THE RENAISSANCE OF SCIENCE. 23 



Considerations of this sort should make us very tolerant of the 

 blunders of our brothers of past time. It is so easy for any one of us 

 to make a list of the follies, errors and crimes of his own century, and 

 so hard to find excuses for them, that it should give us pause in dis- 

 tributing indiscriminating blame to the men of the middle ages as is 

 often done in books of the warfare-of-science-and-theology sort. Among 

 us, as of old, the ignorant are the most harsh. To us, as to the middle 

 ages, the phrase Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner applies in its 

 fullest force and scope. 



During the whole of the middle ages there was never a time when a 

 philosopher was not free to put forth his scientific conclusions hypo- 

 thetically — as theories to account for observed phenomena. He could 

 not, however, directly attack religion, or even roughly handle received 

 opinion on religious matters. At many epochs the first breath of heresy 

 was fatal. Our own age is not very tolerant of attacks upon cherished 

 beliefs. It is in a great degree its indifference to a certain class of 

 inquiries that gives us our present liberty. Had Copernicus lived, his 

 doctrine would not have given rise to scandal in the church, because it 

 was put forth as a distinctly scientific opinion quite detached from 

 theological suggestions. It was not until 1616 that his book was placed 

 upon the index, and then only as a consequence of the personal enmities 

 that Galileo's bitter satires had excited. If Roger Bacon had been 

 willing to follow the methods of Copernicus the long miseries of his 

 life would have been spared and the world might have been saved from 

 three centuries of wandering in devious and ill-directed paths. If 

 Galileo had done the same he would have lived in peace; we should 

 have owed our present freedom to another martyr. 



It is the custom of our minds to escape difficulties by accepting 

 symbols to stand for ideas, types to stand for men, and we stand in 

 danger of losing realities in the types and symbols. The sculpture of 

 the Greeks is summarized to us by a couple of names; but there were 

 many great sculptors in Greece beside Phidias and Praxiteles. The 

 astronomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can show a large 

 list of noted names; but it is epitomized in Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler 

 and Galileo. It is commonly taken for granted that Copernicus burst 

 forth from darkness and made a new epoch. He stands, indeed, for 

 a new epoch; but he was no less the product of his time than Darwin, 

 another Bahnbrecher. There was great activity among astronomers in 

 the decade just preceding the publication of his great book in 1543. 

 Copernicus was the child of universities; the schools of Italy which he 

 frequented for years were alive with inquiry. The epoch for a revision 

 of accepted theory had arrived. It was the encouragement of his 

 friends and scholars that brought about the promulgation of his 

 theories, all of which were fully comprehended by them, before even a 



