A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



back from full acceptance of the relatively simple and, 

 as we now know, correct Copernican doctrine. From 

 our latter-day point of view, it seems so much more 

 natural to accept than to reject the Copernican system, 

 that we find it difficult to put ourselves in the place 

 of a sixteenth-century observer. Yet if we recall that 

 the traditional view, having warrant of acceptance 

 by nearly all thinkers of every age, recorded the earth 

 as a fixed, immovable body, we shall see that our 

 surprise should be excited rather by the thinker who 

 can break away from this view than by the one who 

 still tends to cling to it. 



Moreover, it is useless to attempt to disguise the 

 fact that something more than a mere vague tradition 

 was supposed to support the idea of the earth's over- 

 shadowing importance in the cosmical scheme. The 

 sixteenth - century mind was overmastered by the 

 tenets of ecclesiasticism, and it was a dangerous her- 

 esy to doubt that the Hebrew writings, upon which 

 ecclesiasticism based, its claim, contained the last word 

 regarding matters of science. But the writers of the 

 Hebrew text had been under the influence of that 

 Babylonian conception of the universe which accepted 

 the earth as unqualifiedly central which, indeed, had 

 never so much as conceived a contradictory hypothesis ; 

 and so the Western world, which had come to accept 

 these writings as actually supernatural in origin, lay 

 under the spell of Oriental ideas of a pre-scientific 

 era. In our own day, no one speaking with authority 

 thinks of these Hebrew writings as having any scien- 

 tific weight whatever. Their interest in this regard is 

 purely antiquarian; hence from our changed point of 



66 



