1883. Prowe's Life of Copernicus. 327
clusions must be incomprehensible to most, unacceptable to wellnigh all. The long processes of laborious thought by which he had convinced himself that the motions of the heavenly bodies could only be rendered intelligible by being shown to be in large measure apparent, were not such as could profitably be followed by the ignorant, the impatient, or the prepossessed. Yet he knew that a vast majority even of the reading public were all three. He thus laid deeply to heart the Pythagorean maxims of reticence, and, while not unwilling to communicate the bare results of his theory, he resolved to entrust the principles from which those results were derived to the exclusive guardianship of an esoteric few. It was for this purpose that he wrote the 'Commentariolus,' a short popular account of the new system, of which a few copies were circulated in manuscript.[1] These appear to have been read with no less avidity than admiration. Widmannstad, in 1533, derived from this source the substance of a lecture which Clement VII. recompensed with the gift of a rare Greek text; Calcagnini was encouraged to denounce the absurdity of attributing a diurnal rotation to the sphere ; and Cardinal Schönberg transmitted to Copernicus a formal request for the full publication of his system. There was, indeed, a countercurrent. The doctrine of the earth's motion was made the subject of a farce put upon the stage at Elbing during the Carnival of 1531 or 1532 ; Luther pronounced it contrary to Holy Writ, and stigmatised its chief advocate as a ' fool who thought to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down ; ' [2] and Melanchthon went so far as to desire the sup- pression by the secular power of such mischievous doctrines. [3]
Such demonstrations, we may be sure, added to the difficulties of those friends of Copernicus who sought to impress
- ↑ One of these was discovered by M. Curtze in the Hof-Bibliothek of Vienna, and published in the ' Mittheilungen ' of the Coppernicus-Verein for 1878. The existence of the work was until then unknown.
- ↑ Luther's ' Tischreden,' ed. Walch. p. 2260, quoted by Prowe, Th. ii. p. 282.
- ↑ Beckmann has conclusively shown ('Zur Gesch. des Kop. Systems,' Zeitschrift für die Gesch. Ermlands, Bd. ii.) that, in the sixteenth century, no serious theological objections were made to the Copernican system save from the Protestant side. Catholic ecclesiastics were, in general, extremely well disposed towards it, so that Giordano Bruno's advocacy of it cannot be held responsible for his tragical end. A full discussion of the Reformers' attitude towards the new astronomy will form part of Dr. Prowe's third volume.
