1 64 THE WORLD MACHINE 



authority a blow for the right of private judgment, the liberty 

 of the human conscience, had been struck ; the long struggle 

 against the benumbing yoke of an all-powerful ecclesiasticism 

 had been begun. Servetus, Vanini, Bruno had yet to go to 

 the stake ; but the term of religious persecution, which the 

 careful and unimpassioned Ranke estimates had cost Christendom 

 ten million victims, was approaching its end. 



With this moral revolt came a kindred awakening of the 

 intellect. Ten years after the outbreak of the Reformation, 

 Jean Fernel, a French physician, made the first measure of the 

 earth, so far as we know, on European soil. Twenty years 

 before him, a Roman Catholic priest, in an obscure corner of 

 Poland, had begun upon a work that, by a favouring accident, 

 was destined to accomplish a greater revolution in the thoughts 

 of men than any single volume before or since. 



Nicolaus Coppernik's book on the Revolution of the Heavens 

 did not see the light until the year and near the day of his death 

 that is, in 1543. In his dedication he records that he had 

 been at work upon it for nearly forty years. He was a fearless 

 thinker, but doubtless he loved his peace of mind, and Europe 

 was then a vast holocaust of heretics. The papal Inquisition 

 had been established when Coppernicus was a boy ; Llorente, 

 its historian, figures that in eighteen years Torquemada and 

 his collaborators had burned ten thousand victims, and tortured 

 and punished a hundred thousand more. 



Coppernicus dedicated his book to the Pope ; he had been an 

 instructor in mathematics at Rome, his uncle was a bishop, and 

 his feeling about the sort of criticism his book would meet is 

 shown well enough in the lines that preface this chapter. But 

 still he did not dare. A cardinal became its sponsor, and the 

 frightened Osiander, who put it through the press, wrote for 

 the book a foreword in Coppernicus' name, exhibiting it as 

 simply an hypothesis, this motion of the earth. What a state 

 of the world ! 



Whoso reads now the De Revolutionibus will close its pages 

 with mingled feelings. So far as mere facts go, there was not, 

 to speak strictly, a great deal in it, of value, that was wholly 

 new. A great deal of it six of the twelve chapters of the 

 first book, for example, and much of the rest was little more 

 than an abstract and commentary of the Almagest of Ptolemy 

 of Alexandria. Coppernicus was an exact and lifelong observer 



