Coppernicus and his successors had found that the apparent motions on the celestial sphere of the members of the solar, system could only be satisfactorily explained by taking into account their actual motions in space, so that the solar system came to be effectively regarded as consisting of bodies at different distances from the earth and separated from one another by so many miles. But with the fixed stars the case was quite different: for, with the unimportant exception of the proper motions of a few stars (chapter x., § 203), all their known apparent motions were explicable as the result of the motion of the earth; and the relative or actual distances of the stars scarcely entered into consideration. Although the belief in a real celestial sphere to which the stars were attached scarcely survived the onslaughts of Tycho Brahe and Galilei, and any astronomer of note in the latter part of the 17th or in the 18th century would, if asked, have unhesitatingly declared the stars to be at different distances from the earth, this was in effect a mere pious opinion which had no appreciable effect on astronomical work.
The geometrical conception of the stars as represented by points on a celestial sphere was in fact sufficient for ordinary astronomical purposes, and the attention of great observing astronomers such as Flamsteed, Bradley, and Lacaille was directed almost entirely towards ascertaining the positions of these points with the utmost accuracy or towards observing the motions of the solar system. Moreover the group of problems which Newton's work suggested naturally concentrated the attention of eighteenth-century astronomers on the solar system, though even from this point of view the construction of star catalogues had considerable value as providing reference points which could be used for fixing the positions of the members of the solar system.
Almost the only exception to this general tendency consisted in the attempts—hitherto unsuccessful—to find the parallaxes and hence the distances of some of the fixed stars, a problem which, though, originally suggested by the Coppernican controversy, had been recognised as possessing great intrinsic interest.
Herschel therefore struck out an entirely new path when
