168 THE WORLD MACHINE 



Coppernicus saw that if the earth in its circling round about 

 the sun did not hold always to exactly the same tilt, that if 

 its axis swayed ever so little, this would produce precisely the 

 effect noted. He works it out, writes the very briefest descrip- 

 tion of it that he may, gives you a diagram to make it all 

 perfectly clear, then goes on his way. He may have disclosed 

 his discovery to some of the enthusiastic young men who had 

 heard a rumour of the new teachings and came to ask con- 

 cerning them. Beyond this, there is no evidence that he ever 

 wrote a line about it outside of the work which immortalised 

 his name. 



But consider what it all meant. Not only had he seen with 

 the Pythagoreans that we must conceive the earth as slowly 

 turning on its axis ; not only had he reached the far more 

 difficult point of view of Aristarchus, that the earth swings in 

 a vast circle about the sun ; but he had in his mind's eye pictured 

 this vast globe careening slowly as it sweeps along the plane 

 of its colossal orbit. Consider that he had no miracle-working 

 telescopes with which to search for demonstrations of his ideas, 

 nor to bring to his notice curious appearances that might 

 suggest these ideas to his mind. He had such eyes to look 

 upon the heavens as you or I, no more ; but he saw with that 

 inner eye, with that inner sense, that we call imagination. Con- 

 sider that he wrought alone, that he had to dig his very founda- 

 tions himself ; consider that he made no part of a brilliant 

 school of astronomers, thinkers, philosophers, as at Alexandria, 

 but that he followed through his simple and exemplary life in 

 a lonely corner of Poland, far removed from the stimulating 

 plaudits of the world, and we shall not go far wrong perhaps 

 in reckoning him, in power of abstraction, as among the greatest 

 of mankind. 



The more important part of his work is summed up in the 

 fifty pages which comprise the first of his six books. The rest 

 of them is devoted patiently to working out in all their detail 

 the conclusions he had reached. He discusses the inclination 

 of the ecliptic, the equinoxes, the solstices, and makes clear the 

 intimate mechanism of nights and days. He goes deeply into 

 the revolutions of the moon, its variations, its inequalities ; 

 discusses in this connection its distance and size, and the 

 distance and size of the sun ; getting no further, as we have 

 seen, than had the old Alexandrians so long before him, never- 



