V
GIORDANO BRUNO
1548–1600
I have fought: that is much—victory is in the hands of fate. Be that as it may with me, this at least future ages will not deny of me, be the victor who may—that I did not fear to die, yielded to none of my fellows in constancy, and preferred a spirited death to a cowardly life.
As the world grows older knowledge increases. From time to time men have to correct and alter their opinions and beliefs. What at one period is accepted as true may be proved at a later period to be false. But we do not like abandoning our favorite beliefs, and we are apt to get rather annoyed with a reformer, a discoverer, or an inventor who comes along with new notions and upsets our ideas. Even to-day such a man is often laughed at or abused. In mediæval times he was made to suffer as an outcast and even sometimes as a criminal.
You will read many books about heroes who have displayed courage and endurance in battle, exploration, and adventure. But men who have had to overcome prejudices and to stand by their opinions in spite of almost universal opposition have also played an important part in the world’s history, though you may hear less about them. Moral courage is more rare than physical courage. To display physical courage may make a man a popular hero. If he fails he is stamped as a coward. To display moral courage more often than not makes a man unpopular. There is no audience to applaud and it is quite easy to be a moral coward without any one, even intimate friends, finding it out. It is far simpler to say “Yes” when every one else is saying “Yes.” He who rows against the stream cannot hope to carry many with him, and his progress must be slow.
Nothing can have upset men’s calculations more than the first great discoveries of astronomy. No doubt people scoffed when Pythagoras told them the earth was round and not flat, as they supposed. But it was a still more disturbing idea to be told that the earth was not the center of the universe, with the sun and moon and stars revolving round it. Most men firmly believed this to be the case up to the fifteenth century. And when Copernicus first elaborated in a book, between 1506 and 1512, the heliocentric theory, that is to say the theory that the sun was the center round which the earth and the other planets revolved, it was a long time before any one would treat such an idea seriously. We may laugh at the ignorance of our forefathers, and we may declare glibly that of course the earth goes round the sun, but there are not many of us who would be ready to explain scientifically why we know this to be a fact. We, too, have to accept a great deal on other people’s authority because we are told it is true, and not because we know it is true. And to us again the new idea often appears unwelcome and disturbs our most cherished beliefs.
GIORDANO BRUNO
But, anyhow, we know now that a man’s deeds and his loyalty to his own convictions are far more important than any declaration he may make of his beliefs, especially when such a declaration is forced from him or made to please others. Some people find it very difficult to believe things of which they cannot see the clear explanation. Other people, with very little effort, can believe almost anything they are told. They are like the White Queen in “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” who, when Alice said she could not believe impossible things, replied, “I dare say you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
In the sixteenth century doubt and disbelief in any of the hard-and-fast rules and dogmas of the Church was not tolerated. Any one who was bold enough to refuse to say he believed what he conscientiously knew he could not believe was liable to be punished with the utmost severity.