IN FEBRUARY, 1616, GALILEO GALILEI 

 was haled before the Holy Inquisition in Rome 

 to answer charges of having nurtured and bol- 

 stered the heresy invented by an obscure Pole, Nicolaus Coper- 

 nicus, whom death had made unavailable for questioning. The 

 Roman authorities were committing a blunder; heretical or not, 

 the teachings of Copernicus and Galileo were demonstrably 

 true. We may nevertheless admit that Cardinal Bellarmin, 

 Galileo's prosecutor and judge, had valid reasons to feel per- 

 turbed. Copernicus and Galileo so altered man's image of 

 himself that they started the process of his alienation from his 

 world. Instead of living at the center of a compact universe 

 created specifically for him to live in, man found himself a 

 resident of a second-rate planet revolving around a second-rate 

 sun, lost in cosmic spaces. This increased manyfold the mystery 

 which made the Psalmist exclaim: "What is man, that Thou art 

 mindful of him, and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?" 

 Dingle rightly said that "the undying glory of Galileo's con- 

 tribution to thought is that, though only half-consciously, he 

 discarded the everyday common-sense world as a philosophical 

 necessity." 1 But man has to come to terms with what he knows 

 about himself and his relation to his surroundings. Descartes 

 responded to the schism between man and the universe by his 

 philosophy of radical dualism of mind and matter. Man could 

 still be the center of a spiritual world, even though he had to 

 surrender the physical universe as something wholly outside him- 

 self and independent of himself. Newton's grand synthesis 

 showed the universe to be a wondrously orderly mechanism, run- 

 ning smoothly according to fixed and inexorable laws. These 

 laws are neither friendly nor inimical to man; man could not 

 alter them, but he could discover them and control them by 

 obeying them. Nature's orderliness may make nature eventually 



Quoted in P. Frank, Philosophy of Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1957), 

 p. 1. 



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