SEQUEL TO COPERNICUS. 409 



stedfastness with which he looked forwards to phy- 

 sical astronomy as the great and proper object of 

 philosophical interest, we cannot give him credit 

 for seeing the full value and meaning of what 

 had been done, up to his time, in Formal Astro- 

 nomy. 



Bacon's contemporary, Gilbert, whom he fre- 

 quently praises as a philosopher, was much more 

 disposed to adopt the Copernican opinions, though 

 even he does not appear to have made up his 

 mind to assent to the whole of the system. In his 

 work, De Magnete, (printed 1600,) he gives the 

 principal arguments in favour of the Copernican 

 system, and decides that the earth revolves on its 

 axis 5 . He connects this opinion with his magnetic 

 doctrines ; and especially endeavours by that means 

 to account for the precession of the equinoxes. 

 But he does not seem to have been equally con- 

 fident of its annual motion. In a posthumous work, 

 published in 1651, (De Mundo Nostro Sublunari 

 Philosophia Nova) he appears to hesitate between 

 the systems of Tycho and Copernicus". Indeed, it 

 is probable that at this period many persons were 

 in a state of doubt on such subjects. Milton, at 

 a period somewhat later, appears to have been still 

 undecided. In the opening of the eighth book of 

 the Paradise Lost, he makes Adam state the dif- 

 ficulties of the Ptolemaic hypothesis, to which the 

 archangel Raphael opposes the usual answers ; but 



5 Lib. vi. capp. 3, 4. 6 Lib. ii. cap. 20 



