REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSION, 393 



not based on fact. He proved that "the heavens 

 can change and lay aside their former aspects, and 

 assume others entirely new;" and in doing this, he 

 gave a death blow to one of the leading tenets on 

 which peripatetics generally had so long set such 

 store. Learned professors at Pisa, Padua and Bo- 

 logna, tried to silence the illustrious Florentine by 

 the profuse use of syllogisms and to disprove the 

 truth of his observations by a priori reasonings. He 

 was declared by others to be the victim of strange 

 optical illusions, and, accordingly, it was asserted 

 that the spots on the sun, and the satellites of Jupi- 

 ter and the variable stars had no existence outside 

 of the observer's diseased imagination. Aristotel- 

 ians indignantly denied the existence of sun-spots, 

 because, said they : " It is impossible that the eye 

 of the universe could suffer from ophthalmia." For 

 an equally trivial reason they rejected Kepler's 

 great discovery of the accelerated and retarded mo- 

 tions of the planets in different parts of their orbits. 

 " It is undignified," they declared, " for heavenly 

 bodies to hurry and slacken their pace in accordance 

 with the law of the German astronomer." Aris- 

 totelianism, it was almost universally agreed, was 

 to be safeguarded at all hazards, and Galileo, Kep- 

 ler and other innovators, who thus ruthlessly tram- 

 pled under foot the philosophy of the master " Si 

 calpesta tutta la filosofia d 'Aristotele" were to be 

 vanquished at whatever cost, for if they were al- 

 lowed to continue their sacrilegious work, they 

 would eventually undermine, not only philosophy 

 and theology, but also sacred Scripture as well. 



