A RATIONAL WORLD CONCEPTION 221 



Gassendi had signalled his adhesion to the new doctrines in 

 two letters addressed to Galileo in 1625 an d again in 1632. 

 In 1646, named to the chair of mathematics in the College de 

 France, he gave a detailed exposition of the new theories with 

 all the arguments that might be urged in their favour. He 

 observes that the partisans of these theories are very numerous ; 

 but that they " do not dare declare themselves because of the 

 sentence of the Congregation pronounced on Galileo by some 

 cardinals" Ostensibly he professed adherence to the bizarre 

 scheme of Tycho Brahe, since he says it is needful to reject 

 absolutely the system of Ptolemy, and because the Bible teaches 

 positively the movement of the sun. The farce was so obvious 

 that probably no one was deceived, and the excellent abb6 was 

 able to keep his chair. For the rest, he was, as Lange remarks, 

 one of those happy natures that we pardon more readily than 

 others. Intellectually a disciple of Charron the sceptic, he 

 was not, like Bruno, a disturber. He was amiable, he was 

 gay ; he had an inexhaustible fund of good stories ; it seemed 

 absurd to burn such a man or cut his tongue out. By way of 

 revenge the practitioners of medicine, against whom much of 

 his raillery was directed, accomplished what the Church did 

 not. He died of a blood-letting. 



It was the fortune of Gassendi not merely to be one of the 

 earliest of the Coppernicans, or, let us say, Galileans, in France, 

 but to have made an observation which offered the most dis- 

 tinctive piece of proof of the new theory since Galileo's observa- 

 tions of the phases of Venus. It followed, of course, from the 

 Coppernican scheme that we should observe the periodical 

 transit of Mercury across the face of the sun. The Arabian 

 Averrhoes thought that he had observed it ; Kepler as well. It 

 is now known that the transit cannot be observed by the 

 naked eye. 



Kepler had taken pains to calculate the moment of solar 

 eclipse, and had announced the passage of Mercury across the 

 sun's face for the 7th of November 1631. Gassendi, something 

 of an astronomer, made preparations to observe it. That day 

 the sun appeared half-hidden by the clouds. He thought he 

 could perceive a small black spot, but it seemed too slight to 

 be the body of a planet. Happily, however, he observed the 

 spot carefully, and was rewarded by finding that its movement 

 was much more rapid than that of any sun-spot which had ever 



