been required to make before the Inquisitors, who first sanctioned the book and then condemned it, were satisfied. It is tolerably certain, from what we know of Galileo's stated opinions, that if there had been no censorship he would have published his work in a more direct form, notwithstanding his obliging complacence to the wishes of the priests, when they used their Procrustean persuasion to make him change his mind, and take their view as to how astronomical matters ought to be announced to the world. His non-resistance on this occasion, as well as the obscure and mystical language in which his four tedious dialogues are written, rather favours the idea, that his views differed very little from those of the Inquisitors after all. This tribunal merely disliked the idea of accurate astronomical knowledge becoming common property, and Galileo showed no serious objection to gratify them. Kepler and Tycho Brahe, the contemporaries of Galileo, always kept their disclosures within the bounds of ecclesiastical license, and Kepler never pretended that he spoke otherwise than in parables in his "Mysterium Cosmographicum"—an obviously mystical work, written entirely as an exposition of the old doctrines which we find in the "Timæus" of Plato.
All these mystifications resorted to by the astronomers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggest, that there was no real desire on their part to allow the true facts of their science to become generally known, and a sentence of John Hutchinson's implies, that their was nothing new in the disclosures of Copernicus. For he says: "Such as believe that the motions of the orbs were never known before Copernicus, nor philosophy before, or that it was understood by Sir Isaac Newton, let them study their books."[1] Again, the
- ↑ "The Religion of Satan, or Antichrist delineated," 1749.
