them with the accused. And as no attempt is made to account for his ignorance of the prohibition, and it is simply taken for granted, it must be allowed that Galileo's judges, to say the least, were guilty of a great breach of judicial order, in using, without any close examination, a paper as a valid document on the trial, which was destitute of nearly all the characteristics of one, namely, the signatures of the accused, of the notary and witnesses, and in spite of three contradictory depositions of the accused. No special arguments are needed to prove that this breach of order did not proceed from mere carelessness. And so, immediately after the accused has declared that he does not remember any command but that intimated to him by Cardinal Bellarmine, we find the Inquisitor asking him: Whether, after the aforesaid command was issued to him, he had received any permission to write the book which he had acknowledged to be his, and which he afterwards had printed?
Galileo: "After receiving the command aforesaid, I did not ask permission to write the book acknowledged by me to be mine, because I did not consider that in writing it I was acting contrary to, far less disobeying, the command not to hold, defend, or to teach the said opinion."
The Inquisitor now asks to be informed whether, from whom, and in what way, Galileo had received permission to print the "Dialogues." Galileo briefly relates the whole course of the negotiations which preceded the printing. As his narrative agrees entirely with what we know, it is not reproduced here. The Inquisitor then asks: Whether, when asking permission to print his book, he had told the Master of the Palace about the command aforesaid, which had been issued to him by order of the Holy Congregation?
Galileo: "I did not say anything about that command to the Master of the Palace when I asked for the imprimatur for the book, for I did not think it necessary to say anything, because I had no scruples about it; for I have neither maintained nor defended the opinion that the earth moves and the sun is stationary in that book, but have rather demonstrated the opposite of the Copernican opinion, and shown that the arguments of Copernicus are weak and not conclusive."
