ADDRESS, Ixxv 
issue, but left the intellect in everlasting haze. Here and there was heard 
the voice of one impatiently crying in the wilderness, ‘‘ Not unto Aristotle, 
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 
nature by observation and experiment.” In 1543 the epoch-making work 
of Copernicus on the paths of the heavenly bodies appeared. The total 
erash of Aristotle’s closed universe with the earth at its centre followed as 
a consequence ; and “the earth moves” became a kind of watchword among 
intellectual freemen. Copernicus was Canon of the church of Frauenburg 
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 For three-and-thirty years he had withdrawn 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 
scheme of the solar system. He made its blocks eternal; and even to those 
who feared it and desired its overthrow it was so obviously strong that 
they refrained for a time from meddling with it. In the last year of the life 
of Copernicus his book appeared: it is said that the old man received a copy 
of it a few days before his death, and then departed in peace. 
The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was one of the earliest converts 
to the new astronomy. Taking Lucretius as his exemplar, he revived the 
notion of the infinity of worlds; and combining with it the doctrine of 
Copernicus, reached the sublime generalization that the fixed stars are suns, 
scattered numberless through space and accompanied by satellites, which bear 
the same relation to them that our earth does to our sun, or our moon to our 
earth. This was an expansion of transcendent import ; but Bruno came closer 
than this to our present line of thought. Struck with the problem of the gene- 
ration and maintenance of organisms, and duly pondering it, he came to 
the conclusion that Nature in her productions does not imitate the technic 
of man. Her process is one of unravelling and unfolding. The infinity of 
forms under which matter appears were not imposed upon it by an external 
artificer ; by its own intrinsic force and virtue it brings these forms forth. 
Matter is not the mere naked, empty capacity which philosophers have 
pictured her to be, but the universal mother, who brings forth all things as 
the fruit of her own womb. 
This outspoken man was originally a Dominican monk. He was accused 
of heresy and had to fly, seeking refuge in Geneva, Paris, England, and Ger- 
many. In 1592 he fell into the hands of the Inquisition at Venice. He 
was imprisoned for many years, tried, degraded, excommunicated, and handed 
over to the Civil power, with the request that he should be treated gently and 
‘* without the shedding of blood.” This meant that he was to be burnt; and 
burnt accordingly he was, on the 16th of February, 1600. To escape a 
similar fate Galileo, 33 years afterwards, abjured, upon his knees and with 
his hand upon the holy gospels, the heliocentric doctrine which he knew to be 
true. After Galileo came Kepler, who from his German home defied the 
power beyond the Alps. He traced out from preexisting observations the 
laws of planetary motion. Materials were thus prepared for Newton, who 
bound those empirical laws together by the principle of gravitation. 
In the seventeenth century Bacon and Descartes, the restorers of philo- 
sophy, appeared in succession. Differently educated and endowed, their 
philosophic tendencies were different. Bacon held fast to Induction, be- 
lieving firmly in the existence of an external world, and making collected 
experiences the basis of all knowledge. The mathematical studies of Des- 
cartes gave him a bias towards Deduction; and his fundamental principle 
was much the same as that of Protagoras, who made the individual man the 
measure of all things. “I think, therefore, I am,” said Descartes. Only 
