The Warfare of Science

by Andrew Dickson White

But the losses to the earth in the long war against Galileo were followed by losses not less unfortunate in other quarters. There was then in Europe one of the greatest thinkers ever given to mankind—Réné Descartes. Mistaken though many of his theories were, they were fruitful in truths. The scientific warriors had stirred new life in him, and he was working over and summing up in his mighty mind all the researches of his time; the result must make an epoch in history. His aim was to combine all knowledge and thought into a "Treatise on the World." His earnestness he proved by the eleven years which he gave to the study of anatomy alone. Petty persecution he had met often, but the fate of Galileo robbed him of all hope, of all energy; the battle seemed lost; he gave up his great plan forever. [70]

But champions pressed on. Campanella, full of vagaries as he was, wrote his Apologia pro Galileo, though for that and other heresies, religious and political, he seven times underwent torture. [71]

And Kepler comes. He leads science on to greater victories. Kopernik, great as he was, could not disentangle his scientific reasoning entirely from the theological bias. The doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as to the necessary superiority of the circle, had vitiated the minor features of his system, and left breaches in it through which the enemy was not slow to enter. Kepler sees these errors, and, by wonderful genius in insight and vigor in thought, he brings to the world the three laws which bear his name, and this fortress of science is complete. He thinks and speaks as one inspired. His battle is severe; he is sometimes abused, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes imprisoned. Protestants in Styria and at Tübingen, Catholics at Rome, press upon him; [72] but Newton, Halley, Bradley, and the other great leaders follow, and to science remains the victory.

And yet the war did not wholly end. During the seventeenth century, in all France, after all the splendid proofs added by Kepler, no one dared openly teach the Copernican theory, and Cassini, the great astronomer, never declared it. [73] In 1672 Father Riccioli, a Jesuit, declared that there were precisely forty-nine arguments for the Copernican theory and seventy-seven against it; so that there remained twenty-eight reasons for preferring the orthodox theory. [74] Toward the end of the seventeenth century, after the demonstration of Sir Isaac Newton, even Bossuet, the "eagle of Meaux," among the loftiest of religious thinkers, declared for the Ptolemaic theory as the Scriptural theory; [75] and in 1724 John Hutchinson published in England his Moses's Principia, maintaining that the Hebrew Scriptures are a perfect system of natural philosophy, and are opposed to the Newtonian theory of gravitation. [76] In 1746 Boscovich, the great mathematician of the Jesuits, used these words: "As for me, full of respect for the Holy Scriptures and the decree of the Holy Inquisition, I regard the earth as immovable; nevertheless, for simplicity in explanation, I will argue as if the earth moves, for it is proved that of the two hypotheses the appearances favor that idea." [77] And even at a date far within our own nineteenth century, the authorities of the Spanish universities vigorously excluded the Newtonian system, and the greatest of them all, the University of Salamanca, held it under the ban until a very recent period. [78]

Nor has the opposition failed even in our own time. On the 5th of May, 1829, a great multitude assembled at Warsaw, to do honor to the memory of Kopernik, and to unveil Thorwaldsen's statue of him.

Kopernik had lived a pious, Christian life. He was well known for unostentatious Christian charity. With his religious belief no fault had ever been found; he was a canon of the church of Frauenberg, and over his grave had been written the most touching of Christian epitaphs.

Naturally, then, the people expected a religious service. All was understood to be arranged for it. The procession marched to the church and waited. The hour passed, and no priest appeared; none could be induced to appear. Kopernik, simple, charitable, pious, one of the noblest gifts of God to the service of religion as well as science, was still held to be a reprobate. Five years after that, his book was still standing on the Index of books prohibited to Christians; and although, in 1757, under Benedict XIV., the Congregation of the Index had secretly allowed the ideas of Kopernik and Galileo to be simply tolerated, it was not until 1822, as we have seen, that Pius VII. allowed the publishing of them at Rome; and not until 1835 did the prohibition of them fully disappear from the Index. [79]