Chapter V: Part I: From Dusk to Daylight (4)

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 Cosmo di 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 he only 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 a 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 criticize 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 sympathizes with the temptation. Not emolument, 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 world-wide reputation, lived as luxuriously as he cared for, had his time all to 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 Brahé in his island of Huen.

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 aright we must remember the political divisions of Italy at that date.

Tuscany was a Papal State, and thought there was by no means free. Venice was a free republic, and was even hostile to the Papacy. In 1606 the Pope had placed it under an interdict. In reply it had ejected every Jesuit.

Out of this atmosphere of comparative enlightenment and freedom into that hotbed of mediævalism and superstition went Galileo with his eyes open. Keen was the regret of his Paduan and Venetian friends; bitter were 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, for he was not in the least a sceptic. 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 to-day 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 earth's rotation for a short time, than 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 addressed 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 dared no more than remonstrate, and ultimately his successor had to refrain from even this, so enchained 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 was suffered to believe and teach much the same doctrines unmolested. 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 and forcibly, 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 specially obnoxious to the Aristotelian Jesuits in their double capacity both of priests and of philosophers, and they singled him out for 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. wrote requesting him to come to Rome to explain his views. He went, was well received, made a special friend of Cardinal Barberino--an 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 his adversaries on, almost like Socrates, only to ultimately overwhelm them in a more hopeless rout. 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 leave to go away again. But he felt like an apostle of the new doctrines, whose mission it was to proclaim them even in this 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 he 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 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 on
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,[11] 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, the following:--

"This theory occurred to me when in Rome whilst the theologians
were debating on the prohibition of Copernicus's 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 my intellect can 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 as 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 passed the time studiously enough, partly at his house in Florence, partly at his villa in Arcetri, 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 dutiful 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 this peaceful time. For instance, the convent clock won't go, and Galileo mends it for them. He is 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, there was elected to the Papal throne, as Urban VIII., Cardinal Barberino, 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 good
will 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 whither your liberality recalls him without an ample
provision of Pontifical love. And that you may know how dear he is
to Us, We have willed to give him this honourable 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 good will 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 men.

The conversations are something between Plato's _Dialogues_ and Sir Arthur Helps's _Friends in Council_. 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 than 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 through 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 Aristotelians 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 henceforward, and whether overruled by his Cardinals, or 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 Arcetri 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 gaol.

By April he was removed to 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 a 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 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 Dominis, Archbishop of Salpetria, 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 at this mode of compelling a prisoner to say anything they wished, that they were a legally 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 haled 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 a 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, deny 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:--1st. The official threat in the court. 2nd. The taking to the door of the torture chamber and renewing the official threat. 3rd. The taking inside and showing the instruments. 4th. Undressing and binding upon the rack. 5th. _Territio 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 was he removed to a cell while 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 prelates 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--1st. To the abjuration. 2nd. To formal imprisonment for life. 3rd. 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 immortalized 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 Reverend Lords Cardinals,
General Inquisitors of the universal 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
that the sun is the centre and immovable, and forbidden to hold,
defend, or teach the said false doctrine in any manner, and after
it hath 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 believed 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 unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse, and detest the
said errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect
contrary to 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 any one 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
touch with my own hands. I, the above-named Galileo Galilei, have
abjured, 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, 22nd June, 1633. I, Galileo Galilei, have
abjured as above with my own hand."

Those who believe the story about his muttering to a friend, as he rose from his knees, "e pur si muove," do not realize the scene.

1st. There was no friend in the place.

2nd. It would have been fatally dangerous to mutter anything before such an assemblage.

3rd. 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 wretched 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 death-bed. 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 Arcetri, 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 is to stay at Arcetri, is not to go out of the house, is not to receive visitors, and that if he asks for more favours, or transgresses the commands laid upon him, he is liable to be haled 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.

Idle, 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 Arcetri 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 (see page 167). One more astronomical discovery also he was to make--that of the moon's libration.

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 amanuensis, and the help of his pupils Torricelli, Castelli, and Viviani, all devotedly attached to him, and Torricelli 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 as immortal as himself--John Milton, 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 blind sage 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 unauthorized 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 struggle as went on fiercely in the seventeenth century is still smouldering 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 assailed 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 truths 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 and other positions certainly no man doubts but His Holiness the Pope hath 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 refused 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 primæval pair in a garden, and I am constrained to say this much: Take heed lest some prophet, after having excited your indignation at the follies and bigotry of a bygone generation, does not turn upon you with the sentence, "Thou art the man."

SUMMARY OF FACTS FOR LECTURE VI

_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 Brahé, and lived from 1540 to 1603.

_Francis Bacon_, Lord Verulam, 1561-1626, though a brilliant writer, is not specially 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 Descartes.

_René Descartes_ was born at La Haye in Touraine, 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 twenty-one 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 Leyden in 1637, and his _Principia_ at Amsterdam in 1644; great pains being taken to avoid the condemnation of the Church.

Descartes'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, just as Galileo and Gilbert were the originators of the modern experimental method.

LECTURE VI

DESCARTES 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. _Die 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 men'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: twenty 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, twenty-five years after _The Origin of Species_, as compared with their attitude to the Copernican system a century after _De 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 shudder. 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 maturer 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-wands, 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 splendour of their inheritance, and away sailed Drake and Frobisher and Raleigh into the lands of the West.

For literature, you know what a 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--Hooke and Boyle 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, sat 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 talons at any derisive assailant who incautiously approached too 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 right in omitting. 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 do I 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 had 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, electro-magnetism, 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.[12]

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 reawakening 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 man 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 methods 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 any one 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 candour 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 market-place, of the tribe, of the theatre, 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. Descartes's _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 Advancement of Learning_ are masterly productions; and as a literary man he takes high rank.

The over-praise 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; some one has to undertake the ungrateful task of pulling him down again. Justus von Liebig addressed himself to this task with some vigour in his _Reden und Abhandlung_ (Leipzig, 1874), where he quotes from Bacon a number of suggestions for absurd experimentation.[13]

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 over-estimates of Bacon's importance, and extravagant laudation of his writings as making an epoch in science; hear what Draper says on the opposite side:--[14]

"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
mechanico-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 orrery has had 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 Ælia
Lælia Crispis, or to that of the charade of Sir Hilary.

"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
treatise _De Magnete_; 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."

This seems to me a depreciation 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 realise his position we must think of a subject still in its very early infancy, one in which the advisability 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 formulæ 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 a 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 Prof. Adamson, in the _Encyclopædia 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 Touraine, on the 31st of March, 1596.