A RATIONAL WORLD CONCEPTION 223 



by this time even Bacon appears rather as a belated owl blink- 

 ing confusedly in the flooding light. 



None the less, if Hobbes was not a pioneer like Gilbert or 

 like Bruno, the weight of his influence on English thought was 

 great. He was the first prominent thinker, the first widely 

 read writer in England boldly to signal his acceptance of the 

 new faith. It is to be noted that he was the lifelong friend 

 of Gassendi ; it may have been to his acquaintance with the 

 Coppernicising abbe that this was in some part due ; what is 

 certain is that Hobbes, forerunner by forty or fifty years of 

 Boyle, Hooke, Wren, and Newton, turned English philosophy 

 from the vanity of the schools and paved the way for this 

 brilliant coterie that, in a few years, was to lift England from 

 its barbarian estrangement and isolation from the rest of the 

 world and make of this dark land the light of Europe. 



The author of the Leviathan lived to an extreme old 

 age ; Gassendi was dead in 1655, five years after his great 

 adversary, Descartes. Despite the decrees of Rome and the 

 Parliament of Paris, it is clear that for some time before this 

 that is to say, in a little more than a century after the publica- 

 tion of the De Revolutionibus, and certainly within a half-century 

 of the invention of the telescope, the more enlightened portion 

 of mankind had become Coppernican. 



Already the thought of the time was reaching out to con- 

 ceptions of infinitude and of a grandeur of the universe before 

 which the great globe of the earth seemed to shrink, to shrivel, 

 almost to disappear, even as some vast creation of legerdemain, 

 obeying the will of the conjurer, before our astonished eyes 

 grows subtly less and less and downwards to a point. 



What was the observation which would make it clear to all 

 thinking men ? 



