If an advancing motion is admitted to be the motion proper to the sun, the orbits traversed by the planets cannot be closed.
But the question may be asked: is it true that science contradicts itself in this way? We reply: Yes! astronomical observation has overtaken theoretical or explicative science. Theory has stood still.
In order to set their minds at rest, learned men explain what they wish to explain, and just as heavenly phenomena were accounted for according the systems of Ptolemæus, of Copernicus and of Tycho de Brahe, so too there will be no lack of good reasons to account for the motion proper to the sun; only history will tell us that the astronomers of the last but one decennium of the XIXth century have taught by writing and speaking in their schools, that the sun is at the same time moving and not moving.
A science which cannot make any use of this immense discovery, nor deduce any application from it, does not possess any vital power; it is a dead science, it is strangled by those whose duty is to keep it alive, to lead it onwards to perfection.
Astronomers assert "that the sun conducts its system with himself in mundane space," but in the same breath they add: "with reference however to the planets it may be regarded as in a state of rest."
Hence astronomers have discovered a motion which is at rest.
If the sun is not fixed, the system of Copernicus falls to ground. Either the sun moves, or does not; a moving sun in a condition of rest, is an impossibility.
If the sun moves, there is no fixed centre, there are no closed or recurrent curves and no plains of orbits. If these must be obtained at any price, the sun must be definitively fixed, it cannot be permitted to move onwards and yet at the same time not to move.