Historical Relations 1 27 



Campanella, after twenty-seven years in prison, is detained for 

 three more in the chambers of the Inquisition ; Mersenne escapes 

 criticism by professing the narrowest theological orthodoxy ; 

 Descartes, despite his claim to be regarded as a faithful follower of 

 the Church in which he had been born, consistently finds discretion 

 the better part of valour on all questions which involve theological 

 judgements. 



In great contrast to such men as these are the character and fate 

 of the small band of practical investigators. Regiomontanus com- 

 pletes his work under the patronage of a Cardinal but unnoticed 

 by the theologians ; Copernicus and Vesalius lay their axes to the 

 tree of Aristotelian science and go their ways in peace ; Tycho, 

 in a Lutheran country, prepares the path for Galileo without 

 suffering hindrance. 



Among the practical exponents of the new experimental 

 method we will select for special discussion two brilliant practi- 

 tioners, Copernicus and Vesalius. By a curious coincidence these 

 two — both men of one book — published the great works with 

 which their names are associated in the same year, 1543, which 

 perhaps better than any other may be regarded as the birth-year of 

 modern science. 



Copernicus, much the older, much the less striking, much the 

 less of an " observer " in the modern sense of the word, was also 

 much the more conservative of the two. Despite the vast change 

 introduced in his name, he was himself more in line with such 

 comparatively conservative scholars as Nicholas of Cusa and 

 Regiomontanus than with the more revolutionary thinkers such as 

 Pomponazzi and Telesio, who were perhaps more typical of the 

 thought of his time. No man was ever more " academic " than 

 Copernicus, and he inherited the learning of the Italian Univer- 

 sities, at almost all of which he studied. Despite — or perhaps 

 because of — his learning, he was not to any large extent a first-hand 

 observer. He had, it is true, taken a small number of observations 

 of eclipses and planets, but for the most part his results were obtained 

 in the study. In his dedication to the Pope he recounts that he 

 was induced to seek a new theory of the heavenly bodies by finding 

 that mathematicians differed among themselves on this subject. 

 It is evident, both from his long delay in publication and also from 

 certain notes in the preface to his work " On the Revolutions of 

 the Celestial Orbs," that he had anticipated opposition on religious 



