THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



physical sciences as a basis for their new science and 

 almost immediately they attempted to ally it to the 

 mechanistic theory. 



Towards the end of the sixteenth century the rigid 

 bands restraining scientific thought began to show 

 signs of weakness and to give way under the pressure 

 of the new freedom. The credit for the rupture be- 

 longs to two men, Copernicus and Galileo. In 1543, 

 Nicolaus Copernicus published his treatise De revo- 

 lutionibus orbium coelestium which was destined to 

 change our whole point of view towards the universe. 

 His postulate was simply that the sun should be taken 

 as the centre of the planetary system and that the 

 earth, instead of being a fixed body about which all 

 the celestial bodies revolved, was merely a planet like 

 the others with two motions, an annual revolution 

 about the sun and a diurnal rotation about its polar 

 axis. At first, the Church received this work without 

 opposition, and in fact the Pope, Paul III, permitted 

 it to be dedicated to him. Perhaps its significance was 

 not appreciated, because the author, in a preface, 

 states that this new system was devised to reduce the 

 labour of computation of planetary orbits; whereas, 

 the reality was according to the Bible and the eccle- 

 siastic doctrine of geocentrism. There has been some 

 controversy concerning this subterfuge as to whether 

 it was due to Copernicus; it is probable that it was 

 interpolated by Osiander as a thin veil to ward off 



1:983 



