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 primaeval 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 Brahe, 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.
_Rene 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 AElia
Laelia 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."