Salv.You say very well; but you alledge nothing in that which may favour the cause of the Ptolomæans in the least, who did never yet reject the motion of 36000. years in the starry Sphere, for that the said tardity would make it too vast and immense. For if that the said immensity was not to be supposed in Nature, they ought before now to to have denied a conversion so slow as that it could not with good proportion adapt it self, save onely to a Sphere of monstrous magnitude.
Sagr.Pray you, Salviatus, let us lose no more time in proceeding, by the way of these proportions with people that are apt to admit things most dis-proportionate; so that its impossible to win any thing upon them this way: and what more disproportionate proportion can be imagined than that which these men swallow down, and admit, in that writing, that there cannot be a more convenient way to dispose the Cœlestial Spheres, in order, than to regulate them by the differences of the times of their periods, placing from one degree to another the more slow above the more swift, when they have constituted the Starry Sphere higher than the rest, as being the slowest, they frame another higher still than that, and consequently greater, and make it revolve in twenty four hours, whilst the next below, it moves not round under 36000. years?
Salv.I could wish, Simplicius, that suspending for a time the affection rhat you bear to the followers of your opinion, you would sincerely tell me, whether you think that they do in their minds comprehend that magnitude, which they reject afterwards as uncapable for its immensity to be ascribed to the Universe. For I,Immense magnitudes and numbers are incomprehensible by our understanding. as to my own part, think that they do not; But believe, that like as in the apprehension of numbers, when once a man begins to passe those millions of millions, the imagination is confounded, and can no longer form a conceipt of the same, so it happens also in comprehending immense magnitudes and distances; so that there intervenes to the comprehension an effect like to that which befalleth the sense; For whilest that in a serene night I look towards the Stars, I judge, according to sense, that their distance is but a few miles, and that the fixed Stars are not a jot more remote than Jupiter or Saturn, nay than the Moon. But without more ado, consider the controversies that have past between the Astronomers and Peripatetick Philosophers, upon occasion of the new Stars of Cassiopeia and of Sagittary, the Astronomers placing them amongst the fixed Stars, and the Philosophers believing them to be below the Moon. So unable is our sense to distinguish great distances from the greatest, though these be in reality many thousand times greater than those. In a word, I ask of thee, O foolish man! Doth thy imagination comprehendthat
