68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



France, and, for a time, in other lands where the Reformation was 

 afterward crushed out, was a power of mental freedom. 



Yet mental enslavement continued. The reformers would only 



m 



change the master. He certainly was not to be the Roman Catholic 

 Church, they said ; he was only to be a more legitimate power. Stand- 

 ards were still set up, and ecclesiastical and civil power stood behind 

 them, to compel religious, philosophical, scientific, and other thought, 

 not to differ from them. Every one, Romish or Protestant, claimed 

 the right to defend and to propagate opinion by force ; every one was 

 in favor of calling in the civil power to aid in a controversy in thought. 

 But matters have much improved in the ecclesiastical sphere during 

 these last four centuries. There is now marked progress in liberty 

 of religious thought. The fierce invectives once hurled back and 

 forth between Protestant and Catholic are dropped. The war of de- 

 nominations has largely ceased. Convictions seriously entertained are 

 now generally respected. Although a change of religion, or even in 

 ministers a change of denomination, frequently causes more or less 

 petty persecution, still there is improvement since the time, several 

 centuries ago, when the apostasy of any one from the rest was re- 

 garded as one of the worst of crimes. A change of religion or even 

 of denomination, from a sense of duty, is now commonly allowed 

 among intelligent men. To-day the Protestant nations and the Roman 

 Catholic countries of France,, Spain, Italy, Austria, Bavaria, and Span- 

 ish America, have abandoned intolerance and enjoy freedom of opinion. 



There is also marked progress in liberty of scientific thought in 

 the seventeenth century, that freedom to prosecute and publish inves- 

 tigation in science, which is so necessary to the advancement of sci- 

 ence, hardly existed as yet. Though the political influence of the 

 Church of Rome had much diminished, though European society had 

 largely passed from the dominion of the Roman Church to that of 

 temporal governments, yet that Church, though less tyrannical, freer 

 from abuses, and more tolerant than before, was still disposed to 

 maintain at every point the doctrines and opinions already expressed 

 upon questions of science and learning ; while also in Protestant 

 lands popular prejudice still to an extent repressed mental freedom. 



But there arose practical reformers in science Leonardo da Vinci 

 Copernicus, Fabricius, Galileo, Kepler, and Tycho Brahe. Science 

 began to make decided advances in geography, astronomy, chemistry, 

 physics, anatomy, medicine, geology, political economy, and other 

 branches. The conflict with the astronomers is well known and has 

 been well described the fear of Copernicus, the imprisonment of 

 Galileo, the burning at the stake in Rome of Giordano Bruno for up- 

 holding the teaching of modern astronomy as to the immensity of the 

 universe and the plurality of worlds. 



Still liberty of thought in science began to grow in various lands, 

 giving us Bacon, Harvey, Descartes, Hooker, Barrow, Newton, Locke, 



