146 DISCOVERY CH. 



Rome was responsible for the recantation may almost 

 be said to have been incidental. Had the Salvation 

 Army or a council of politicians possessed the same 

 powers in those days, they would probably have been 

 just as active in crushing what was believed to be a 

 pestiferous doctrine for which the people were not 

 prepared and which was, therefore, a danger to the 

 State. We need not go back three hundred years to 

 find scientific workers who have been deprived of their 

 posts, or whose careers have been ruined, because of 

 their convictions. The man who to-day dared to teach 

 doctrines so revolutionary as those held by Galileo, so 

 opposed to conceptions of what is sacred, and contrary 

 to what public opinion considers to be true, may not be 

 tortured or imprisoned, but he would assuredly suffer 

 social ostracism and would lose position and friends as 

 sadly as Galileo did in his old age. 



Copernicus put forward his doctrine of the arrange- 

 ment and movements of bodies in the solar system 

 hesitatingly, and merely as a hypothesis by which the 

 different positions of the sun and planets as seen from 

 the earth could be explained much more simply than 

 on a system involving an immovable earth in the centre 

 of the universe. Of a different type of mind was 

 Giordano Bruno, who had arrived at a like conception 

 of the cosmic system by intuition, and not only went 

 beyond Copernicus in his ideas but also in his fearless 

 advocacy of them. Thirty-three years before Galileo 

 had been brought before the Inquisition, Bruno had 

 declared to the same body his philosophical creed in 

 unmistakable terms. 



I believe in an infinite universe, the effect of the infinite divine 

 potency, because it has seemed to me unworthy of the divine 

 goodness and power to create a finite world, when able to produce 



