THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 153 



firmed by St. Thomas Aquinas, were both denied philo- 

 sophically, but admitted to be true as articles of the 

 Catholic faith. When Protagoras uttered the maxim 

 which brought upon him so much vituperation, that 

 ' opposite assertions are equally true,' he simply meant 

 to affirm men's differences to be so great, that what 

 was subjectively true to the one might be subjectively 

 untrue to the other. The great Sophist never meant 

 to play fast and loose with the truth by saying that 

 one of two opposite assertions, made by the same indi- 

 vidual, could possibly escape being a He. It was not 

 ' sophistry,' but the dread of theologic vengeance, that 

 generated this double dealing with conviction; and it 

 is astonishing to notice what lengths were allowed to 

 men who were adroit in the use of artifices of this kind. 

 Towards the close of the stationary period a word- 

 weariness, if I may so express it, took more and more 

 possession of men's minds. Christendom had become 

 sick of the School Philosophy and its verbal wastes, 

 which led to no issue, but left the intellect in everlast- 

 ing haze. Here and there was heard the voice of one 

 impatiently crying in the wilderness, ' Not unto Aris- 

 totle, not unto subtle hypothesis, not unto church, 

 Bible, or blind tradition, must we turn for a knowledge 

 of the universe, but to the direct investigation of na- 

 ture by observation and experiment/ In 1543 the 

 epoch-marking work of Copernicus on the paths of the 

 heavenly bodies appeared. The total crash of Aris- 

 totle's closed universe, with the earth at its centre, 

 followed as a consequence, and ' The earth moves! ' 

 became a kind of watchword among intellectual free- 

 men. Copernicus was Canon of the church of Frauen- 

 burg in the diocese of Ermeland. For three-and-thirty 

 years he had withdrawn himself from the world, and 

 devoted himself to the consolidation of his great 



