Greater, so manifold, to this one use,”
appeared disproportionate to Milton’s Adam. Homo could not be the Master-Builder’s main concern—the great human tragedy was a by-product. A sad conclusion, and possibly a true—but a conclusion utterly unwarranted by these premises. More sanely did the beneficent and facile Raphael remind the doubting Adam,
“Whether heaven moves or earth
Imports not.”
The noble astronomic questionings in the eighth book of “Paradise Lost” testify to the ferment among the first inhabitants of the new cosmos—Milton was born in the same year as the telescope and met Galileo at Florence—but despite the poet’s half-hearted protests, man has swallowed too humbly the doctrine that our earth is not the centre of the universe. Pray do not confound me with those pious pundits whose proofs of the flatness of the earth are still the hope of a lingering sect, and a witness to the immortality of human stupidity. I am no Muggletonian whose sun is four miles from the earth. I have no lance to tilt against the mathematicians and their tubes. But I fail to see how the mere broadening out of our universe can displace Terra from the centre. Till we have the final and all-inclusive chart of the heavens—and worlds immeasurable are still beyond our ken, worlds whose light speeding to us at eleven million miles or so a minute is still on its way—how can any one assert conclusively that our earth is not in the exact centre of all the systems? That it goes round the sun—instead of being the centre of the sun’s revolution—is nothing against its supremacy or central status. The fire exists for the meat, though the spit revolves and not the fire.
And if the earth be not in the centre of the systems, it assuredly remains at the centre of Space. For by that old definition of Hermes Trismegistus to which Pascal gave currency, every point of an infinite area is really its centre, even as no point is its circumference. And in a psychological sense too, wherever a spectator stands is the centre of the universe.
But grant the earth be not the centre of Space or the systems! What then? How does it lose its lofty estate? Is London at the globe’s kernel? Did the axis pass through Rome? Kepler wasted much precious time under the current philosophic obsession that the orbits of the planets must be circular—since any figure less perfect than a circle were incompatible with their dignity. Hence the cumbrous hypotheses to explain their apparent deviation from perfection, hence was the sphere girt
“With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”
The same fallacy of symmetry surely underlies the notion that the earth is dethroned from its hegemony of the stellar system merely because the lines drawn to it from every ultima Thule of the universe are unequal. ’Tis a confusion of geometric centre with centre of forces. It may be that just this asymmetric station was necessary for the evolution of the universe’s crowning race.