Galileo and Cremonini who was undergoing a trial. The causes and course of the trial of Cremoni by the Inquisition are not yet known. All that is known is that he was Professor of the philosophy of Aristotle at the University of Padua; and it appears from the letters of Sagredo to Galileo, that his lectures and writings had given rise to suspicions of atheism. For the rest, Cremonini was all his life one of Galileo's most decided enemies.
The very triumphs of Galileo and his telescopic discoveries were the causes, to a great extent, of those ceaseless and relentless persecutions which were to restrict his labours and embitter his life. The Aristotelians perceived with rage and terror that the revolutionary discoveries of this dangerous innovator were surely, if slowly, gaining ground. Every one of them, with its inevitable logical consequences, pulled down some important stone in the artistic structure of their views of nature; and unless some measures were taken to arrest the demolition, it was clear that the venerable edifice must fall and bury the inmates beneath the ruins. This must be averted at any price, even at the price of knowledge of the acts of nature. If Galileo's reformed physics offered no point of attack, his astronomy did; not indeed in the honourable contest of scientific discussion, but by bringing theology into the field against science.
Galileo had never openly proclaimed his adoption of earth's double motion, but the demonstration of his telescopic observations alone sufficed to make it one of the burning questions of the day. What were the phases of Venus and Mercury, the motions of the solar spots, and above all Jupiter and his moons, this little world within our large one, as Galileo afterwards called it himself,[1] but telling proofs of the truth of the Copernican theory? The question of the two systems had been hitherto an exclusively scientific one. How else could the famous philosopher and astronomer Nicholas of Casa, who taught the double motion of the earth
- ↑ Op. vi. p. 274.
