THE TRIAL OF GALILEO. 401 



good and all, by conducting him, through a series of moral tortures, 

 to the uttermost limits of terror. 



At the same time the solemn form of his abjuration was calculated 

 to prevent him from ever again inclining toward the Copernican 

 doctrine. How could he embrace that doctrine again after he had 

 openly pronounced it heretical, and promised, as he was compelled to 

 do, to inform upon all persons suspected of this heresy? His judges, 

 however, were not yet satisfied ; he was feared even after his abjuration. 

 He was confined at first in the palace of the Archbishop Piccolomini, 

 at Siena, then at his own villa of Arcetri, near Florence, with leave to 

 receive a few visits of relatives and friends, but on condition that 

 several persons should never meet there to hold conversation. It was 

 particularly feared that he would communicate with learned men 

 abroad and in Italy. Father Castelli, his old pupil, in vain begged 

 leave to see him, though he promised not to talk with him about the 

 earth's motion. In order to protect all other Catholic countries 

 against the contagion of his ideas, the pope dispatched to all apos- 

 tolic nuncios and to all inquisitors copies of the sentence pronounced 

 on Galileo, and of his act of abjuration. At Florence his chief dis- 

 ciples and friends, especially the professors of mathematics, were 

 summoned by name to listen to the reading of these two documents. 



In shutting the mouth of a writer so gifted, so full of resources, so 

 admired by the public, it was hoped that an end was made of the 

 doctrine of Copernicus that dangerous doctrine which alarmed the 

 theologians by displacing the centre of the universe, ousting the earth 

 from its primacy and substituting the sun, and opening the way for 

 hypotheses of the plurality of worlds and the end of creation. But 

 the effort was vain. The theory of the earth's motion has survived 

 all condemnations. It was not Galileo, as tradition would have it, 

 that uttered the famous saying, " Eppur si muove" but the general 

 voice of mankind who, after his death, thus proclaimed the undying 

 truth of his belief. 



Here we will stop. "We would not weaken, by any comments of 

 ours, the importance of the documents we have been examining. It 

 is a fixed historical fact that in the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury the Roman congregations, assuming to represent the Church, 

 and not disavowed by her, made themselves the judges of a scientific 

 question, and decided it in a way contrary to the conclusions of 

 soience. The splendor of Galileo's genius and the commiseration 

 inspired by his sufferings impress upon this discussion a tragical and 

 popular character ; but the emotion produced by his cruel fate must 

 not blind us to the gravity of the problem. The great question was 

 whether, in countries that were then Catholic and destined so to remain, 

 Science could free herself from the dominion of Faith. The trial of 

 Galileo, so far from retarding this conclusion, as is commonly sup- 

 posed, on the contrary made it inevitable and urgent. So soon as the 

 vol. x. 26 



