being persecuted to some extent by the Church, Bruno took refuge in Venice, a free republic almost independent of the papacy where he felt himself safe. Galileo was at Padua hard by, the University of Padua was under the government of the Senate of Venice, the two men must in all probability have met. Well, the Inquisition at Rome sent messengers to Venice with a demand for the extradition of Bruno. They wanted him at Rome to try him for heresy. In a moment of miserable weakness the Venetian Republic gave him up, and Bruno was taken to Rome. There he was tried and cast into the dungeons for six years, and because he entirely refused to recant, was at length delivered over to the secular arm and burned at the stake on the 16th February, Anno Domini 1600. This event could not but have cast a gloom over the mind of lovers and expounders of truth, and the lesson probably sank deep into Galileo's soul. In dealing with these historic events will you allow me to repudiate once for all the slightest sectarian bias or meaning? I have nothing to do with Catholic or Protestant as such, I have nothing to do with the Church of Rome as such, I am dealing with the history of science, but historically at one period science and the Church came into conflict. It was not especially one Church rather than another, it was the Church in general, the only one that then existed in those countries. Historically, I say, they came into conflict, and historically the Church was the conqueror. It got its way, and science, in the persons of Bruno, Galileo and several others, was vanquished. Such being the facts, there is no help but to mention them in dealing with the history of science. Doubtless now the Church regards it as an unhappy victory, and gladly we'd ignore this painful struggle. This, however, is impossible. With their creed the Churchmen of that day could act in no other way. They were bound to prosecute heresy, and they were bound to conquer in the struggle will be themselves shattered. But let me insist on the fact that no one accuses the ecclesiastical courts of crime or evil motives. They attacked heresy after their manor, as the civil courts attacked witchcraft after their manor. Both aired grievously, but both acted with the best intentions. We must remember, moreover, that his doctrines were scientifically heterodox, and the university professors of that day were probably quite as ready to condemn them as the Church was. To realize the position we must think of some subjects which, today, are scientifically heterodox, and of the customary attitude adopted towards them by persons of widely different creeds. If it be contended now, as it is, that the ecclesiastics treated Galileo well, I admit it freely, they treated him as well as they possibly could. They overcame him, and he recanted, but if he had not recanted, if he had persisted in his heresy, they would, well, they would still have treated his soul well, but they would have set fire to his body. Their mistake consisted not in cruelty, but in supposing themselves the arbiters of eternal truth, and by no amount of slurring and glossing over facts can they evade the responsibility assumed by them on account of this mistaken attitude. I am not here attacking the dogma of papal infallibility. It is historically, I believe, quite unaffected by the controversy respecting the motion of the earth, no people edict ex-cathedra having been promulgated on the subject. We left Galileo standing at his telescope and beginning his survey of the heavens. We followed him indeed through a few of his first great discoveries, the discovery of the mountains and other variety of surface on the moon, of the nebulae and a multitude of faint stars, and lastly of the four satellites of Jupiter. This latter discovery made an immense sensation and contributed its share to his removal from Padua, which quickly followed it, as I shall shortly narrate. But first I think it will be best to continue our survey of his astronomical discoveries without regard to the place once they were made. Before the end of the year Galileo had made another discovery, this time on Saturn. But to guard against the hosts of plagiarists and imposters, he published it in the form of an anagram, which, at the request of the emperor Rudolph, a request probably inspired by Kepler, he interpreted, It ran thus. The furthest planet is triple. Very soon after he found that Venus was changing from a full moon to a half moon appearance. He announced this also by an anagram, and waited till it should become a crescent, which it did. This was a dreadful blow to the anti-Copernicans, before it removed the last lingering difficulty to the reception of the Copernican doctrine. Copernicus had predicted indeed a hundred years before that if ever uphours of sight were sufficiently enhanced, Venus and Mercury would be seen to have phases like the moon, and now Galileo, with his telescope, verifies the prediction to the letter. Here was a triumph for the grand old monk and a bitter morsel for his opponents. Castelli writes, This must now convince the most obstinate. But Galileo, with more experience, replies, you almost make me laugh by saying that these clear observations are sufficient to convince the most obstinate. It seems you have yet to learn that long ago the observations were enough to convince those who are capable of reasoning, and those who wish to learn the truth. But that to convince the obstinate, and those who care for nothing beyond the vain applause of the senseless vulgar, not even the testimony of the stars would suffice, were they to descend on earth to speak for themselves. Let us then endeavour to procure some knowledge for ourselves, and rest contented with this soul-satisfaction, but of advancing in popular opinion, or of gaining the ascent of the book philosophers, what has abandoned both the hope and the desire. What a year's work it had been. In 12 months, observational astronomy had made such a bound as it has never made before or since. Why did not others make any of these observations? Because no one could make telescopes like Galileo. He gathered pupils round him, however, and taught them how to work the lenses, so that gradually these instruments penetrated Europe, and astronomers everywhere verified his splendid discoveries. But still, he worked on, and by March in the very next year, he saw something still more hateful to the Aristotelian philosophers—this, spots on the sun. If anything was pure and perfect, it was the sun, they said. Was this impostor going to blacken its face, too? Well, there they were. They slowly formed and changed, and by moving altogether showed him that the sun rotated about once a month. Before taking leave of Galileo's astronomical researches, I must mention an observation made at the end of 1612 that the apparent triplicity of Saturn, figure 46, had vanished. Looking on Saturn within these few days, I found it solitary, without the assistance of its accustomed stars, and in short perfectly round and defined, like Jupiter, and such it still remains. Now, what can be said of so strange a metamorphosis, or perhaps the two smaller stars consumed like spots on the sun? Have they suddenly vanished and fled, or has Saturn devoured his own children? Or was the appearance indeed fraud and illusion, with which the glasses of so long time mocked me, and so many others who have so often observed with me? Now perhaps the time has come to revive the withering hopes of those who, guided by more profound contemplations, have fathomed all the fallacies of the new observations, and recognized their impossibility. I cannot resolve what to say in a chance so strange, so new, so unexpected. The shortness of time, the unexampled occurrence, the weakness of my intellect, the terror of being mistaken, have greatly confounded me. However, he plucked up courage, and conjectured that the two attendants would reappear by revolving round the planet. The real reason of their disappearance is well known to us now. The plane of Saturn's rings oscillates slowly about our line of sight, and so we sometimes see them edgeways, and sometimes with the moderate amount of obliquity. The rings are so thin that when turned precisely edgeways, they become invisible. The two imaginary attendants were the most conspicuous portions of the ring, subsequently called Ansei. I have thought it better not to interrupt this catalogue of brilliant discoveries by any biographical details, but we must now retrace our steps to the years 1609 and 1610, the era of the invention of the telescope. By this time Galileo had been 18 years at Padua, unlike many another man in like case, was getting rather tired of continual lecturing. Moreover, he felt so full of ideas that he longed to have a better opportunity of following them up, and more time for thinking them out. Now, in the holidays he had been accustomed to return to his family home at Pisa, and there to come a good deal into contact with the grand ducal house of Tuscany. Young Cosmoder Medici became, in fact, his pupil, and arrived at man's estate with the highest opinion of the philosopher. This young man had now come to the throne as Cosmo II, and to him Galileo wrote, saying how much he should like more time and leisure, how full he was of discoveries if only he had the chance of a reasonable income without the necessity of consuming so large a portion of his time in elementary teaching, and practically asking to be removed to some position in the court. Nothing was done for a time, but negotiations proceeded, and soon after the discovery of Jupiter's satellites, Cosmo wrote, making a generous offer, which Galileo gladly and enthusiastically accepted, and at once left Padua for Florence. All his subsequent discoveries date from Florence. Thus closed his brilliant and happy career as professor at the University of Padua. He had been treated well, his pay had become larger than that of any professor of mathematics up to that time, and, as you know, immediately after his invention of the telescope, the Venetian Senate, in a fit of enthusiasm, had doubled it and secured it to him for life wherever he was. To throw up his chair and leave the place the very next year, scarcely seems a strictly honourable procedure. It was legal enough, no doubt, and it is easy for small men to criticise a great one, but nevertheless I think we must admit that it is a step such as a man with a keen sense of honour would hardly have taken. One quite feels and sympathises with the temptation. Not emoliment, but leisure, freedom from harassing engagements and constant teaching, and liberty to prosecute his studies day and night without interference. This was the golden prospect before him. He yielded, but one cannot help wishing he had not. As it turned out it was a false step, the first false step of his public career. When made it was irretrievable, and it led to great misery. At first it seemed brilliant enough. The great philosopher of the Tuscan court was courted and flattered by princes and nobles. He enjoyed a worldwide reputation, lived as luxuriously as he cared for, had his time alter himself, and lectured but very seldom, on great occasions or to a few crowned heads. His position was in fact analogous to that of Tycho Brahe in his island of Huon. Misfortune overtook both. In Tycho's case it arose mainly from the death of his patron. In Galileo's it was due to a more insidious cause. To understand which cause are right we must remember the political divisions of Italy at that date. Tuscan was a papal state and thought there was by no means free. Venice was a free republic and even hostile to the papacy. In 1606 the Pope had placed it under an interdict and reply it had ejected every Jesuit. Out of this atmosphere of comparative enlightenment and freedom into that hotbed of medievalism and superstition went Galileo with his eyes open. Kim was the regret of his Paduan and Venetian friends, bitter with their remonstrances and exhortations, but he was determined to go and not without turning some of his old friends into enemies he went. seldom has such a man made so great a mistake, never I suppose has one been so cruelly punished for it. We must remember however that Galileo, though by no means a saint, was yet a really religious man, a devout Catholic and thorough adherent of the church, so that he would have no dislike to place himself under her sway. Moreover he had been born a Tuscan, his family had lived at Florence or Pisa and it felt like going home. His theological attitude is worthy of notice, but he was not in the least a skeptic. He quite acquiesces in the authority of the Bible, especially in all matters concerning faith and conduct. As to its statements in scientific matters he argues that we are so liable to misinterpret their meaning that it is really easier to examine nature for truth in scientific matters and that when direct observation and scripture seem to clash it is because of our fallacious interpretation of one or both of them. He is, in fact, what one now calls a reconciler. It is curious to find such a man prosecuted for heresy when today his opinions are those of the orthodox among the orthodox, but so it ever is and the heresy of one generation becomes the commonplace of the next. He accepts Joshua's miracle, for instance, not as a striking poem, but as a literal fact, and he points out how much more simply it could be done on the Copernican system by stopping the assertion for a short time, then by stopping the sun and moon and all the host of heaven as on the old Ptolemaic system, or again by stopping only the sun and not any of the other bodies and so throwing astronomy all wrong. This reads to us like satire, but no doubt it was his genuine opinion. These scriptural reconciliations of his, however, angered the religious authorities still more. They said it was bad enough for this heretic to try and upset old scientific beliefs and to spoil the face of nature with his infidel discoveries, but at least he might leave the Bible alone, and they address an indignant remonstrance to Rome to protect it from the hands of ignorant laymen. Thus wherever he turned he encountered hostility. Of course he had many friends, some of them powerful, like Cosmo, all of them faithful and sincere. But against the power of Rome what could they do? Cosmo dead no more than remonstrate, and ultimately his successor had to refrain from even this. So in chained and bound was the spirit of the rulers of those days, and so when his day of tribulation came he stood alone and helpless in the midst of his enemies. You may wonder, perhaps, why this man should excite so much more hostility than many another man who has suffered to believe and teach much the same doctrines and molested. But no other man had made such brilliant and exciting discoveries. No man stood so prominently forward in the eyes of all Christendom as the champion of the new doctrines. No other man stated them so clearly enforceably, nor drove them home with such brilliant and telling illustrations. And again there was the memory of his early conflict with the Aristotelians at Pisa, of his scornful and successful refutation of their absurdities. All this made him especially obnoxious to the Aristotelian Jesuits in their double capacity, both of priests and of philosophers, and they singled him out for a relentless official persecution. Not yet, however, is he much troubled by them. The chief men at Rome have not yet moved. Messages, however, keep going up from Tuscany to Rome respecting the teachings of this man and of the harm he is doing by his pertinacious preaching of the Copernican doctrine that the earth moves. At length, in 1615, Pope Paul V. Roche requesting him to come to Rome to explain his views. He went, was well received, made a special friend of Cardinal Barbarino and accomplished man in high position, who became, in fact, the next pope. Galileo showed Cardinals and others his telescope, and to as many as would look through it he showed Jupiter's satellites and his other discoveries. He had a most successful visit. He talked. He harangued. He held forth in the midst of fifteen or twenty disputants at once, confounding his opponents and putting them to shame. His method was to let the opposite arguments be stated as fully and completely as possible, himself aiding, and often adducing the most forcible and plausible arguments against his own views, and then, all having been well stated, he would proceed to utterly undermine and demolish the whole fabric and bring out the truth in such a way as to convince all honest minds. It was this habit that made him such a formidable antagonist. He never shrank from meeting an opposing argument, never sought to ignore it, or cloak it in a cloud of words. Every hostile argument he seemed to delight in, as a foe to be crushed, and the better and stronger they sounded, the more he liked them. He knew many of them well. He invented a number more, and had he chosen, could have out- argued the stoutest Aristotelian on his own grounds. Thus did he lead as adversaries on, almost like Socrates, only to ultimately overwhelm them in a more hopeless route. All this in Rome, too, in the heart of the Catholic world. Had he been worldly wise, he would certainly have kept silent and unobtrusive till he had to leave to go away again. But he felt like an apostle of the new doctrines, whose mission it was to proclaim them even in the centre of the world and of the Church. Well, he had an audience with the Pope, a chat an hour long, and the two parted good friends, mutually pleased with each other. He writes that he is all right now, and might return home when you liked. But the question began to be agitated whether the whole system of Copernicus ought not to be condemned as impious and heretical. This view was persistently urged upon the Pope and the College of Cardinals, and it was soon to be decided upon. Had Galileo been unfaithful to the Church, he could have left them to stultify themselves in any way they thought proper, and himself have gone. But he felt supremely interested in the result, and he stayed. He writes, So far as concerns the clearing of my own character, I might return home immediately. But although this new question regards me no more than all those who, for the last eighty years, have supported those opinions, both in public and private, yet as perhaps I may be of some assistance in that part of the discussion which depends upon the knowledge of truths ascertained by means of the sciences which I profess, I as a zealous and Catholic Christian, neither can nor ought to withhold that assistance which my knowledge affords, and this business keeps me sufficiently employed. It is possible that his stay was the worst thing for the cause he had at heart. Anyhow, the result was that the system was condemned, and both the Book of Copernicus and the Epitome of it by Kepler were placed on the forbidden list, and Galileo himself was formally ordered never to teach or to believe the motion of the earth. He quitted Rome in disgust, which before long broke out in satire. The only way in which he could safely speak of these views now was as if they were hypothetical and uncertain, and so we find him writing to the Archduke Leopold with a presentation copy of his book on the tides for following. This theory occurred to me when in Rome, whilst the theologians were debating on the prohibition of Copernicus' book, and of the opinion maintained in it of the motion of the earth, which I at that time believed, until it pleased those gentlemen to suspend the book and declare the opinion false and repugnant to the holy scriptures. Now, as I know how well it becomes me to obey and believe the decisions of my superiors, which proceed out of more knowledge than the weakness of mine to let it attain to, this theory which I send you, which is founded on the motion of the earth, I now look upon as a fiction and a dream, and beg your highness to receive it as such. But his poets often learn to prize the creations of their fancy, so, in like manner, do I set some value on this absurdity of mine. It is true that when I sketched this little work, I did hope that Copernicus would not, after eighty years, be convicted of error, and I had intended to develop and amplify it further. But a voice from heaven suddenly awakened me, and at once annihilated all my confused and entangled fancies. This sarcasm, if it had been in print, would probably have been dangerous. It was safe in a private letter, but it shows us his real feelings. However, he was left comparatively quiet for a time. He was getting an old man now, and past the time studiously enough, partly at his house in Florence, partly at his villa in Archetry, a mile or so out of the town. Here was a convent, and in it his two daughters were nuns. One of them, who passed under the name of Sister Maria Celeste, seems to have been a woman of considerable capacity. Certainly, she was of a most affectionate disposition, and loved and honoured her father in the most beautiful way. This was a quiet period of his life, spoiled only by occasional fits of illness and severe rheumatic pains, to which the old man was always liable. Many little circumstances are known of his peaceful time. For instance, the convent clock won't go, and Galileo mends it for them. He's always doing little things for them, and sending presents to the Lady Superior and his two daughters. He was occupied now with problems in hydrostatics, and on other matters unconnected with astronomy, a large piece of work which I must pass over. Most interesting and acute it is, however. In 1623, when the old Pope died, the wars elected to the papal throne as Urban VIII, Cardinal Barbarino, a man of very considerable enlightenment, and a personal friend of Galileo's, so that both he and his daughters rejoice greatly, and hope that things will come all right, and the forbidding edict be withdrawn. The year after this election, he manages to make another journey to Rome to compliment his friend on his elevation to the Pontifical Chair. He had many talks with Urban, and made himself very agreeable. Urban wrote to the Grand Duke Ferdinand, son of Cosmo, for we find in him not only literary distinction, but also love of piety, and he is strong in those qualities by which Pontifical Goodwill is easily obtainable. And now, when he has been brought to this city to congratulate us on our elevation, we have very lovingly embraced him, nor can we suffer him to return to the country whether your liberality recalls him without an ample provision of Pontifical love, and that you may know how dear he is to us, we have will to give him this honorable testimonial of virtue and piety, and we further signify that every benefit which you shall confer upon him, imitating or even surpassing your father's liberality, will conduce to our gratification. Encouraged doubtless by these marks of approbation, and reposing too much confidence in the individual Goodwill of the Pope, without heeding the crowd of half-declared enemies who were seeking to undermine his reputation, he set about after his return to Florence, his greatest literary and most popular work, dialogues on the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. This purports to be a series of four conversations between three characters, Salviati, a Copernican philosopher, Sagredo, a wit and scholar, not specially learned but keen and critical, and who lightens the talk with chaff, Simplicio, an Aristotelian philosopher who propounds the stock absurdities which served instead of arguments to the majority of man. The conversations are something between Plato's dialogues and Serapha helps friends in counsel. The whole is conducted with great good temper and fairness, and, discreetly enough, no definite conclusion is arrived at, the whole being left in abeyance as if for a fifth and decisive dialogue, which, however, was never written, and perhaps was only intended in case the reception was favourable. The preface also sets forth that the object of the writer is to show that the Roman edict forbidding the Copernican doctrine was not issued in ignorance of the facts of the case, as had been maliciously reported, and that he wishes to show how well and clearly it was all known beforehand. So he says the dialogue on the Copernican side takes up the question purely as a mathematical hypothesis or speculative figment, and gives it every artificial advantage of which the theory is capable. This piece of caution was insufficient to blind the eyes of the cardinals, for in it the arguments in favour of the earth's motion are so cogent and unanswerable, and are so popularly stated, as to do more in a few years to undermine the old system and all that he had written and spoken before. He could not get it printed for two years after he had written it, and then only got consent for a piece of carelessness or laziness on the part of the ecclesiastical censor through whose hands the manuscript passed, for which he was afterwards dismissed. However, it did appear and was eagerly read, the more perhaps as the Church at once sought to suppress it. The Aristotleians were furious, and represented to the Pope that he himself was the character intended by Simplicio, the philosopher whose opinions get alternately refuted and ridiculed by the other two till he is reduced to an abject state of impotence. The idea that Galileo had thus cast ridicule upon his friend and patron is no doubt a gratuitous and insulting libel. There is no telling whether or not Urban believed it, but certainly his countenance changed to Galileo hence forward, and whether overruled by his cardinals were actuated by some other motive, his favour was completely withdrawn. The infirm old man was instantly summoned to Rome. His friends pleaded his age, he was now seventy, his ill health, the time of year, the state of the roads, the quarantine existing on account of the plague, it was all of no avail. To Rome he must go, and on the 14th of February he arrived. His daughter at archetry was in despair, and anxiety and fastings and penances self-inflicted on his account dangerously reduced her health. At Rome he was not imprisoned, but he was told to keep indoors and show himself as little as possible. He was allowed however to stay at the house of the Tuscan Ambassador instead of in jail. By April he was removed of the chambers of the Inquisition and examined several times. Here however, the anxiety was too much and his health began to give way seriously. So before long he was allowed to return to the Ambassador's house, and after application had been made was allowed to drive in the public garden in half-closed carriage. Thus in every way the Inquisition dealt with him as leniently as they could. He was now their prisoner and they might have cast him into their dungeons as many another had been cast. By whatever they were influenced, perhaps the Pope's old friendship, perhaps his advanced age and infirmities, he was not so cruelly used. Still they had their rules. He must be made to recant and abjure his heresy, and if necessary torture must be applied. This he knew well enough and his daughter knew it, and her distress may be imagined. Moreover it is not as if they had really been heretics as if they had hated or despised the Church of Rome. On the contrary, they loved and honoured the Church. They were sincere and devout worshippers, and only on a few scientific matters did Galileo presume to differ from his ecclesiastical superiors. His disagreement with them occasioned him real sorrow, and his dearest hope was that they could be brought to his way of thinking and embrace the truth. Every time he was sent for by the Inquisition, he was in danger of torture unless he recanted. All his friends urged him repeatedly to submit. They said resistance was hopeless and fatal. Within the memory of men still young, Giordano Bruno had been burnt alive for a similar heresy. This had happened while Galileo was at Padua. Venice was full of it, and since that, only eight years ago indeed, Antonio de Domines, Archbishop of Salpettria, had been sentenced to the same fate, to be handed over to the secular arm to be dealt with as mercifully as possible, without the shedding of blood. So ran the hideous formula condemning a man to the stake. After his sentence, this unfortunate man died in the dungeons in which he had been incarcerated six years, died what is called a natural death, but the sentence was carried out, notwithstanding, on his lifeless body and his writings, his writings for which he had been willing to die. These were the tender mercies of the Inquisition, and this was the kind of meaning lurking behind many of their well-sounding and merciful phrases. For instance, what they call rigorous examination, we call torture. Let us, however, remember in our horror this mode of compelling a prisoner to say anything they wished, that they were illegally constituted tribunal, that they acted with well-established rules and not in passion, and that torture was a recognized mode of extracting evidence, not only in ecclesiastical but in civil courts at that date. All this, however, was but poor solace to the pitiable old philosopher, thus ruthlessly hailed up and down, questioned and threatened, threatened and questioned, receiving agonizing letters from his daughter week by week and trying to keep up a little spirit to reply as happily and hopefully as he could. This condition of things could not go on. From February to June the suspense lasted. On the 20th of June he was summoned again and told he would be wanted all next day for rigorous examination. Early in the morning of the 21st he repaired thither, and the doors were shut. Out of those chambers of horror he did not reappear till the 24th. What went on all those three days, no one knows. He himself was bound to secrecy. No outsider was present. The records of the Inquisition are jealously guarded. That he was technically tortured is certain that he actually underwent the torment of the rack is doubtful. Much learning has been expended upon the question, especially in Germany. Several eminent scholars have held the fact of actual torture to be indisputable, geometrically certain one says, and they confirm it by the hernia from which he afterwards suffered, this being a well-known and frequent consequence. Other equally learned commentators, however, denied that the last stage was reached, for there are five stages all laid down in the rules of the Inquisition, and steadily adhered to in a rigorous examination, at each stage an opportunity being given for recantation, every utterance, groan or sigh being strictly recorded the recantation so given has to be confirmed a day or two later under pain of a precisely similar ordeal. The five stages are, first, the official threat in the court, second, the taking to the door of the torture chamber and renewing the official threat, third, the taking inside and showing the instruments, fourth, and dressing and binding upon the rack, fifth, teritia realis. Through how many of these ghastly acts Galileo passed, I do not know, I hope and believe, not the last. There are those who lament that he did not hold out and accept the crown of martyrdom thus offered to him. Had he done so, we know his fate, a few years languishing in the dungeons and then the flames. Whatever he ought to have done, he did not hold out, he gave way. At one stage or another of the dread ordeal, he said, I am in your hands, I will say whatever you wish. Then he was removed to a cell where his special form of perjury was drawn up. The next day, clothed as a penitent, the venerable old man was taken to the convent of Minerva, where the cardinals and prolates were assembled for the purpose of passing judgment upon him. The text of the judgment I have here, but it is too long to read. It sentences him, first, to the abjuration, second, to formal imprisonment for life, third, to recite the seven penitential psalms every week. Ten cardinals were present, but to their honour be it said, three refused to sign. And this blasphemous record of intolerance and bigoted folly goes down the ages with the names of seven cardinals immortalised upon it. This having been read, he next had to read word for word the abjuration which had been drawn up for him, and then sign it. The abjuration of Galileo I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei of Florence, aged seventy years, being brought personally to judgment and kneeling before you most eminent and most revered lords, cardinals, general inquisitors of the universe or Christian republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the holy gospels which I touch with my own hands, swear that I have always believed and now believe and with the help of God will in future believe every article which the holy catholic and apostolic church of Rome holds, teaches and preaches. But because I have been enjoined by this holy office altogether to abandon the false opinion which maintains the sun as the centre and immovable, and forbidden to hold defend or teach the said false doctrine in any manner, and after it has been signified to me that the said doctrine is repugnant with the holy scripture I have written and printed a book in which I treat of the same doctrine now condemned and adduce reasons with great force in support of the same without giving any solution, and therefore have been judged grievously suspected of heresy. That is to say that I held and believe that the sun is the centre of the universe and is immovable and that the earth is not the centre and is movable, willing therefore to remove from the minds of your eminences and of every Catholic Christian this vehement suspicion rightfully entertained towards me with a sincere heart and unfaithful faith I abduce, curse and detest the said eras and heresies and generally every other error and sect contrary to the holy church and I swear that I will never more in future say or assert anything verbally or in writing which may give rise to a similar suspicion of me. But if I shall know any heretic or anyone suspected of heresy that I will denounce him to this holy office or to the inquisitor or ordinary of the place where I may be I swear moreover and promise that I will fulfil and observe fully all the penances which have been or shall be laid on me by this holy office. But if it shall happen that I violate any of my said promises oaths and protestations which God avert I subject myself to all the pains and punishments which have been decreed and promulgated by the sacred canons and other general and particular constitutions against delinquents of this description. So may God help me and his holy gospels which I touched with my own hands. I, the above name Galileo Galilei, have abjurbed, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above, and in witness thereof with my own hand have subscribed this present writing of my abjuration, which I have recited word for word. At Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, 22 June, 1633, I, Galileo Galilei, have abjurbed as above with my own hand. Those who believe the story about his muttering to a friend as he rose from his knees, a per si muove, do not realise the scene. First, there was no friend in the place. Second, it would have been fatally dangerous to mutter anything before such an assemblage. Third, he was by this time an utterly broken and disgraced old man, wishful of all things to get away and hide himself and his miseries from the public gaze. Probably with his senses deadened and stupefied by the mental sufferings he had undergone and no longer able to think or care about anything, except perhaps his daughter, certainly not about any motion of this richard earth. Far and wide the news of the recantation spread. Copies of the abjuration were immediately sent to all universities with instructions to the professors to read it publicly. At Florence, his home, it was read out in the Cathedral Church, all his friends and adherents being specially summoned to hear it. For a short time more he was imprisoned in Rome, but at length was permitted to depart, never more of his own will to return. He was allowed to go to Siena. Here his daughter wrote consolingly, rejoicing at his escape, and saying how joyfully she already recited the penitential psalms for him, and so relieved him of that part of his sentence. But the poor girl was herself by this time ill, thoroughly worn out with anxiety and terror. She lay, in fact, on what proved to be her deathbed. Her one wish was to see her dearest Lord and Father, so she calls him once more. The wish was granted. His prison was changed by orders from Rome, from Siena to Archetry, and once more Father and daughter embraced. Six days after this she died. The broken-hearted old man now asks for permission to go to live in Florence, but is met with the stern answer that he's to stay at Archetry. He's not to go out at the house, he's not to receive visitors, and that if he asks for more favours, or transgresses the commands laid upon him, he is liable to be hailed back to Rome and cast into a dungeon. These harsh measures were dictated, not by cruelty, but by the fear of his still-spreading heresy by conversation, and so he was to be kept isolated. Idol, however, he was not, and could not be. He often complains that his head is too busy for his body. In the enforced solitude of Archetry, he was composing those dialogues on motion which are now reckoned his greatest and most solid achievement. In these the true laws of motion are set forth for the first time. One more astronomical discovery also he was to make, that of the moon's Liberation. And then there came one more crushing blow. His eyes became inflamed and painful, the sight of one of them failed, the other soon went, he became totally blind. But this, being a heaven-sent infliction, he could bear with resignation, though it must have been keenly painful to a solitary man of his activity. Alas, says he, in one of his letters, your dear friend and servant is totally blind. Henceforth this heaven, this universe, which by wonderful observations I had enlarged a hundred and a thousand times beyond the conception of former ages, is shrunk for me into the narrow space which I myself fill in it. So it pleases God. It shall therefore please me also. He was now allowed an Emanuensis, and the help of his pupils, Taracelli, Castelli and Viviani, all devotedly attached to him, and Taracelli very famous after him. Visitors also were permitted, after approval by a Jesuit supervisor, and under these circumstances many visited him. Among them a man is immortal as himself, John Milfin, then only twenty-nine, travelling in Italy. Surely a pathetic incident, this meeting of these two great men, the one already blind, the other destined to become so. No wonder that, as in his old age he dictated his masterpiece, the thoughts of the English poet should run on the blindsage of Tuscany, and the reminiscence of their conversation should lend colour to the poem. Well, it were tedious to follow the petty annoyances and troubles to which Galileo was still subject, how his own son was set to see that no one authorized procedure took place, and that no heretic visitors were admitted, how it was impossible to get his new book printed till long afterwards, and how one form of illness after another took possession of him. The merciful end came at last, and at the age of seventy-eight he was released from the Inquisition. They wanted to deny him burial. They did deny him a monument. They threatened to cart his bones away from Florence if his friends attempted one, and so they hoped that he, and his work, might be forgotten. Poor schemers! Before the year was out an infant was born in Lincolnshire, whose destiny it was to round and complete and carry forward the work of their victim, so that, until man shall cease from the planet, neither the work nor its author shall have need of a monument. Here, might I end, were it not that the same kind of struggles went on fiercely in the seventeenth century is still smoldering even now, not in astronomy indeed as then, nor yet in geology as some fifty years ago, but in biology mainly, perhaps in other subjects. I myself have heard Charles Darwin spoken of as an atheist and an infidel, the theory of evolution has sailed as unscriptural, and the doctrine of the ascent of man from a lower state of being as opposed to the fall of man from some higher condition denied as impious and un-christian. Men will not learn by the past, still they brandish their feeble weapons against the treatise of nature, as if assertions one way or another could alter fact or make the thing other than it really is, as Galileo said before his spirit was broken. In these in other positions certainly no man doubts, but his holiness the Pope have always an absolute power of admitting or condemning them, but it is not in the power of any creature to make them to be true or false, or otherwise than of their own nature, and in fact they are. I know nothing of the views of any here present, but I have met educated persons who, while they might laugh at the men who refuse to look through a telescope lest they should learn something they did not like, yet also themselves commit the very same folly. I have met persons who utterly refuse to listen to any view concerning the origin of man, other than that of a perfect primeval pair in a garden, and I am constrained to say this much. Take heed lest some profit, after having excited your indignation of folly's and bigotry of a bygone generation, does not turn upon you with the sentence thou art the man. End of lecture five, read by Megan Argo. Lecture six of Pioneers of Science This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Avail in June 2010. Pioneers of Science by Sir Oliver Lodge Lecture six Summary of Facts for Lecture Six Science Before Newton Dr. Gilbert of Colchester Physician to Queen Elizabeth was an excellent experimenter and made many discoveries in magnetism and electricity. He was contemporary with Tycho Brahe and lived from 1540 to 1603. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, 1561 to 1626, though a brilliant writer, is not especially important as regards science. He was not a scientific man and his rules for making discoveries or methods of induction have never been consciously, nor often indeed unconsciously, followed by discoverers. They are not in fact practical rules at all, though they were so intended. His really strong doctrines are that phenomena must be studied direct and that variations in the ordinary course of nature must be induced by aid of experiment, but he lacked the scientific instinct for pursuing these great truths into detail and special cases. He sneered at the work and methods of both Gilbert and Galileo and rejected the Copernican theory as absurd. His literary gifts have conferred on him an artificially high scientific reputation, especially in England. At the same time, his writings undoubtedly helped to make popular the idea of there being new methods for investigating nature and by insisting on the necessity for freedom from preconceived ideas and opinions, they did much to release men from the bondage of Aristotelian authority and scholastic tradition. The greatest name between Galileo and Newton is that of the cart. René du Cart was born at La Haye in Turin 1596 and died at Stockholm in 1650. He did important work in mathematics, physics, anatomy, and philosophy, was greatest as a philosopher and mathematician. At the age of 21, he served as a volunteer under Prince Maurice of Nassau, but spent most of his later life in Holland. His famous discourse on method appeared at Leiden in 1637 and his Principia at Amsterdam in 1644, great pains being taken to avoid the condemnation of the church. The cart's main scientific achievement was the application of algebra to geometry. His most famous speculation was the theory of vortices, invented to account for the motion of planets. He also made many discoveries in optics and physiology. His best known immediate pupils were the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Christina, Queen of Sweden. He founded a distinct school of thought, the Cartesian, and was the precursor of the modern mathematical method of investigating science. Justice Galileo and Gilbert were the originators of the modern experimental method. Lecture 6 The cart and his theory of vortices After the dramatic life we have been considering in the last two lectures, it is well to have a breathing space, to look round on what has been accomplished and to review the state of scientific thought before proceeding to the next great era. For we are still in the early morning of scientific discovery, the dawn of the modern period, faintly heralded by Copernicus, brought nearer by the work of Tycho and Kepler, and introduced by the discoveries of Galileo. The dawn has occurred, but the sun is not yet visible. It is hidden by the clouds and mists of the long night of ignorance and prejudice. The light is sufficient indeed to render these earth-born vapours more visible, it is not sufficient to dispel them. A generation of slow and doubtful progress must pass before the first ray of sunlight can break through the eastern clouds and the full orb of day itself appear. It is this period of hesitating progress and slow leavening of men's ideas that we have to pass through in this week's lecture. It always happens thus. The assimilation of great and new ideas is always a slow and gradual process. There is no haste either here or in any other department of nature. The Zeit ist unendlich lang. Steadily the forces work, sometimes seeming to accomplish nothing, sometimes even the motion appears retrograde, but in the long run the destined end is reached and the course, whether of a planet or of man's thoughts about the universe, is permanently altered. Then the controversy was about the earth's place in the universe. Now, if there be any controversy of the same kind, it is about man's place in the universe, but the process is the same. A startling statement by a great genius or prophet, general disbelief, and it may be an attitude of hostility, gradual acceptance by a few, slow spreading among the many, ending in universal acceptance and faith often as unquestioning and unreasoning as the old state of unfaith had been. Now the process is comparatively speedy, 20 years accomplishes a great deal, then it was tediously slow and a century seemed to accomplish very little. Periodical literature may be responsible for some waste of time, but it certainly assists the rapid spread of ideas. The rate with which ideas are assimilated by the general public cannot even now be considered excessive, but how much faster it is than it was a few centuries ago may be illustrated by the attitude of the public to Darwinism now, 20 years after the origin of species, as compared with their attitude to the Copernican system a century after the revolutionibus. By the way, it is, I know, presumptuous for me to have an opinion, but I cannot hear Darwin compared to or mentioned along with Newton without a shutter. The stage in which he found biology seems to me far more comparable with the Ptolemaic era in astronomy and he himself to be quite fairly comparable to Copernicus. Let us proceed to summarize the stage at which the human race had arrived at the epoch with which we are now dealing. The Copernican view of the solar system had been stated, restated, fought and insisted on. A chain of brilliant telescopic discoveries had made it popular and accessible to all men of any intelligence. Henceforth it must be left to slowly percolate and sink into the minds of the people. For the nations were waking up now and were accessible to new ideas. England especially was, in some sort, at the zenith of its glory, or if not at the zenith, was in that full flush of youth and expectation and hope which is stronger and more prolific of great deeds and thoughts than a mature period. A common cause against a common and detested enemy had roused in the hearts of Englishmen a passion of enthusiasm and patriotism so that the mean elements of trade, their cheating yard ones, were forgotten for a time. The Armada was defeated and the nation's true and conscious adult life began. Commerce was now no mere struggle for profit and hard bargains. It was full of the spirit of adventure and discovery. A new world had been opened up. Who could tell what more remained unexplored? Men awoke to the splendor of their inheritance and away sailed Drake and Frobisher and Raleigh into the lands of the West. For literature you know what time it was. The author of Hamlet and Othello was alive. It is needless to say more. And what about science? The atmosphere of science is a more quiet and less stirring one. It thrives best when the fever of excitement is allayed. It is necessarily a later growth than literature. Already, however, our second great man of science was at work in a quiet country town, second in point of time, I mean, Roger Bacon being the first. Dr. Gilbert of Colchester was the second in point of time and the age was ripening for the time when England was to be honoured with such a galaxy of scientific luminaries, hook and boil and Newton, as the world had not yet known. Yes, the nations were awake. In all directions, as Draper says, nature was investigated. In all directions, new methods of examination were yielding unexpected and beautiful results. On the ruins of its ivy-grown cathedrals, ecclesiasticism or scholasticism, surprised and blinded by the breaking day, said solemnly blinking at the light and life about it, absorbed in the recollection of the night that had passed, dreaming of new phantoms and delusions in its wished-for return and vindictively striking its talents at any derisive assailant who unconsciously approached to near. Of the work of Gilbert there is much to say, so there is also of Roger Bacon, whose life I am by no means sure I did write in on meeting. But neither of them had much to do with astronomy, and since it is in astronomy that the most startling progress was during these centuries being made, I have judged it wiser to adhere mainly to the pioneers in this particular department. Only for this reason I do pass Gilbert with but slight mention. He knew of the Copernican theory and thoroughly accepted it. It is convenient to speak of it as the Copernican theory, though you know that it has been considerably improved in detail since the first crude statement by Copernicus, but he made in it no changes. He was a cultivated scientific man and an acute experimental philosopher. His main work lay in the domain of magnetism and electricity. The phenomena connected with the Mariner's compass had been studied somewhat by Roger Bacon, and they were now examined still more thoroughly by Gilbert, whose treatise De Magnete marks the beginning of the science of magnetism. As an appendix to that work, he studied the phenomenon of amber, which had been mentioned by Thales. He resuscitated this little fact after its burial of 2,200 years and greatly extended it. He it was, who invented the name electricity. I wish it had been a shorter one. Mankind invents names much better than do philosophers. What can be better than heat, light, sound? How favourably they compare with electricity, magnetism, galvanism, electromagnetism, and magneto-electricity. The only long-established monosyllabic name I know invented by a philosopher is gas, an excellent attempt which ought to be imitated. Of Lord Bacon, who flourished about the same time a little later, it is necessary to say something, because many persons are under the impression that to him and his novum organon, the re-awakening of the world and the overthrow of Aristotelian tradition are mainly due. His influence, however, has been exaggerated. I am not going to enter into a discussion of the novum organon and the mechanical methods which he propounded as certain to evolve truth, if patiently pursued, for this is what he thought he was doing, giving to the world an infallible recipe for discovering truth, with which any ordinarily industrious men could make discoveries by means of collection and discrimination of instances. You will take my statement for what it is worth, but I assert this, that many of the methods which Bacon lays down are not those which the experience of mankind has found to be serviceable, nor are they such as a scientific man would have thought of devising. True it is that a real love and faculty for science are born in a man and that to the man of scientific capacity rules of procedure are unnecessary, his own intuition is sufficient, or he has mistaken his vocation, but that is not my point. It is not that Bacon's methods are useless because the best men do not need them, if they had been founded on a careful study of the methods actually employed, though it might be unconsciously employed by scientific men, as the means of induction stated long after by John Stuart Mill were founded, then no doubt their statement would have been a valuable service and a great thing to accomplish, but they were not this. They are the ideas of a brilliant man of letters, writing in an age when scientific research was almost unknown about a subject in which he was an amateur. I confess I do not see how he, or John Stuart Mill, or anyone else writing in that age, could have formulated the true rules of philosophizing, because the materials and information were scarcely to hand. Science and its methods were only beginning to grow. No doubt it was a brilliant attempt. No doubt also there are many good and true points in the statement, especially in his insistence on the attitude of free and open candor, with which the investigation of nature should be approached. No doubt there was much beauty in his allegories of the errors into which men were apt to fall, the idola of the marketplace, of the tribe, of the theater and of the den, but all this is literature and on the solid progress of science may be said to have had little or no effect. The cuts discourse on method was a much more solid production. You will understand that I speak of Bacon purely as a scientific man, as a man of letters, as a lawyer, a man of the world and a statesman, he is beyond any criticism of mine. I speak only of the purely scientific aspect of the Novum Organon. The essays and the advancements of learning are masterly productions and as a literary man he takes high rank. The overpraise which in the British Isles has been lavished upon his scientific importance is being followed abroad by what may be an unnecessary amount of detraction. This is always the worst of setting up a man on too high a pinnacle. Someone has to undertake the ungrateful task of pulling him down again. Justus von Liebig addressed himself to this task with some vigor in his Reden und Abhandlung, Leipzig, 1874, where he quotes from Bacon a number of suggestions for absurd experimentation. The next paragraph I read not because I endorse it, but because it is always well to hear both sides of a question. You have probably been long accustomed to read overestimates of Bacon's importance and extravagant laudation of his writings as making an epoch in science. Hear what Draper says on the opposite side. The more closely we examine the writings of Lord Bacon, the more unworthy does he seem to have been of the great reputation which has been awarded to him. The popular delusion to which he owes so much originated at a time when the history of science was unknown. They who first brought him into notice knew nothing of the old school of Alexandria. This boasted founder of a new philosophy could not comprehend and would not accept the greatest of all scientific doctrines when it was plainly set before his eyes. It has been represented that the invention of the true method of physical science was an amusement of Bacon's hours of relaxation from the more laborious studies of law and duties of a court. His chief admirers have been persons of a literary turn who have an idea that scientific discoveries are accomplished by a mechanical mental operation. Bacon never produced any great practical result himself. No great physicist has ever made any use of his method. He has had the same to do with the development of modern science that the inventor of the orary has to do with the discovery of the mechanism of the world. Of all the important physical discoveries there is not one which shows that its author made it by the Baconian instrument. Newton never seems to have been aware that he was under any obligation to Bacon. Archimedes and the Alexandrians and the Arabians and Leonardo da Vinci did very well before he was born. The discovery of America by Columbus and the circumnavigation by Magellan can hardly be attributed to him yet they were the consequences of a truly philosophical reasoning. But the investigation of nature is an affair of genius, not of rules. No man can invent an organon for writing tragedies and epic poems. Bacon's system is, in its own terms, an idol of the theatre. It would scarcely guide a man to a solution of the riddle of Aelia, Leila, Crispus or to that of the charade of Sir Hillary. Few scientific pretenders have made more mistakes than Lord Bacon. He rejected the Copernican system and spoke insolently of its great author. He undertook to criticize adversely Gilbert's treaties the magnate. He was occupied in the condemnation of any investigation of final causes, while Harvey was deducing the circulation of the blood from Aquapendente's discovery of the valves in the veins. He was doubtful whether instruments were of any advantage, while Galileo was investigating the heavens with the telescope. Ignorant himself of every branch of mathematics, he presumed that they were useless in science, but a few years before Newton achieved by their aid his immortal discoveries. It is time that the sacred name of philosophy should be severed from its long connection with that of one who was a pretender in science, a time-serving politician, an insidious lawyer, a corrupt judge, a treacherous friend, a bad man. End quote. This seems to me a deprecation as excessive as are the eulogies commonly current. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two extremes. It is unfair to judge Bacon's methods by thinking of physical science in its present stage. To realize his position, we must think of a subject still in its very early infancy, one in which the adversibility of applying experimental methods is still doubted, one which has been studied by means of books and words and discussion of normal instances, instead of by collection and observation of the unusual and irregular, and by experimental production of variety. If we think of a subject still in this infantile and almost pre-scientific stage, Bacon's words and formulae are far from inapplicable. They are, within their limitations, quite necessary and wholesome. A subject in this stage, strange to say, exists. Psychology, now hesitatingly beginning to assume its experimental weapons amid the stifling atmosphere of distrust and suspicion. Bacon's lack of the modern scientific instinct must be admitted, but he rendered humanity a powerful service in directing it from books to nature herself and his genius is indubitable. A judicious account of his life and work is given by Professor Adamson, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and to this article I now refer you. Who, then, was the man of first magnitude filling up the gap in scientific history between the death of Galileo and the maturity of Newton? Unknown and mysterious are the laws regulating the appearance of genius. We have passed in review a Pole, a Dane, a German, and an Italian. The great man is now a Frenchman, René Descartes, born in Turin, on the 31st of March, 1596. His mother died at his birth. The father was of no importance, save as the owner of some landed property. The boy was reared luxuriously and inherited a fair fortune. Nearly all the man of first rank, you notice, were born well off. Genius born to poverty might, indeed, even then achieve name and fame, as we see in the case of Kepler, but it was terribly handicapped. Handicapped it is still, but far less than of old, and we may hope it will become gradually still less so, as enlightenment proceeds and the tremendous moment of great men to a nation is more clearly and actively perceived. It is possible for genius, when combined with strong character, to overcome all obstacles and reach the highest eminence, but the struggle must be severe, and the absence of early training and refinement during the receptive years of youth must be a lifelong drawback. The cart had none of these drawbacks. Life came easily to him, and as a consequence, perhaps, he never seems to have taken it quite seriously. Great movements and stirring events were to him opportunities for the study of men and manners. He was not a man to court persecution, nor to show enthusiasm for losing or struggling cause. In this, as in many other things, he was imbued with a very modern spirit, a cynical and skeptical spirit, which, to an outside and superficial observer like myself, seems rather rife just now. He was also imbued with a face of scientific spirit which he sometimes still meet with, though I believe it is passing away, that is, an uncultured absorption in his own pursuits, and some feeling of contempt for classical and literary and aesthetic studies. In politics, art and history, he seems to have had no interest. He was a spectator rather than an actor on the stage of the world, and though he joined the army of that great military commander, Prince Maurice of Nassau, he did it not as a man with a cause at heart worth fighting for, but precisely in the spirit in which one of our own gilded youths would volunteer in a similar case as a good opportunity for frolic and for seeing life. He soon tired of it and withdrew, at first to gay society in Paris. Here he might naturally have sunk into the gutter with his companions, but for a great mental shock which became the main epoch and turning point of his life, the crisis which diverted him from frivolity to seriousness. It was a purely intellectual emotion, not excited by anything in the visible or tangible world, nor could it be called conversion in the common acceptation of that term. He tells us that on the 11th of November 1619, at the age of 24, a brilliant idea flashed upon him, the first idea, namely of his great and powerful mathematical method, of which I will speak directly, and in the flash of it he foresaw that just as geometers, starting with a few simple and evident propositions or axioms, ascended by a long and intricate ladder of reasoning to propositions more and more obstruous, so it might be possible to ascend from a few data to all the secrets and facts of the universe by a process of mathematical reasoning. Comparing the mysteries of nature with the laws of mathematics, he dared to hope that the secrets of both could be unlocked with the same key. That night he lapsed gradually into a state of enthusiasm in which he saw three dreams or visions which he interpreted at that time, even before waking, to be revelations from the spirit of truth to direct his future course, as well as to warn him from the sins he had already committed. His account of the dreams is on record, but it's not very easy to follow, nor is it likely that a man should be able to convey to others any adequate idea of the deepest spiritual or mental agitation which has shaken him to his foundations. His associates in Paris were now abandoned, and he withdrew after some wanderings to Holland, where he abode the best part of his life and did his real work. Even now, however, he took life easily. He recommends idleness as necessary to the production of good mental work. He worked and meditated but a few hours a day, and most of those in bed. He used to think best in bed, he said. The afternoon he devoted to society and recreation. After supper he wrote letters to various persons, all plainly intended for publication and scrupulously preserved. He kept himself free from care and was most cautious about his health, regarding himself no doubt as a subject of experiment and wishful to see how long he could prolong his life. At one time he writes to a friend that he shall be seriously disappointed if he does not manage to see one hundred years. This plan of not overworking himself and limiting the hours devoted to serious thought is one that might perhaps advantageously be followed by some overlaborious students of the present day. At any rate it conveys a lesson, for the amount of ground covered by the cut in a life not very long is extraordinary. He must, however, have had a singular aptitude for scientific work and the judicious leaven of selfishness whereby he was able to keep himself free from care and embarrassments must have been a great help to him. And what did this versatile genius accomplish during his 54 years of life? In philosophy, using the term as meaning mental or moral philosophy and metaphysics as opposed to natural philosophy or physics, he takes a very high rank and it is on this that perhaps his greatest fame rests. He is the author you may remember of the famous aphorism, cogito ergo sum. In biology I believe he may be considered almost equally great. Certainly he spent a great deal of time in dissecting and he made out a good deal of what is now known of the structure of the body and of the theory of vision. He eagerly accepted the doctrine of the circulation of the blood then being taught by Harvey and was an excellent anatomist. You doubtless know Professor Huxley's article on the cart in the lace sermons and you perceive in what high estimation he is their hilt. He originated the hypothesis that animals are automata for which indeed there is much to be said from some points of view but he unfortunately believed that they were unconscious and non-sentient automata and this belief led his disciples into acts of abominable cruelty. Professor Huxley lectured on this hypothesis and partially upheld it not many years since. The article is included in his volume called science and culture. Concerning his work in mathematics and physics I can speak with more confidence. He is the author of the Cartesian system of algebraic or analytic geometry which has been so powerful an engine of research far easier to wield than the old synthetic geometry. Without it Newton could never have written the Principia or made his greatest discoveries. He might indeed have invented it for himself but it would have consumed some of his life to have brought it to the necessary perfection. The principle of it is the specification of the position of a point in a plane by two numbers indicating say its distance from two lines of reference in the plane like the latitude and longitude of a place on the globe. For instance the two lines of reference might be the bottom edge and the left hand vertical edge of a wall then a point on the wall stated as being for instance six feet along and two feet up is precisely determined. These two distances are called coordinates horizontal ones are usually denoted by x and vertical ones by y. If instead of specifying two things only one statement is made such as y equals two it is satisfied by a whole row of points all the points in a horizontal line two feet above the ground. Hence y equals two may be said to represent that straight line and is called the equation to that straight line. Similarly x equals six represents a vertical straight line six feet or inches or some other unit from the left hand edge. If it is asserted that x equals six and y equals two only one point can be found to satisfy both conditions that is the crossing point of the above two straight lines. Suppose an equation such as x equals y to be given this also is satisfied by a row of points that is by all those that are equidistant from bottom and left hand edges. In other words x equals y represents a straight line slanting upwards at 45 degrees. The equation x equals two y represents another straight line with a different angle of slope and so on. The equation x squared plus y squared equals 36 represents a circle of radius six. The equation three x squared plus four y squared equals 25 represents an ellipse and in general every algebraic equation that can be written down provided it involves only two variables x and y represents some curve in a plane a curve more over that can be drawn or its properties completely investigated without drawing from the equation. Thus algebra is wedded to geometry and the investigation of geometric relations by means of algebraic equations is called analytical geometry as opposed to the old Euclidean or synthetic mode of treating the subject by reasoning consciously directed to the subject by help of figures. If there be three variables x y and z instead of only two an equation among them represents not a curve in a plane but a surface in space the three variables corresponding to the three dimensions of space length breadth and thickness an equation with four variables usually requires space of four dimensions for its geometrical interpretation and so on. Thus geometry cannot only be reasoned about in a more mechanical and therefore much easier manner but it can be extended into regions of which we have and can have no direct conception because we are deficient in sense organs for accumulating any kind of experience in connection with such ideas. In physics proper the Cartes tract on optics is of considerable historical interest. He treats all the subjects he takes up in an able and original manner. In astronomy he is the author of that famous and long upheld theory the doctrine of vortices. He regarded space as a plenum full of an all-pervading fluid. Certain portions of this fluid were in a state of whirling motion as in a whirlpool or eddy of water and each planet had its own eddy in which it was world round and round as a straw is caught and whirled in a common whirlpool. This idea he works out and elaborates very fully applying it to the system of the world and to the explanation of all the motions of the planets. This system evidently supplied a void in man's minds left vacant by the overthrow of the Ptolemaic system and it was rapidly accepted. In the English universities it held for a long time almost undisputed sway it was in this faith that Newton was brought up. Something was felt to be necessary to keep the planets moving on their endless round the primum mobile of Ptolemy had been stopped an angel was sometimes assigned to each planet to carry it round but though a widely diffused belief this was a fantastic and not a serious scientific one the cart's vortices seemed to do exactly what was wanted it is true they had no connection with the laws of Kepler I doubt whether he knew about the laws of Kepler he had not much opinion of other people's work he read very little found it easier to think he traveled through Florence once when Galileo was at the height of his renown without calling upon or seeing him in so far as the motion of a planet was not circular it had to be accounted for by the jostling and crowding and distortion of the vortices gravitation he explained by a settling down of bodies toward the center of each vortex and cohesion by an absence of relative motion tending to separate particles of matter he can imagine no stronger cement the vortices as Ducat imagined them are not now believed in are we then to regard the system as absurd and wholly false I do not see how we can do this when to this day philosophers are agreed in believing space to be completely full of fluid which fluid is certainly capable of vortex motion and perhaps everywhere does possess that motion true the now imagined vortices are not the large worlds of planetary size they are rather infinitesimal worlds of less than atomic dimensions still a whirling fluid is believed into this day and many are seeking to deduce all the properties of matter rigidity elasticity cohesion gravitation and the rest from it further although we talk glibly about gravitation and magnetism and so on we do not really know what they are progress is being made but we do not yet properly know much overwhelmingly much remains to be discovered and it ill behoves us to reject any well founded and long held theory as utterly and intrinsically false and absurd the more one gets to know the more one perceives a kernel of truth even in the most singular statements and scientific men have learned by experience to be very careful how they lop off any branch of the tree of knowledge lest as they cut away the dead wood they lose also some green shoot some healthy bud of unperceived truth however it may be admitted that the idea of a cartesian vortex in connection with the solar system applies if at all rather to an earlier its nebulous stage when the whole thing was one great world ready to split or shrink off planetary rings at their appropriate distances soon after he had written his great work the Principia Mathematica and before he printed it news reached him of the persecution and recantation of Galileo he seems to have been quite thunderstruck at the tidings says Mr. Mahaffey in his life of the cart he had started on his scientific journeys with the firm determination to enter into no conflict with the church and to carry out his system of pure mathematics and physics without ever meddling with matters of faith he was rudely disillusioned as to the possibility of this severance he wrote at once apparently November 20th 1633 to Mersenne to say he would on no account publish his work nay that he had at first resolved to burn all his papers for that he would never prosecute philosophy at the risk of being censored by his church quote I could hardly have believed he says that an Italian and in favor with the Pope as I hear could be considered criminal for nothing else than for seeking to establish the earth's motion though I know it has formally been censored by some cardinals but I thought I had heard that since then it was constantly being taught even at Rome and I confess that if the opinion of the earth's movement is false all the foundations of my philosophy are so also because it is demonstrated clearly by them it is so bound up with every part of my treaties that I could not sever it without making the remainder faulty and although I consider all my conclusions based on very certain and clear demonstrations I would not for all the world sustain them against the authority of the church 10 years later however he did publish the book for he had by this time hit on an ingenious compromise he formally denied that the earth moved and only asserted that it was carried along with its water and air in one of those large emotions of the celestial ether which produced the diurnal and annual revolutions of the solar system so just as a passenger on the deck of a ship might be called stationary so was the earth he gives himself out therefore as a follower of Tycho rather than of Copernicus and says if the church won't accept this compromise he must return to the Ptolemaic system but he hopes they won't compel him to do that seeing that it is manifestly untrue this elaborate deference to the powers that be did not indeed save the work from being ultimately placed upon the forbidden list by the church but it saved himself at any rate from annoying persecution he was not indeed at all willing to be persecuted and would no doubt have it once withdrawn anything they wished I should be sorry to call him a time server but he certainly had plenty of that worldly wisdom in which some of his predecessors had been so lamentably deficient moreover he was really a skeptic and cared nothing at all about the church or its dogmas he knew the church's power however and the advisability of standing well with it he therefore professed himself a catholic and studiously kept his science and his Christianity distinct in saying that he was a skeptic you must not understand that he was in the least an atheist very few men are certainly the cart never thought of being one the term is indeed ludicrously inapplicable to him for a great part of his philosophy is occupied with what he considers a rigorous proof of the existence of the deity at the age of 53 he was sent for to Stockholm by Christina Queen of Sweden a young lady enthusiastically devoted to study of all kinds and determined to surround her court with all that was most famous in literature and science thither after hesitation the cart went he greatly liked royalty but he dreaded the cold climate born in terrain a swedish winter was peculiarly trying to him especially as the energetic queen would have lessons given her at five o'clock in the morning she intended to treat him well and was immensely taken with him but this getting up at five o'clock on a november morning to a man accustomed all his life to lie in bed till eleven was a cruel hardship he was too much of a courtier however to murmur and the early morning audience continued his health began to break down he thought of retreating but suddenly he gave way and became delirious the queen's physician attended him and of course wanted to bleed him this knowing all he knew of physiology sent him furious and they could do nothing with him after some days he became quiet was bled twice and gradually sank discoursing with great calmness on his approaching death and duly fortified with all the rights of the catholic church his general method of research was as nearly as possible a purely deductive one that is after the manner of euclid he starts with a few simple principles and then by a chain of reasoning endeavors to deduce from them their consequences and so to build up bit by bit an edifice of connected knowledge in this he was the precursor of newton this method when rigorously pursued is the most powerful and satisfactory of all and results in an ordered province of science far superior to the fragmentary conquests of experiment but few indeed are the men who can handle it safely and satisfactorily and none without continual appeals to experiment for verification it was through not perceiving the necessity for verification that he earned his importance to science lies not so much in what he actually discovered as in his anticipation of the right conditions for the solution of problems in physical science he in fact made the discovery that nature could after all be interrogated mathematically a fact that was in great danger of remaining unknown for observe that the mathematical study of nature the discovery of truth with a piece of paper and a pen has a perilous similarity at first sight to the straw thrashing subtleties of the Greeks whose methods of investigating nature by discussing the meaning of words and the usage of language and the necessities of thought had proved to be so futile and unproductive a reaction had set in led by Galileo Gilbert and the whole modern school of experimental philosophers lasting down to the present day men who teach that the only right way of investigating nature is by experiment and observation it is indeed a very right and an absolutely necessary way but it is not the only way a foundation of experimental fact there must be but upon this a great structure of theoretical deduction can be based all rigidly connected together by pure reasoning and all necessarily as true as the premises provided no mistake is made to guard against the possibility of mistake and oversight especially oversight all conclusions must sooner or later be brought to the test of experiment and if disagreeing therewith the theory itself must be reexamined and the floor discovered or else the theory must be abandoned of this grand method quite different from the gropings in the dark of Kepler this method which in combination with experiment has made science what it now is this which in the hands of newton was to lead to such stupendious results we owe the beginning and early stages to renais du carte end of lecture six