ii2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



promotores fuerunt 

 D. Philippus Bardella et ") 



>- cives Ferrariensis etc. 

 D. Antonius Leutus qui ei dedit insignia J 



In the year 1500 Copernicus delivered lectures at Rome before an 

 audience of two thousand hearers, the Archbishop of Mechlin declares. 

 These lectures could not have announced the heliocentric theory, which 

 dates from the year 1506 only, nor could they have been before the 

 university, because Copernicus did not take the degree that admitted 

 him to the privilege of teaching until 1503. He took no degree at 

 Krakau, so far as is known. 



Copernicus was now quite free to prosecute his studies in medicine, 

 which he combined with philosophy. The celebrated Pomponazzi was 

 then a member of the faculty, in the prime of his vigor. He had taken 

 his degrees in philosophy and medicine at Padua in 1487, and in the 

 next year, when he was but twenty-six years of age, had been chosen 

 extraordinary professor. It was a custom of those days to choose 

 two professors of each subject in order that their public disputations 

 might stimulate their hearers to independent thinking. The ordinary 

 professor of philosophy was Achillini — a veteran of the strict school 

 of Aristotle. 



Pomponazzi remained at Padua until the university was closed in 

 1509; and in Ferrara till 1512, when he removed to Bologna, where in 

 1516 he wrote his famous treatise on the 'Immortality of the Soul' — 

 the foundation of his character as a skeptic and of his fame as a phi- 

 losopher. Into his doctrines it is not necessary to enter at length. 

 Briefly they are that man, standing on the confines of two worlds — 

 the material and spiritual — necessarily partakes of the nature of both. 

 Man is partly mortal (since the human soul depends in some degree 

 on matter) and partly immortal. The soul is, Pomponazzi says, abso- 

 lutely mortal, relatively immortal. This doctrine was, of course, a 

 denial of the theory of the Roman church. He was vehemently at- 

 tacked. His book was burned in Venice. Powerful friends among 

 the cardinals protected him in Rome. His university stood by him 

 and confirmed him in his professorial chair for eight years, and in- 

 creased his salary to 1,200 ducats. 



Pomponazzi was a thinker of essentially modern spirit. Reason, he 

 said, was superior to any authority. If, in his teaching of Aristotle, 

 he should find himself in error, ' ' ought I, " he says, ' ' to interpret him 

 differently from my real sentiment? If it is said — the hearers are 

 scandalized — well, be it so. They are not obliged to listen to me, or 

 to forbid my teaching. I neither wish to lie, nor to be false to my 

 true conviction." He decides, on psychological grounds, against the 

 immortality of the soul, and then proceeds to build up a system of 



