102 THE WORLD MACHINE 



vessel, we sometimes have the illusion that it is the shore and 

 docks which are going by, so it might be that we have the same 

 illusion regarding the stability of the earth. 



By common credit, Pythagoras is held to have been the first 

 to have taught such a doctrine ; but it is not very clear that 

 he did ; it is many times certain that he was not the first. 

 Pythagoras was a product of that highly intelligent society 

 which rose among the Greek colonies in southern Italy, while 

 Athens was still the home of marauding pirates. He travelled 

 widely, and it was doubtless in Egypt that he heard of this 

 monstrous paradox of the earth's motion. He seems to have 

 imbibed the notions of the old priestly caste that science and 

 knowledge were to be guarded by a secret band and to be com- 

 municated only to the initiate. 



Among his disciples it is evident that the paradox was 

 bruited openly, so that by the time of Plato and Aristotle, it 

 is a matter of general debate. Aristotle, who cuts rather a 

 sorry figure as a thinker, had no hesitations ; he chose a fixed 

 and immovable earth. But Plato, who had made a journey 

 to Italy to learn of the new doctrine, seems in his old age to have 

 wavered, and thought perhaps he had made a mistake in taking 

 the same view. But it was on purely sentimental grounds, from 

 esthetic considerations, that he wavered ; reason or fact did 

 not disturb the Platonic soul. Indeed, to read the monstrous 

 wish-wash which passed for logical argument in those days, and 

 for a thousand years thereafter, one might now readily imagine 

 that since that day the processes of reasoning had completely 

 changed, and hence might completely change again, in another 

 millennium or so. It is a curious and disturbing thought ; but 

 we need not be agitated. Happily we know there were among 

 the Greeks thinkers of the highest order, men of trained and 

 logical minds, like Democritus and Anaxagoras, Euclid and 

 Aristarchus, whose conceptions, so far as they got, differ but 

 little from our own ; and we may conclude that, with its Platos 

 and Aristotles, Greece was then, as our own time now, full of 

 vain babblers, imposing upon a generation, in Carlylean defini- 

 tion " chiefly fools." 



With the advent of mechanical conceptions, this abracadabra 

 which passed for philosophy and sense ceased to satisfy men's 

 minds. They began to scrutinise more closely. 



It is clear from the work of Coppernicus, which probably 



