The biography of men who have devoted themselves to philosophical pursuits seldom affords so various and striking a succession of incidents as that of a soldier or statesman. The life of a man who is shut up during the greater part of his time in his study or laboratory supplies but scanty materials for personal details; and the lapse of time rapidly removes from us the opportunities of preserving such peculiarities as might have been worth recording. An account of it will therefore consist chiefly in a review of his works and opinions, and of the influence which he and they have exercised over his own and succeeding ages. Viewed in this light, few lives can be considered more interesting than that of Galileo; and if we compare the state in which he found, with that in which he left, the study of nature, we shall feel how justly an enthusiastic panegyric pronounced upon the age immediately following him may be transferred to this earlier period. "This is the age wherein all men's minds are in a kind of fermentation, and the spirit of wisdom and learning begins to mount and free itself from those drossie and terrene impediments wherewith it has been so long clogged, and from the insipid phlegm and caput mortuum of useless notions in which it hath endured so violent and long a fixation. This is the age wherein, methinks, philosophy comes in with a spring tide, and the peripatetics may as well hope to stop the current of the tide, or, with Xerxes, to fetter the ocean, as hinder the overflowing of free philosophy. Methinks I see how all the old rubbish must be thrown away, and the rotten buildings be overthrown and carried away, with so powerful an inundation. These are the days that must lay a new foundation of a more magnificent philosophy, never to be overthrown, that will empirically and sensibly canvass the phenomena of nature, deducing the causes of things from such originals in nature as we observe are producible by art, and the infallible demonstration of mechanics: and certainly this is the way, and no other, to build a true and permanent philosophy."[3]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ménage.
[2] Hume's England, James I.
[3] Power's Experimental Philosophy, 1663.
Chapter II.
Galileo's Birth—Family—Education—Observation of the Pendulum—Pulsilogies—Hydrostatical Balance—Lecturer at Pisa.
Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa, on the 15th day of February, 1564, of a noble and ancient Florentine family, which, in the middle of the fourteenth century, adopted this surname instead of Bonajuti, under which several of their ancestors filled distinguished offices in the Florentine state. Some misapprehension has occasionally existed, in consequence of the identity of his proper name with that of his family; his most correct appellation would perhaps be Galileo de' Galilei, but the surname usually occurs as we have written it. He is most commonly spoken of by his Christian name, agreeably to the Italian custom; just as Sanzio, Buonarotti, Sarpi, Reni, Vecelli, are universally known by their Christian names of Raphael, Michel Angelo, Fra Paolo, Guido, and Titian.
Several authors have followed Rossi in styling Galileo illegitimate, but without having any probable grounds even when they wrote, and the assertion has since been completely disproved by an inspection of the registers at Pisa and Florence, in which are preserved the dates of his birth, and of his mother's marriage, eighteen months previous to it.[4]