80 THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 



arouse the hostility of the Church and suffer a penalty 

 similar to that which had just overwhelmed Galileo. 

 His own plea was that he valued peace more than the 

 spread of his opinions and also that he had always 

 been a good Catholic and bowed to the authority of 

 the Church, even when its decrees were contrary to his 

 reason. But it is also possible that doubts arose in 

 his own mind as his system developed and that when 

 he found it necessary to compromise with the rigorous 

 principles he had announced, he tried to disarm criti- 

 cism by the plea that after all he was really concerned 

 only with a fictitious world. 



At all events, while the laws of the heavens were 

 under consideration, he permitted this veil of unreality 

 to remain very thin; for he knew the Church wisely 

 allowed considerable latitude of thought concerning 

 those regions of space which apparently contained no 

 subjects to Catholicism, and he felt scientifically safe 

 in a field where verification by experiment was only 

 beginning to be advocated. But the case was altered 

 when he came to discuss terrestrial laws and phe- 

 nomena, for here both Church and experience held 

 sway and must be conciliated. In this field Descartes, 

 mindful probably of both of these perils, relied on the 

 same hypothesis, but to placate the Church he insisted 

 that it was to be understood only in a most figurative 

 sense, because we know that God created the earth, 

 finished and perfect, as revealed in the Mosaic account; 



