Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/356

after a further imprisonment of two years, tried, excommunicated, and delivered over to the secular authorities, to be punished ‘as mercifully as possible and without the shedding of his blood,’ the abominable formula for burning a man alive. He had collected all the observations that had been made respecting the new star in Cassiopeia, 1572; he had taught that space is infinite, and that it is filled with self-luminous and opaque worlds many of them inhabited—this being his capital offense.^[1] He believed that the world is animated by an intelligent soul, the cause of forms but not of matter; that it lives in all things, even such as seem not to live; that everything is ready to become organized; that matter is the mother of forms and then their grave; that matter and the soul of the world together constitute God. His ideas were therefore pantheistic, ‘Est Deus in nobis.’ In his Cena delle Cenere he insists that the Scripture was not intended to teach science, but morals only. The severity with which he was treated was provoked by his asseverations that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor belief. This was the aim of his work entitled ‘The Triumphant Beast.’ He was burned at Rome, February 16, 1600.

In 1612 Galileo writes to Kepler that epicycles and eccentrics are not chimerical; ‘not only are there many motions in eccentrics and epicycles, but there are no other motions.’ This, written three years after Kepler had sent him his Theory of Mars containing the proof of elliptic motion, shows that Galileo had not yet appreciated Kepler's revolutionary discoveries. It is doubtful if he ever did so. He makes no effective use of them in his arguments in favor of the Copernican doctrines.

In the meantime busy enemies were stirring up trouble. The letter to Castelli gave great offense. The Bishop of Fiesole became enraged at Copernicus and was much surprised to learn that he had been dead for eighty years. A Dominican friar, P. Caccini, preached a violent sermon against Galileo (1614) on the text Viri Galilæi quid statis aspicientes in cœlum? Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into Heaven? Castelli was advised by the archbishop of Pisa, ‘for his welfare,’ ‘if he wished to escape ruin,’ to abandon the Copernican opinion, because that opinion, besides being an absurdity, was perilous, scandalous, rash, heretical and contrary to scripture.

Another Dominican friar, Lorini, addressed to Cardinal Mellini, president of the Congregation of the Index, a denunciation of ‘the Galileists,’ who hold the doctrine of Copernicus. The congregation accordingly (February, 1619) opened a secret inquiry. A copy of Galileo's letter to Castelli was examined by the consultator of the Holy

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1. One of them; his pantheistic ideas were, perhaps, his worst heresies in the eyes of his judges. His doctrine that space is infinite filled the pious Kepler, as well as Bruno's Roman judges, with ‘horror.’ Bruno's works were full of opinions that were abhorrent to all religious people of his time. He was inclined to pronounce in favor of polygamy, and he advocated a species of socialism. Religion he made essentially synonymous with intellectual culture, neglecting moral discipline and spiritual feeling.