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CH. IV.] 



PLAYFAIE'S DEFENCE OF HUTTON. 



83 



ranee of tlie times, and that inquisitorial power which forced 

 Galileo to abjure, and the two Jesuits to disclaim the theory 

 of Newton.* 



Hutton answered Kirwan's attacks with great warmth, and 

 with the indignation justly excited by unmerited reproach. 

 ' He had always displayed/ says Playfair, ' the utmost dis- 

 position to admire the beneficent design manifested in the 

 structure of the world ; and he contemplated with delight 

 those parts of his theory which made the greatest additions 



to our knowledge of final causes/ 



We may 



more 



eloquent passages be found, concerning the fitness, harmony, 

 and grandeur of all parts of the creation, than in those of 

 Playfair, They are evidently the unaffected expressions of 

 a mind, which contemplated the study of nature, as best 

 calculated to elevate our conceptions of the attributes of the 



the force and elegance of 

 . popularity to the Hutto- 

 coincidence, Neptunianism 



First Cause. 



time 



and orthodoxy were now associated in the same creed ; and 

 the tide of prejudice ran so strong, that the majority were 

 carried far away into the chaotic fluid, and other cosmological 

 inventions of Werner. 



had borrowed with little modification, and without any im- 

 provement, from his predecessors. They had not the 



These fictions the Saxon professor 



common 



>ly approved of by many as being so ideal 



article, by Mr. Congregation; and the late Cardinal 

 Drmkwater, on the < Life of Galileo,' Toriozzi, assessor of the Sacred Office 



* In a most able 



published in the ' Library of Useful 

 Knowledge/ it is stated that both Gali- 



proposed < that they should wipe off 

 this scandal from the church.' The 



leo's work, and the book of Coper- repeal was carried, with the dissentient 

 nicus 'Nisi corngatur' (for, with the voice of one Dominican only Lone 

 omission of certain passages, it was before that time the Newtonian theory 



nad been taught in the Sapienza, and 

 aH Catholic universities in Europe 

 (with the exception, I am told, of Sala- 



sanctioned), were still to be seen on 

 the forbidden list of the Index at 

 Eome in 1828. I was, however, as- 



ZrJm^JT J ™1 Jt> 0f t S T T ° r maUCa) ; but {t ™ s a W* required 



Scarpelhm at Eome that Pius VII., f professors, in deference to the de- 



a pontiff 'distinguished for his love of crees of the chnrch, to use the term 



science, had procured a repeal of the hypothesis, instead of theory. They 



edicts against Galileo and the Coper- now speak of the Copernican theory 

 mean system. He had assembled the copernican theory. 



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