SEQUEL TO COPERNICUS. 283 



and he prefixed to the Dialogue a Notice, To the Discreet Reader, in 

 which, in a vein of transparent irony, he assigned his reasons for the 

 publication. " Some years ago," he says, " a wholesome edict was 

 promulgated at Rome, which, in order to check the perilous scandals 

 of the present age, imposed silence upon the Pythagorean opinion of 

 the motion of the earth. There were not wanting," he adds, " persons 

 who rashly asserted that this decree w r as the result, not of a judicious 

 inquiry, but of a passion ill-informed; and complaints were heard that 

 counsellors, utterly unacquainted with astronomical observations, ought 

 not to be allowed, with their undue prohibitions, to clip the wings of 

 speculative intellects. At the hearing of rash lamentations like these, 

 my zeal could not keep silence." And he then goes on to say that he 

 wishes, by the publication of his Dialogue, to show that the subject 

 had been fully examined at Rome. The result of this was that Galileo 

 was condemned for his infraction of the injunction laid upon him in 

 1616; his Dialogue was prohibited; he himself was commanded to 

 abjure on his knees the doctrine which he had taught; and this abju- 

 ration he performed. 



This celebrated event must be looked upon rather as a question of 

 decorum, than a struggle in which the interests of truth and free in- 

 quiry were deeply concerned. The general acceptance of the Coperni- 

 can System was no longer a matter of doubt. Several persons in the 

 highest positions, including the Pope himself, looked upon the doctrine 

 with favorable eyes ; and had shown their interest in Galileo and his 

 discoveries. They had tried to prevent his involving himself in trou- 

 ble by discussing the question on scriptural grounds. It is probable 

 that his knowledge of those favorable dispositions towards himself and 

 his opinions led him to suppose that the slightest color of professed 

 submission to the Church in his belief, would enable his arguments in 



O 



favor of the system to pass unvisited : the notice which I have quoted, 

 in which the irony is quite transparent and the sarcasm glaringly ob- 

 vious, was deemed too flimsy a veil for the purpose of decency, and 

 : ndeed must have aggravated the offence. But it is not to be supposed 

 that the inquisitors believed Galileo's abjuration to be sincere, or even 

 that they wished it to be so. It is stated that when Galileo had made 

 his renunciation of the earth's motion, he rose from his knees, and 

 stamping on the earth with his foot, said, E pur si muove " And yet 

 .t does move." This is sometimes represented as the heroic soliloquy 

 of a mind cherishing its conviction of the truth in spite of persecution : 

 I think we may more' naturally conceive it uttered as a playful epi- 



