ARABIAN ASTRONOMY. In astronomy, they not only made catalogues, but maps of the stars visible in their skies, giving to those of the larger magnitudes the Arabic names they still bear on our celestial globes. They ascertained, as we have seen, the size of the earth by the measurement of a degree on her surface, determined the obliquity of the ecliptic, published corrected tables of the sun and moon fixed the length of the year, verified the precession of the equinoxes. The treatise of Albategnius on “The Science of the Stars” is spoken of by Laplace with respect; he also draws attention to an important fragment of Ibn-Junis, the astronomer of Hakem, the Khalif of Egypt, A.D. 1000, as containing a long series of observations from the time of Almansor, of eclipses, equinoxes, solstices, conjunctions of planets, occultations of stars–observations which have cast much light on the great variations of the system of the world. The Arabian astronomers also devoted themselves to the construction and perfection of astronomical instruments, to the measurement of time by clocks of various kinds, by clepsydras and sun-dials. They were the first to introduce, for this purpose, the use of the pendulum.
In the experimental sciences, they originated chemistry; they discovered some of its most important reagents– sulphuric acid, nitric acid, alcohol. They applied that science in the practice of medicine, being the first to publish pharmacopoeias or dispensatories, and to include in them mineral preparations. In mechanics, they had determined the laws of falling bodies, had ideas, by no means indistinct, of the nature of gravity; they were familiar with the theory of the mechanical powers. In hydrostatics they constructed the first tables of the specific gravities of bodies, and wrote treatises on the flotation and sinking of bodies in water. In optics, they corrected the Greek misconception, that a ray proceeds from the eye, and touches the object seen, introducing the hypothesis that the ray passes from the object to the eye. They understood the phenomena of the reflection and refraction of light. Alhazen made the great discovery of the curvilinear path of a ray of light through the atmosphere, and proved that we see the sun and moon before they have risen, and after they have set.
AGRICULTURE AND MANUFACTURE. The effects of this scientific activity are plainly perceived in the great improvements that took place in many of the industrial arts. Agriculture shows it in better methods of irrigation, the skillful employment of manures, the raising of improved breeds of cattle, the enactment of wise codes of rural laws, the introduction of the culture of rice, and that of sugar and coffee. The manufactures show it in the great extension of the industries of silk, cotton, wool; in the fabrication of cordova and morocco leather, and paper; in mining, casting, and various metallurgic operations; in the making of Toledo blades.
Passionate lovers of poetry and music, they dedicated much of their leisure time to those elegant pursuits. They taught Europe the game of chess; they gave it its taste for works of fiction–romances and novels. In the graver domains of literature they took delight: they had many admirable compositions on such subjects as the instability of human greatness; the consequences of irreligion; the reverses of fortune; the origin, duration, and end of the world. Sometimes, not without surprise, we meet with ideas which we flatter ourselves have originated in our own times. Thus our modern doctrines of evolution and development were taught in their schools. In fact, they carried them much farther than we are disposed to do, extending them even to inorganic or mineral things. The fundamental principle of alchemy was the natural process of development of metalline bodies. “When common people,” says Al- Khazini, writing in the twelfth century, “hear from natural philosophers that gold is a body which has attained to perfection of maturity, to the goal of completeness, they firmly believe that it is something which has gradually come to that perfection by passing through the forms of all other metallic bodies, so that its gold nature was originally lead, afterward it became tin, then brass, then silver, and finally reached the development of gold; not knowing that the natural philosophers mean, in saying this, only something like what they mean when they speak of man, and attribute to him a completeness and equilibrium in nature and constitution–not that man was once a bull, and was changed into an ass, and afterward into a horse, and after that into an ape, and finally became a man.”
CHAPTER V.
CONFLICT RESPECTING THE NATURE OF THE SOUL.– DOCTRINE OF EMANATION AND ABSORPTION.
European ideas respecting the soul.–It resembles the form of the body.
Philosophical views of the Orientals.–The Vedic theology and Buddhism assert the doctrine of emanation and absorption.–It is advocated by Aristotle, who is followed by the Alexandrian school, and subsequently by the Jews and Arabians.–It is found in the writings of Erigena.
Connection of this doctrine with the theory of conservation and correlation of force.–Parallel between the origin and destiny of the body and the soul.–The necessity of founding human on comparative psychology.
Averroism, which is based on these facts, is brought into Christendom through Spain and Sicily.
History of the repression of Averroism.–Revolt of Islam against it.–Antagonism of the Jewish synagogues.–Its destruction undertaken by the papacy.–Institution of the Inquisition in Spain.–Frightful persecutions and their results.–Expulsion of the Jews and Moors.–Overthrow of Averroism in Europe.–Decisive action of the late Vatican Council.
THE pagan Greeks and Romans believed that the spirit of man resembles his bodily form, varying its appearance with his variations, and growing with his growth. Heroes, to whom it had been permitted to descend into Hades, had therefore without difficulty recognized their former friends. Not only had the corporeal aspect been retained, but even the customary raiment.
THE SOUL. The primitive Christians, whose conceptions of a future life and of heaven and hell, the abodes of the blessed and the sinful, were far more vivid than those of their pagan predecessors, accepted and intensified these ancient ideas. They did not doubt that in the world to come they should meet their friends, and hold converse with them, as they had done here upon earth –an expectation that gives consolation to the human heart, reconciling it to the most sorrowful bereavements, and restoring to it its dead.
In the uncertainty as to what becomes of the soul in the interval between its separation from the body and the judgment-day, many different opinions were held. Some thought that it hovered over the grave, some that it wandered disconsolate through the air. In the popular belief, St. Peter sat as a door-keeper at the gate of heaven. To him it had been given to bind or to loose. He admitted or excluded the Spirits of men at his pleasure. Many persons, however, were disposed to deny him this power, since his decisions would be anticipatory of the judgment-day, which would thus be rendered needless. After the time of Gregory the Great, the doctrine of purgatory met with general acceptance. A resting-place was provided for departed spirits.
That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. A pleasing terror gathers round the winter’s-evening fireside at the stories of apparitions, goblins, ghosts. In the old times the Romans had their lares, or spirits of those who had led virtuous lives; their larvae or lemures, the spirits of the wicked; their manes, the spirits of those of whom the merits were doubtful. If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of any thing whatever, that these shades of the dead congregate near tombstones, or take up their secret abode in the gloomy chambers of dilapidated castles, or walk by moonlight in moody solitude.
ASIATIC PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS. While these opinions have universally found popular acceptance in Europe, others of a very different nature have prevailed extensively in Asia, and indeed very generally in the higher regions of thought. Ecclesiastical authority succeeded in repressing them in the sixteenth century, but they never altogether disappeared. In our own times so silently and extensively have they been diffused in Europe, that it was found expedient in the papal Syllabus to draw them in a very conspicuous manner into the open light; and the Vatican Council, agreeing in that view of their obnoxious tendency and secret spread, has in an equally prominent and signal manner among its first canons anathematized all persons who hold them. “Let him be anathema who says that spiritual things are emanations of the divine substance, or that the divine essence by manifestation or development becomes all things.” In view of this authoritative action, it is necessary now to consider the character and history of these opinions.
Ideas respecting the nature of God necessarily influence ideas respecting the nature of the soul. The eastern Asiatics had adopted the conception of an impersonal God, and, as regards the soul, its necessary consequence, the doctrine of emanation and absorption.
EMANATION AND ABSORPTION. Thus the Vedic theology is based on the acknowledgment of a universal spirit pervading all things. “There is in truth but one Deity, the supreme Spirit; he is of the same nature as the soul of man.” Both the Vedas and the Institutes of Menu affirm that the soul is an emanation of the all-pervading Intellect, and that it is necessarily destined to be reabsorbed. They consider it to be without form, and that visible Nature, with all its beauties and harmonies, is only the shadow of God.
Vedaism developed itself into Buddhism, which has become the faith of a majority of the human race. This system acknowledges that there is a supreme Power, but denies that there is a supreme Being. It contemplates the existence of Force, giving rise as its manifestation to matter. It adopts the theory of emanation and absorption. In a burning taper it sees an effigy of man–an embodiment of matter, and an evolution of force. If we interrogate it respecting the destiny of the soul, it demands of us what has become of the flame when it is blown out, and in what condition it was before the taper was lighted. Was it a nonentity? Has it been annihilated? It admits that the idea of personality which has deluded us through life may not be instantaneously extinguished at death, but may be lost by slow degrees. On this is founded the doctrine of transmigration. But at length reunion with the universal Intellect takes place, Nirwana is reached, oblivion is attained, a state that has no relation to matter, space, or time, the state into which the departed flame of the extinguished taper has gone, the state in which we were before we were born. This is the end that we ought to hope for; it is reabsorption in the universal Force– supreme bliss, eternal rest.
Through Aristotle these doctrines were first introduced into Eastern Europe; indeed, eventually, as we shall see, he was regarded as the author of them. They exerted a dominating influence in the later period of the Alexandrian school. Philo, the Jew, who lived in the time of Caligula, based his philosophy on the theory of emanation. Plotinus not only accepted that theory as applicable to the soul of man, but as affording an illustration of the nature of the Trinity. For, as a beam of light emanates from the sun, and as warmth emanates from the beam when it touches material bodies, so from the Father the Son emanates, and thence the Holy Ghost. From these views Plotinus derived a practical religious system, teaching the devout how to pass into a condition of ecstasy, a foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul. In that condition the soul loses its individual consciousness. In like manner Porphyry sought absorption in or union with God. He was a Tyrian by birth, established a school at Rome, and wrote against Christianity; his treatise on that subject was answered by Eusebius and St. Jerome, but the Emperor Theodosius silenced it more effectually by causing all the copies to be burnt. Porphyry bewails his own unworthiness, saying that he had been united to God in ecstasy but once in eighty-six years, whereas his master Plotinus had been so united six times in sixty years. A complete system of theology, based on the theory of emanation, was constructed by Proclus, who speculated on the manner in which absorption takes place: whether the soul is instantly reabsorbed and reunited in the moment of death, or whether it retains the sentiment of personality for a time, and subsides into complete reunion by successive steps.
ARABIC PSYCHOLOGY. From the Alexandrian Greeks these ideas passed to the Saracen philosophers, who very soon after the capture of the great Egyptian city abandoned to the lower orders their anthropomorphic notions of the nature of God and the simulachral form of the spirit of man. As Arabism developed itself into a distinct scientific system, the theories of emanation and absorption were among its characteristic features. In this abandonment of vulgar Mohammedanism, the example of the Jews greatly assisted. They, too, had given up the anthropomorphism of their ancestors; they had exchanged the God who of old lived behind the veil of the temple for an infinite Intelligence pervading the universe, and, avowing their inability to conceive that any thing which had on a sudden been called into existence should be capable of immortality, they affirmed that the soul of man is connected with a past of which there was no beginning,, and with a future to which there is no end.
In the intellectual history of Arabism the Jew and the Saracen are continually seen together. It was the same in their political history, whether we consider it in Syria, in Egypt, or in Spain. From them conjointly Western Europe derived its philosophical ideas, which in the course of time culminated in Averroism; Averroism is philosophical Islamism. Europeans generally regarded Averroes as the author of these heresies, and the orthodox branded him accordingly, but he was nothing more than their collector and commentator. His works invaded Christendom by two routes: from Spain through Southern France they reached Upper Italy, engendering numerous heresies on their way; from Sicily they passed to Naples and South Italy, under the auspices of Frederick II.
But, long before Europe suffered this great intellectual invasion, there were what might, perhaps, be termed sporadic instances of Orientalism. As an example I may quote the views of John Erigena (A.D. 800) He had adopted and taught the philosophy of Aristotle had made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of that philosopher, and indulged a hope of uniting philosophy and religion in the manner proposed by the Christian ecclesiastics who were then studying in the Mohammedan universities of Spain. He was a native of Britain.
In a letter to Charles the Bald, Anastasius expresses his astonishment “how such a barbarian man, coming from the very ends of the earth, and remote from human conversation, could comprehend things so clearly, and transfer them into another language so well.” The general intention of his writings was, as we have said, to unite philosophy with religion, but his treatment of these subjects brought him under ecclesiastical censure, and some of his works were adjudged to the flames. His most important book is entitled “De Divisione Nature.”
Erigena’s philosophy rests upon the observed and admitted fact that every living thing comes from something that had previously lived. The visible world, being a world of life, has therefore emanated necessarily from some primordial existence, and that existence is God, who is thus the originator and conservator of all. Whatever we see maintains itself as a visible thing through force derived from him, and, were that force withdrawn, it must necessarily disappear. Erigena thus conceives of the Deity as an unceasing participator in Nature, being its preserver, maintainer, upholder, and in that respect answering to the soul of the world of the Greeks. The particular life of individuals is therefore a part of general existence, that is, of the mundane soul.
If ever there were a withdrawal of the maintaining power, all things must return to the source from which they issued–that is, they must return to God, and be absorbed in him. All visible Nature must thus pass back into “the Intellect” at last. “The death of the flesh is the auspices of the restitution of things, and of a return to their ancient conservation. So sounds revert back to the air in which they were born, and by which they were maintained, and they are heard no more; no man knows what has become of them. In that final absorption which, after a lapse of time, must necessarily come, God will be all in all, and nothing exist but him alone.” “I contemplate him as the beginning and cause of all things; all things that are and those that have been, but now are not, were created from him, and by him, and in him. I also view him as the end and intransgressible term of all things. . . . There is a fourfold conception of universal Nature–two views of divine Nature, as origin and end; two also of framed Nature, causes and effects. There is nothing eternal but God.”
The return of the soul to the universal Intellect is designated by Erigena as Theosis, or Deification. In that final absorption all remembrance of its past experiences is lost. The soul reverts to the condition in which it was before it animated the body. Necessarily, therefore, Erigena fell under the displeasure of the Church.
It was in India that men first recognized the fact that force is indestructible and eternal. This implies ideas more or less distinct of that which we now term its “correlation and conservation.” Considerations connected with the stability of the universe give strength to this view, since it is clear that, were there either an increase or a diminution, the order of the world must cease. The definite and invariable amount of energy in the universe must therefore be accepted as a scientific fact. The changes we witness are in its distribution.
But, since the soul must be regarded as an active principle, to call a new one into existence out of nothing is necessarily to add to the force previously in the world. And, if this has been done in the case of every individual who has been born, and is to be repeated for every individual hereafter, the totality of force must be continually increasing.
Moreover, to many devout persons there is something very revolting in the suggestion that the Almighty is a servitor to the caprices and lusts of man, and that, at a certain term after its origin, it is necessary for him to create for the embryo a soul.
Considering man as composed of two portions, a soul and a body, the obvious relations of the latter may cast much light on the mysterious, the obscure relations of the former. Now, the substance of which the body consists is obtained from the general mass of matter around us, and after death to that general mass it is restored. Has Nature, then, displayed before our eyes in the origin, mutations, and destiny of the material part, the body, a revelation that may guide us to a knowledge of the origin and destiny of the companion, the spiritual part, the soul?
Let us listen for a moment to one of the most powerful of Mohammedan writers:
“God has created the spirit of man out of a drop of his own light; its destiny is to return to him. Do not deceive yourself with the vain imagination that it will die when the body dies. The form you had on your entrance into this world, and your present form, are not the same; hence there is no necessity of your perishing, on account of the perishing of your body. Your spirit came into this world a stranger, it is only sojourning, in a temporary home. From the trials and tempests of this troublesome life, our refuge is in God. In reunion with him we shall find eternal rest–a rest without sorrow, a joy without pain, a strength without infirmity, a knowledge without doubt, a tranquil and yet an ecstatic vision of the source of life and light and glory, the source from which we came.” So says the Saracen philosopher, Al-Gazzali (A.D. 1010).
In a stone the material particles are in a state of stable equilibrium; it may, therefore, endure forever. An animal is in reality only a form through which a stream of matter is incessantly flowing. It receives its supplies, and dismisses its wastes. In this it resembles a cataract, a river, a flame. The particles that compose it at one instant have departed from it the next. It depends for its continuance on exterior supplies. It has a definite duration in time, and an inevitable moment comes in which it must die.
In the great problem of psychology we cannot expect to reach a scientific result, if we persist in restricting ourselves to the contemplation of one fact. We must avail ourselves of all accessible facts. Human psychology can never be completely resolved except through comparative psychology. With Descartes, we must inquire whether the souls of animals be relations of the human soul, less perfect members in the same series of development. We must take account of what we discover in the intelligent principle of the ant, as well as what we discern in the intelligent principle of man. Where would human physiology be, if it were not illuminated by the bright irradiations of comparative physiology?
Brodie, after an exhaustive consideration of the facts, affirms that the mind of animals is essentially the same as that of man. Every one familiar with the dog will admit that that creature knows right from wrong, and is conscious when he has committed a fault. Many domestic animals have reasoning powers, and employ proper means for the attainment of ends. How numerous are the anecdotes related of the intentional actions of the elephant and the ape! Nor is this apparent intelligence due to imitation, to their association with man, for wild animals that have no such relation exhibit similar properties. In different species, the capacity and character greatly vary. Thus the dog is not only more intelligent, but has social and moral qualities that the cat does not possess; the former loves his master, the latter her home.
Du Bois-Reymond makes this striking remark: “With awe and wonder must the student of Nature regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant. It has developed itself to its present state through a countless series of generations.” What an impressive inference we may draw from the statement of Huber, who has written so well on this subject: “If you will watch a single ant at work, you can tell what he will next do!” He is considering the matter, and reasoning as you are doing. Listen to one of the many anecdotes which Huber, at once truthful and artless, relates: “On the visit of an overseer ant to the works, when the laborers had begun the roof too soon, he examined it and had it taken down, the wall raised to the proper height, and a new ceiling constructed with the fragments of the old one.” Surely these insects are not automata, they show intention. They recognize their old companions, who have been shut up from them for many months, and exhibit sentiments of joy at their return. Their antennal language is capable of manifold expression; it suits the interior of the nest, where all is dark.
While solitary insects do not live to raise their young, social insects have a longer term, they exhibit moral affections and educate their offspring. Patterns of patience and industry, some of these insignificant creatures will work sixteen or eighteen hours a day. Few men are capable of sustained mental application more than four or five hours.
Similarity of effects indicates similarity of causes; similarity of actions demands similarity of organs. I would ask the reader of these paragraphs, who is familiar with the habits of animals, and especially with the social relations of that wonderful insect to which reference has been made, to turn to the nineteenth chapter of my work on the “Intellectual Development of Europe,” in which he will find a description of the social system of the Incas of Peru. Perhaps, then, in view of the similarity of the social institutions and personal conduct of the insect, and the social institutions and personal conduct of the civilized Indian–the one an insignificant speck, the other a man–he will not be disposed to disagree with me in the opinion that “from bees, and wasps, and ants, and birds, from all that low animal life on which he looks with supercilious contempt, man is destined one day to learn what in truth he really is.”
The views of Descartes, who regarded all insects as automata, can scarcely be accepted without modification. Insects are automata only so far as the action of their ventral cord, and that portion of their cephalic ganglia which deals with contemporaneous impressions, is concerned.
It is one of the functions of vesicular-nervous material to retain traces or relics of impressions brought to it by the organs of sense; hence, nervous ganglia, being composed of that material, may be considered as registering apparatus. They also introduce the element of time into the action of the nervous mechanism. An impression, which without them might have forthwith ended in reflex action, is delayed, and with this duration come all those important effects arising through the interaction of many impressions, old and new, upon each other.
There is no such thing as a spontaneous, or self- originated, thought. Every intellectual act is the consequence of some preceding act. It comes into existence in virtue of something that has gone before. Two minds constituted precisely alike, and placed under the influence of precisely the same environment, must give rise to precisely the same thought. To such sameness of action we allude in the popular expression “common- sense”–a term full of meaning. In the origination of a thought there are two distinct conditions: the state of the organism as dependent on antecedent impressions, and on the existing physical circumstances.
In the cephalic ganglia of insects are stored up the relics of impressions that have been made upon the common peripheral nerves, and in them are kept those which are brought in by the organs of special sense– the visual, olfactive, auditory. The interaction of these raises insects above mere mechanical automata, in which the reaction instantly follows the impression.
In all cases the action of every nerve-centre, no matter what its stage of development may be, high or low, depends upon an essential chemical condition–oxidation. Even in man, if the supply of arterial blood be stopped but for a moment, the nerve-mechanism loses its power; if diminished, it correspondingly declines; if, on the contrary, it be increased–as when nitrogen monoxide is breathed–there is more energetic action. Hence there arises a need of repair, a necessity for rest and sleep.
Two fundamental ideas are essentially attached to all our perceptions of external things: they are SPACE and TIME, and for these provision is made in the nervous mechanism while it is yet in an almost rudimentary state. The eye is the organ of space, the ear of time; the perceptions of which by the elaborate mechanism of these structures become infinitely more precise than would be possible if the sense of touch alone were resorted to.
There are some simple experiments which illustrate the vestiges of ganglionic impressions. If on a cold, polished metal, as a new razor, any object, such as a wafer, be laid, and the metal be then breathed upon, and, when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discover no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view; and this may be done again and again. Nay, more, if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can deteriorate its surface, and be so kept for many months, on breathing again upon it the shadowy form emerges.
Such an illustration shows how trivial an impression may be thus registered and preserved. But, if, on such an inorganic surface, an impression may thus be indelibly marked, how much more likely in the purposely- constructed ganglion! A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent trace, a trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes. Photographic operations are cases in point. The portraits of our friends, or landscape views, may be hidden on the sensitive. surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or glassy surface until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done.
If, after the eyelids have been closed for some time, as when we first awake in the morning, we suddenly and steadfastly gaze at a brightly-illuminated object and then quickly close the lids again, a phantom image is perceived in the indefinite darkness beyond us. We may satisfy ourselves that this is not a fiction, but a reality, for many details that we had not time to identify in the momentary glance may be contemplated at our leisure in the phantom. We may thus make out the pattern of such an object as a lace curtain hanging in the window, or the branches of a tree beyond. By degrees the image becomes less and less distinct; in a minute or two it has disappeared. It seems to have a tendency to float away in the vacancy before us. If we attempt to follow it by moving the eyeball, it suddenly vanishes.
Such a duration of impressions on the retina proves that the effect of external influences on nerve-vesicles is not necessarily transitory. In this there is a correspondence to the duration, the emergence, the extinction, of impressions on photographic preparations. Thus, I have seen landscapes and architectural views taken in Mexico developed, as artists say, months subsequently in New York–the images coming out, after the long voyage, in all their proper forms and in all their proper contrast of light and shade. The photograph had forgotten nothing. It had equally preserved the contour of the everlasting mountains and the passing smoke of a bandit-fire.
Are there, then, contained in the brain more permanently, as in the retina more transiently, the vestiges of impressions that have been gathered by the sensory organs? Is this the explanation of memory–the Mind contemplating such pictures of past things and events as have been committed to her custody. In her silent galleries are there hung micrographs of the living and the dead, of scenes that we have visited, of incidents in which we have borne a part? Are these abiding impressions mere signal-marks, like the letters of a book, which impart ideas to the mind? or are they actual picture-images, inconceivably smaller than those made for us by artists, in which, by the aid of a microscope, we can see, in a space not bigger than a pinhole, a whole family group at a glance?
The phantom images of the retina are not perceptible in the light of the day. Those that exist in the sensorium in like manner do not attract our attention so long as the sensory organs are in vigorous operation, and occupied in bringing new impressions in. But, when those organs become weary or dull, or when we experience hours of great anxiety, or are in twilight reveries, or are asleep, the latent apparitions have their vividness increased by the contrast, and obtrude themselves on the mind. For the same reason they occupy us in the delirium of fevers, and doubtless also in the solemn moments of death. During a third part of our life, in sleep, we are withdrawn from external influences; hearing and sight and the other senses are inactive,but the never-sleeping Mind, that pensive, that veiled enchantress, in her mysterious retirement, looks over the ambrotypes she has collected–ambrotypes, for they are truly unfading impressions–and, combining them together, as they chance to occur, constructs from them the panorama of a dream.
Nature has thus implanted in the organization of every man means which impressively suggest to him the immortality of the soul and a future life. Even the benighted savage thus sees in his visions the fading forms of landscapes, which are, perhaps, connected with some of his most pleasant recollections; and what other conclusion can be possibly extract from those unreal pictures than that they are the foreshadowings of another land beyond that in which his lot is cast? At intervals he is visited in his dreams by the resemblances of those whom he has loved or hated while they were alive; and these manifestations are to him incontrovertible proofs of the existence and immortality of the soul. In our most refined social conditions we are never able to shake off the impressions of these occurrences, and are perpetually drawing from them the same conclusions that our uncivilized ancestors did. Our more elevated condition of life in no respect relieves us from the inevitable operation of our own organization, any more than it relieves us from infirmities and disease. In these respects, all over the globe men are on an equality. Savage or civilized, we carry within us a mechanism which presents us with mementoes of the most solemn facts with which we can be concerned. It wants only moments of repose or sickness, when the influence of external things is diminished, to come into full play, and these are precisely the moments when we are best prepared for the truths it is going to suggest. That mechanism is no respecter of persons. It neither permits the haughtiest to be free from the monitions, nor leaves the humblest without the consolation of a knowledge of another life. Open to no opportunities of being tampered with by the designing or interested, requiring no extraneous human agency for its effect, out always present with every man wherever he may go, it marvelously extracts from vestiges of the impressions of the past overwhelming proofs of the realities of the future, and, gathering its power from what would seem to be a most unlikely source, it insensibly leads us, no matter who or where we may be, to a profound belief in the immortal and imperishable, from phantoms which have scarcely made their appearance before they are ready to vanish away.
The insect differs from a mere automaton in this, that it is influenced by old, by registered impressions. In the higher forms of animated life that registration becomes more and more complete, memory becomes more perfect. There is not any necessary resemblance between an external form and its ganglionic impression, any more than there is between the words of a message delivered in a telegraphic office and the signals which the telegraph may give to the distant station; any more than there is between the letters of a printed page and the acts or scenes they describe, but the letters call up with clearness to the mind of the reader the events and scenes.
An animal without any apparatus for the retention of impressions must be a pure automaton–it cannot have memory. From insignificant and uncertain beginnings, such an apparatus is gradually evolved, and, as its development advances, the intellectual capacity increases. In man, this retention or registration reaches perfection; he guides, himself by past as well as by present impressions; be is influenced by experience; his conduct is determined by reason.
A most important advance is made when the capability is acquired by any animal of imparting a knowledge of the impressions stored up in its own nerve-centres to another of the same kind. This marks the extension of individual into social life, and indeed is essential thereto. In the higher insects it is accomplished by antennal contacts, in man by speech. Humanity, in its earlier, its savage stages, was limited to this: the knowledge of one person could be transmitted to another by conversation. The acts and thoughts of one generation could be imparted to another, and influence its acts and thoughts.
But tradition has its limit. The faculty of speech makes society possible–nothing more.
Not without interest do we remark the progress of development of this function. The invention of the art of writing gave extension and durability to the registration or record of impressions. These, which had hitherto been stored up in the brain of one man, might now be imparted to the whole human race, and be made to endure forever. Civilization became possible–for civilization cannot exist without writing, or the means of record in some shape.
From this psychological point of view we perceive the real significance of the invention of printing–a development of writing which, by increasing the rapidity of the diffusion of ideas, and insuring their permanence, tends to promote civilization and to unify the human race.
In the foregoing paragraphs, relating to nervous impressions, their registry, and the consequences, that spring from them, I have given an abstract of views presented in my work on “Human Physiology,” published in 1856, and may, therefore, refer the reader to the chapter on “Inverse Vision, or Cerebral Sight;” to Chapter XIV., Book I.; and to Chapter VIII., Book II.; of that work, for other particulars.
The only path to scientific human psychology is through comparative psychology. It is a long and wearisome path, but it leads to truth.
Is there, then, a vast spiritual existence pervading the universe, even as there is a vast existence of matter pervading it–a spirit which, as a great German author tells us, “sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, awakes in man?” Does the soul arise from the one as the body arises from the other? Do they in like manner return, each to the source from which it has come? If so, we can interpret human existence, and our ideas may still be in unison with scientific truth, and in accord with our conception of the stability, the unchangeability of the universe.
To this spiritual existence the Saracens, following Eastern nations, gave the designation “the Active Intellect.” They believed that the soul of man emanated from it, as a rain-drop comes from the sea, and, after a season, returns. So arose among them the imposing doctrines of emanation and absorption. The active intellect is God.
In one of its forms, as we have seen, this idea was developed by Chakia Mouni, in India, in a most masterly manner, and embodied in the vast practical system of Buddhism; in another, it was with less power presented among the Saracens by Averroes.
But, perhaps we ought rather to say that Europeans hold Averroes as the author of this doctrine, because they saw him isolated from his antecedents. But Mohammedans gave him little credit for originality. He stood to them in the light of a commentator on Aristotle, and as presenting the opinions of the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools up to his time. The following excerpts from the “Historical Essay on Averroism,” by M. Renan, will show how closely the Sarscenic ideas approached those presented above:
This system supposes that, at the death of an individual, his intelligent principle or soul no longer possesses a separate existence, but returns to or is absorbed in the universal mind, the active intelligence, the mundane soul, which is God; from whom, indeed, it had originally emanated or issued forth.
The universal, or active, or objective intellect, is uncreated, impassible, incorruptible, has neither beginning nor end; nor does it increase as the number of individual souls increases. It is altogether separate from matter. It is, as it were, a cosmic principle. This oneness of the active intellect, or reason, is the essential principle of the Averroistic theory, and is in harmony with the cardinal doctrine of Mohammedanism–the unity of God.
The individual, or passive, or subjective intellect, is an emanation from the universal, and constitutes what is termed the soul of man. In one sense it is perishable and ends with the body, but in a higher sense it endures; for, after death, it returns to or is absorbed in the universal soul, and thus of all human souls there remains at last but one–the aggregate of them all, life is not the property of the individual, it belongs to Nature. The end of, man is to enter into union more and more complete with the active intellect–reason. In that the happiness of the soul consists. Our destiny is quietude. It was the opinion of Averroes that the transition from the individual to the universal is instantaneous at death, but the Buddhists maintain that human personality continues in a declining manner for a certain term before nonentity, or Nirwana, is attained.
Philosophy has never proposed but two hypotheses to explain the system of the world: first, a personal God existing apart, and a human soul called into existence or created, and thenceforth immortal; second, an impersonal intelligence, or indeterminate God, and a soul emerging from and returning to him. As to the origin of beings, there are two opposite opinions: first, that they are created from nothing; second, that they come by development from pre-existing forms. The theory of creation belongs to the first of the above hypotheses, that of evolution to the last.
Philosophy among the Arabs thus took the same direction that it had taken in China, in India, and indeed throughout the East. Its whole spirit depended on the admission of the indestructibility of matter and force. It saw an analogy between the gathering of the material of which the body of man consists from the vast store of matter in Nature, and its final restoration to that store, and the emanation of the spirit of man from the universal Intellect, the Divinity, and its final reabsorption.
Having thus indicated in sufficient detail the philosophical characteristics of the doctrine of emanation and absorption, I have in the next place to relate its history. It was introduced into Europe by the Spanish Arabs. Spain was the focal point from which, issuing forth, it affected the ranks of intelligence and fashion all over Europe, and in Spain it had a melancholy end.
The Spanish khalifs had surrounded themselves with all the luxuries of Oriental life. They had magnificent palaces, enchanting gardens, seraglios filled with beautiful women. Europe at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. The houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from flower-beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining-halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their Northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked by sobriety. Wine was prohibited. The enchanting moonlight evenings of Andalusia were spent by the Moors in sequestered, fairy-like gardens or in orange-groves, listening to the romances of the story-teller, or engaged in philosophical discourse; consoling themselves for the disappointments of this life by such reflections as that, if virtue were rewarded in this world, we should be without expectations in the life to come; and reconciling themselves to their daily toil by the expectation that rest will be found after death–a rest never to be succeeded by labor.
In the tenth century the Khalif Hakein II. had made beautiful Andalusia the paradise of the world. Christians, Mussulmen, Jews, mixed together without restraint. There, among many celebrated names that have descended to our times, was Gerbert, destined subsequently to become pope. There, too, was Peter the Venerable, and many Christian ecclesiastics. Peter says that he found learned men even from Britain pursuing astronomy. All learned men, no matter from what country they came, or what their religious views, were welcomed. The khalif had in his palace a manufactory of books, and copyists, binders, illuminators. He kept book-buyers in all the great cities of Asia and Africa. His library contained four hundred thousand volumes, superbly bound and illuminated.
Throughout the Mohammedan dominions in Asia, in Africa, and in Spain, the lower order of Mussulmen entertained a fanatical hatred against learning. Among the more devout–those who claimed to be orthodox– there were painful doubts as to the salvation of the great Khalif Al-Mamun–the wicked khalif, as they called him–for he had not only disturbed the people by introducing the writings of Aristotle and other Greek heathens, but had even struck at the existence of heaven and hell by saying that the earth is a globe, and pretending that he could measure its size. These persons, from their numbers, constituted a political power.
Almansor, who usurped the khalifate to the prejudice of Hakem’s son, thought that his usurpation would be sustained if he put himself at the head of the orthodox party. He therefore had the library of Hakem searched, and all works of a scientific or philosophical nature carried into the public places and burnt, or thrown into the cisterns of the palace. By a similar court revolution Averroes, in his old age–he died A.D. 1193–was expelled from Spain; the religious party had triumphed over the philosophical. He was denounced as a traitor to religion. An opposition to philosophy had been organized all over the Mussulman world. There was hardly a philosopher who was not punished. Some were put to death, and the consequence was, that Islam was full of hypocrites.
Into Italy, Germany, England, Averroism had silently made its way. It found favor in the eyes of the Franciscans, and a focus in the University of Paris. By very many of the leading minds it had been accepted. But at length the Dominicans, the rivals of the Franciscans, sounded an alarm. They said it destroys all personality, conducts to fatalism, and renders inexplicable the difference and progress of individual intelligences. The declaration that there is but one intellect is an error subversive of the merits of the saints, it is an assertion that there is no difference among men. What! is there no difference between the holy soul of Peter and the damned soul of Judas? are they identical? Averroes in this his blasphemous doctrine denies creation, providence, revelation, the Trinity, the efficacy of prayers, of alms, and of litanies; he disbelieves in the resurrection and immortality; he places the summum bonum in mere pleasure.
So, too, among the Jews who were then the leading intellects of the world, Averroism had been largely propagated. Their great writer Maimonides had thoroughly accepted it; his school was spreading it in all directions. A furious persecution arose on the part of the orthodox Jews. Of Maimonides it had been formerly their delight to declare that he was “the Eagle of the Doctors, the Great Sage, the Glory of the West, the Light of the East, second only to Moses.” Now, they proclaimed that he had abandoned the faith of Abraham; had denied the possibility of creation, believed in the eternity of the world; had given himself up to the manufacture of atheists; had deprived God of his attributes; made a vacuum of him; had declared him inaccessible to prayer, and a stranger to the government of the world. The works of Maimonides were committed to the flames by the synagogues of Montpellier, Barcelona, and Toledo.
Scarcely had the conquering arms of Ferdinand and Isabella overthrown the Arabian dominion in Spain, when measures were taken by the papacy to extinguish these opinions, which, it was believed, were undermining European Christianity.
Until Innocent IV. (1243), there was no special tribunal against heretics, distinct from those of the bishops. The Inquisition, then introduced, in accordance with the centralization of the times, was a general and papal tribunal, which displaced the old local ones. The bishops, therefore, viewed the innovation with great dislike, considering it as an intrusion on their rights. It was established in Italy, Spain, Germany, and the southern provinces of France.
The temporal sovereigns were only too desirous to make use of this powerful engine for their own political purposes. Against this the popes strongly protested. They were not willing that its use should pass out of the ecclesiastical hand.
The Inquisition, having already been tried in the south of France, had there proved to be very effective for the suppression of heresy. It had been introduced into Aragon. Now was assigned to it the duty of dealing with the Jews.
In the old times under Visigothic rule these people had greatly prospered, but the leniency that had been shown to them was succeeded by atrocious persecution, when the Visigoths abandoned their Arianism and became orthodox. The most inhuman ordinances were issued against them–a law was enacted condemning them all to be slaves. It was not to be wondered at that, when the Saracen invasion took place, the Jews did whatever they could to promote its success. They, like the Arabs, were an Oriental people, both traced their lineage to Abraham, their common ancestor; both were believers in the unity of God. It was their defense of that doctrine that had brought upon them the hatred of their Visigothic masters.
Under the Saracen rule they were treated with the highest consideration. They became distinguished for their wealth and their learning. For the most part they were Aristotelians. They founded many schools and colleges. Their mercantile interests led them to travel all over the world. They particularly studied the science of medicine. Throughout the middle ages they were the physicians and bankers of Europe. Of all men they saw the course of human affairs from the most elevated point of view. Among the special sciences they became proficient in mathematics and astronomy; they composed the tables of Alfonso, and were the cause of the voyage of De Gama. They distinguished themselves greatly in light literature. From the tenth to the fourteenth century their literature was the first in Europe. They were to be found in the courts of princes as physicians, or as treasurers managing the public finances.
The orthodox clergy in Navarre had excited popular prejudices against them. To escape the persecutions that arose, many of them feigned to turn Christians, and of these many apostatized to their former faith. The papal nuncio at the court of Castile raised a cry for the establishment of the Inquisition. The poorer Jews were accused of sacrificing Christian children at the Passover, in mockery of the crucifixion; the richer were denounced as Averroists. Under the influence of Torquemada, a
Dominican monk, the confessor of Queen Isabella, that princess solicited a bull from the pope for the establishment of the Holy Office. A bull was accordingly issued in November, 1478, for the detection and suppression of heresy. In the first year of the operation of the Inquisition, 1481, two thousand victims were burnt in Andalusia; besides these, many thousands were dug up from their graves and burnt; seventeen thousand were fined or imprisoned for life. Whoever of the persecuted race could flee, escaped for his life. Torquemada, now appointed inquisitor-general for Castile and Leon, illustrated his office by his ferocity. Anonymous accusations were received, the accused was not confronted by witnesses, torture was relied upon for conviction; it was inflicted in vaults where no one could hear the cries of the tormented. As, in pretended mercy, it was forbidden to inflict torture a second time, with horrible duplicity it was affirmed that the torment had not been completed at first, but had only been suspended out of charity until the following day! The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burnt at the stake ten thousand two hundred and twenty persons, six thousand eight hundred and sixty in effigy, and otherwise punished ninety-seven thousand three hundred and twenty-one. This frantic priest destroyed Hebrew Bibles wherever be could find them, And burnt six thousand volumes of Oriental literature at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated Judaism. With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition.
But all these frightful atrocities proved failures. The conversions were few. Torquemada, therefore, insisted on the immediate banishment of every unbaptized Jew. On March 30, 1492, the edict of expulsion was signed. All unbaptized Jews, of whatever age, sex, or condition, were ordered to leave the realm by the end of the following July. If they revisited it, they should suffer death. They might sell their effects and take the proceeds in merchandise or bills of exchange, but not in gold or silver. Exiled thus suddenly from the land of their birth, the land of their ancestors for hundreds of years, they could not in the glutted market that arose sell what they possessed. Nobody would purchase what could be got for nothing after July. The Spanish clergy occupied themselves by preaching in the public squares sermons filled with denunciations against their victims, who, when the time for expatriation came, swarmed in the roads and filled the air with their cries of despair. Even the Spanish onlookers wept at the scene of agony. Torquemada, however, enforced the ordinance that no one should afford them any help.
Of the banished persons some made their way into Africa, some into Italy; the latter carried with them to Naples ship-fever, which destroyed not fewer than twenty thousand in that city, and devastated that peninsula; some reached Turkey, a few England. Thousands, especially mothers with nursing children, infants, and old people, died by the way; many of them in the agonies of thirst.
This action against the Jews was soon followed by one against the Moors. A pragmatica was issued at Seville, February, 1502, setting forth the obligations of the Castilians to drive the enemies of God from the land, and ordering that all unbaptized Moors in the kingdoms of Castile and Leon above the age of infancy should leave the country by the end of April. They might sell their property, but not take away any gold or silver; they were forbidden to emigrate to the Mohammedan dominions; the penalty of disobedience was death. Their condition was thus worse than that of the Jews, who had been permitted to go where they chose. Such was the fiendish intolerance of the Spaniards, that they asserted the government would be justified in taking the lives of all the Moors for their shameless infidelity.
What an ungrateful return for the toleration that the Moors in their day of power had given to the Christians! No faith was kept with the victims. Granada had surrendered under the solemn guarantee of the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. At the instigation of Cardinal Ximenes that pledge was broken, and, after a residence of eight centuries, the Mohammedans were driven out of the land.
The coexistence of three religions in Andalusia–the Christian, the Mohammedan, the Mosaic–had given opportunity for the development of Averroism or philosophical Arabism. This was a repetition of what had occurred at Rome, when the gods of all the conquered countries were confronted in that capital, and universal disbelief in them all ensued. Averroes himself was accused of having been first a Mussulman, then a Christian, then a Jew, and finally a misbeliever. It was affirmed that he was the author of the mysterious book “De Tribus Impostoribus.”
In the middle ages there were two celebrated heretical books, “The Everlasting Gospel,” and the “De Tribus Impostoribus.” The latter was variously imputed to Pope Gerbert, to Frederick II., and to Averroes. In their unrelenting hatred the Dominicans fastened all the blasphemies current in those times on Averroes; they never tired of recalling the celebrated and outrageous one respecting the eucharist. His writings had first been generally made known to Christian Europe by the translation of Michael Scot in the beginning of the thirteenth century, but long before his time the literature of the West, like that of Asia, was full of these ideas. We have seen how broadly they were set forth by Erigena. The Arabians, from their first cultivation of philosophy, had been infected by them; they were current in all the colleges of the three khalifates. Considered not as a mode of thought, that will spontaneously occur to all men at a certain stage of intellectual development, but as having originated with Aristotle, they continually found favor with men of the highest culture. We see them in Robert Grostete, in Roger Bacon, and eventually in Spinoza. Averroes was not their inventor, be merely gave them clearness and expression. Among the Jews of the thirteenth century, he had completely supplanted his imputed master. Aristotle had passed away from their eyes; his great commentator, Averroes, stood in his place. So numerous were the converts to the doctrine of emanation in Christendom, that Pope Alexander IV. (1255) found it necessary to interfere. By his order, Albertus Magnus composed a work against the “Unity of the Intellect.” Treating of the origin and nature of the soul, he attempted to prove that the theory of “a separate intellect, enlightening man by irradiation anterior to the individual and surviving the individual, is a detestable error.” But the most illustrious antagonist of the great com- mentator was St. Thomas Aquinas, the destroyer of all such heresies as the unity of the intellect, the denial of Providence, the impossibility of creation; the victories of “the Angelic Doctor” were celebrated not only in the disputations of the Dominicans, but also in the works of art of the painters of Florence and Pisa. The indignation of that saint knew no bounds when Christians became the disciples of an infidel, who was worse than a Mohammedan. The wrath of the Dominicans, the order to which St. Thomas belonged, was sharpened by the fact that their rivals, the Franciscans, inclined to Averroistic views; and Dante, who leaned to the Dominicans, denounced Averroes as the author of a most dangerous system. The theological odium of all three dominant religions was put upon him; he was pointed out as the originator of the atrocious maxim that “all religions are false, although all are probably useful.” An attempt was made at the Council of Vienne to have his writings absolutely suppressed, and to forbid all Christians reading them. The Dominicans, armed with the weapons of the Inquisition, terrified Christian Europe with their unrelenting persecutions. They imputed all the infidelity of the times to the Arabian philosopher. But he was not without support. In Paris and in the cities of Northern Italy the Franciscans sustained his views, and all Christendom was agitated with these disputes.
Under the inspiration of the Dominicans, Averroes oceanic to the Italian painters the emblem of unbelief. Many of the Italian towns had pictures or frescoes of the Day of Judgment and of Hell. In these Averroes not unfrequently appears. Thus, in one at Pisa, he figures with Arius, Mohammed, and Antichrist. In another he is represented as overthrown by St. Thomas. He had become an essential element in the triumphs of the great Dominican doctor. He continued thus to be familiar to the Italian painters until the sixteenth century. His doctrines were maintained in the University of Padua until the seventeenth.
Such is, in brief, the history of Averroism as it invaded Europe from Spain. Under the auspices of Frederick II., it, in a less imposing manner, issued from Sicily. That sovereign bad adopted it fully. In his “Sicilian Questions” he had demanded light on the eternity of the world, and on the nature of the soul, and supposed he had found it in the replies of Ibn Sabin, an upholder of these doctrines. But in his conflict with the papacy be was overthrown, and with him these heresies were destroyed.
In Upper Italy, Averroism long maintained its ground. It was so fashionable in high Venetian society that every gentleman felt constrained to profess it. At length the Church took decisive action against it. The Lateran Council, A.D. 1512, condemned the abettors of these detestable doctrines to be held as heretics and infidels. As we have seen, the late Vatican Council has anathematized them. Notwithstanding that stigma, it is to be borne in mind that these opinions are held to be true by a majority of the human race.
CHAPTER VI.
CONFLICT RESPECTING THE NATURE OF THE WORLD.
Scriptural view of the world: the earth a flat surface; location of heaven and hell.
Scientific view: the earth a globe; its size determined; its position in and relations to the solar system.–The three great voyages.–Columbus, De Gama, Magellan.–Circumnavigation of the earth.–Determination of its curvature by the measurement of a degree and by the pendulum.
The discoveries of Copernicus.–Invention of the telescope.–Galileo brought before the Inquisition.–His punishment.–Victory over the Church.
Attempts to ascertain the dimensions of the solar system.–Determination of the sun’s parallax by the transits of Venus.–Insignificance, of the earth and man.
Ideas respecting the dimensions of the universe.–Parallax of the stars.– The plurality of worlds asserted by Bruno.–He is seized and murdered by the Inquisition.
I HAVE now to present the discussions that arose respecting the third great philosophical problem–the nature of the world.
An uncritical observation of the aspect of Nature persuades us that the earth is an extended level surface which sustains the dome of the sky, a firmament dividing the waters above from the waters beneath; that the heavenly bodies–the sun, the moon, the stars–pursue their way, moving from east to west, their insignificant size and motion round the motionless earth proclaiming their inferiority. Of the various organic forms surrounding man none rival him in dignity, and hence he seems justified in concluding that every thing has been created for his use–the sun for the purpose of giving him light by day, the moon and stars by night.
Comparative theology shows us that this is the conception of Nature universally adopted in the early phase of intellectual life. It is the belief of all nations in all parts of the world in the beginning of their civilization: geocentric, for it makes the earth the centre of the universe; anthropocentric, for it makes man the central object of the earth. And not only is this the conclusion spontaneously come to from inconsiderate glimpses of the world, it is also the philosophical basis of various religious revelations, vouchsafed to man from time to time. These revelations, moreover, declare to him that above the crystalline dome of the sky is a region of eternal light and happiness–heaven–the abode of God and the angelic hosts, perhaps also his own abode after death; and beneath the earth a region of eternal darkness and misery, the habitation of those that are evil. In the visible world is thus seen a picture of the invisible.
On the basis of this view of the structure of the world great religious systems have been founded, and hence powerful material interests have been engaged in its support. These have resisted, sometimes by resorting to bloodshed, attempts that have been made to correct its incontestable errors–a resistance grounded on the suspicion that the localization of heaven and hell and the supreme value of man in the universe might be affected.
That such attempts would be made was inevitable. As soon as men began to reason on the subject at all, they could not fail to discredit the assertion that the earth is an indefinite plane. No one can doubt that the sun we see to-day is the self-same sun that we saw yesterday. His reappearance each morning irresistibly suggests that he has passed on the underside of the earth. But this is incompatible with the reign of night in those regions. It presents more or less distinctly the idea of the globular form of the earth.
The earth cannot extend indefinitely downward; for the sun cannot go through it, nor through any crevice or passage in it, Since he rises and sets in different positions at different seasons of the year. The stars also move under it in countless courses. There must, therefore, be a clear way beneath.
To reconcile revelation with these innovating facts, schemes, such as that of Cosmas Indicopleustes in his Christian Topography, were doubtless often adopted. To this in particular we have had occasion on a former page to refer. It asserted that in the northern parts of the flat earth there is an immense mountain, behind which the sun passes, and thus produces night.
At a very remote historical period the mechanism of eclipses had been discovered. Those of the moon demonstrated that the shadow of the earth is always circular. The form of the earth must therefore be globular. A body which in all positions casts a circular shadow must itself be spherical. Other considerations, with which every one is now familiar, could not fail to establish that such is her figure.
But the determination of the shape of the earth by no means deposed her from her position of superiority. Apparently vastly larger than all other things, it was fitting that she should be considered not merely as the centre of the world, but, in truth, as–the world. All other objects in their aggregate seemed utterly unimportant in comparison with her.
Though the consequences flowing from an admission of the globular figure of the earth affected very profoundly existing theological ideas, they were of much less moment than those depending on a determination of her size. It needed but an elementary knowledge of geometry to perceive that correct ideas on this point could be readily obtained by measuring a degree on her surface. Probably there were early attempts to accomplish this object, the results of which have been lost. But Eratosthenes executed one between Syene and Alexandria, in Egypt, Syene being supposed to be exactly under the tropic of Cancer. The two places are, however, not on the same meridian, and the distance between them was estimated, not measured. Two centuries later, Posidonius made another attempt between Alexandria and Rhodes; the bright star Canopus just grazed the horizon at the latter place, at Alexandria it rose 7 1/2 degrees. In this instance, also, since the direction lay across the sea, the distance was estimated, not measured. Finally, as we have already related, the Khalif Al-Mamun made two sets of measures, one on the shore of the Red Sea, the other near Cufa, in Mesopotamia. The general result of these various observations gave for the earth’s diameter between seven and eight thousand miles.
This approximate determination of the size of the earth tended to depose her from her dominating position, and gave rise to very serious theological results. In this the ancient investigations of Aristarchus of Samos, one of the Alexandrian school, 280 B.C., powerfully aided. In his treatise on the magnitudes and distances of the sun and moon, he explains the ingenious though imperfect method to which he had resorted for the solution of that problem. Many ages previously a speculation had been brought from India to Europe by Pythagoras. It presented the sun as the centre of the system. Around him the planets revolved in circular orbits, their order of position being Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, each of them being supposed to rotate on its axis as it revolved round the sun. According to Cicero, Nicetas suggested that, if it were admitted that the earth revolves on her axis, the difficulty presented by the inconceivable velocity of the heavens would be avoided.
There is reason to believe that the works of Aristarchus, in the Alexandrian Library, were burnt at the time of the fire of Caesar. The only treatise of his that has come down to us is that above mentioned, on the size and distance of the sun and moon.
Aristarchus adopted the Pythagorean system as representing the actual facts. This was the result of a recognition of the sun’s amazing distance, and therefore of his enormous size. The heliocentric system, thus regarding the sun as the central orb, degraded the earth to a very subordinate rank, making her only one of a company of six revolving bodies.
But this is not the only contribution conferred on astronomy by Aristarchus, for, considering that the movement of the earth does not sensibly affect the apparent position of the stars, he inferred that they are incomparably more distant from us than the sun. He, therefore, of all the ancients, as Laplace remarks, had the most correct ideas of the grandeur of the universe. He saw that the earth is of absolutely insignificant size, when compared with the stellar distances. He saw, too, that there is nothing above us but space and stars.
But the views of Aristarchus, as respects the emplacement of the planetary bodies, were not accepted by antiquity; the system proposed by Ptolemy, and incorporated in his “Syntaxis,” was universally preferred. The physical philosophy of those times was very imperfect–one of Ptolemy’s objections to the Pythagorean system being that, if the earth were in motion, it would leave the air and other light bodies behind it. He therefore placed the earth in the central position, and in succession revolved round her the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; beyond the orbit of Saturn came the firmament of the fixed stars. As to the solid crystalline spheres, one moving from east to west, the other from north to south, these were a fancy of Eudoxus, to which Ptolemy does not allude.
The Ptolemaic system is, therefore, essentially a geocentric system. It left the earth in her position of superiority, and hence gave no cause of umbrage to religious opinions, Christian or Mohammedan. The immense reputation of its author, the signal ability of his great work on the mechanism of the heavens, sustained it for almost fourteen hundred years–that is, from the second to the sixteenth century.
In Christendom, the greater part of this long period was consumed in disputes respecting the nature of God, and in struggles for ecclesiastical power. The authority of the Fathers, and the prevailing belief that the Scriptures contain the sum, of all knowledge, discouraged any investigation of Nature. If by chance a passing interest was taken in some astronomical question, it was at once settled by a reference to such authorities as the writings of Augustine or Lactantius, not by an appeal to the phenomena of the heavens. So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer.
The Mohammedan nations did much better. Their cultivation of science dates from the capture of Alexandria, A.D. 638. This was only six years after the death of the Prophet. In less than two centuries they had not only become acquainted with, but correctly appreciated, the Greek scientific writers. As we have already mentioned, by his treaty with Michael III., the khalif Al-Mamun had obtained a copy of the “Syntaxis” of Ptolemy. He had it forthwith translated into Arabic. It became at once the great authority of Saracen astronomy. From this basis the Saracens had advanced to the solution of some of the most important scientific problems. They had ascertained the dimensions of the earth; they had registered or catalogued all the stars visible in their heavens, giving to those of the larger magnitudes the names they still bear on our maps and globes; they determined the true length of the year, discovered astronomical refraction, invented the pendulum-clock, improved the photometry of the stars, ascertained the curvilinear path of a ray of light through the air, explained the phenomena of the horizontal sun and moon, and why we see those bodies before they have risen and after they have set; measured the height of the atmosphere, determining it to be fifty-eight miles; given the true theory of the twilight, and of the twinkling of the stars. They had built the first observatory in Europe. So accurate were they in their observations, that the ablest modern mathematicians have made use of their results. Thus Laplace, in his “Systeme du Monde,” adduces the observations of Al-Batagni as affording incontestable proof of the diminution of the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. He uses those of Ibn-Junis in his discussion of the obliquity of the ecliptic, and also in the case of the problems of the greater inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn.
These represent but a part, and indeed but a small part, of the services rendered by the Arabian astronomers, in the solution of the problem of the nature of the world. Meanwhile, such was the benighted condition of Christendom, such its deplorable ignorance, that it cared nothing about the matter. Its attention was engrossed by image-worship, transubstantiation, the merits of the saints, miracles, shrine-cures.
This indifference continued until the close of the fifteenth century. Even then there was no scientific inducement. The inciting motives were altogether of a different kind. They originated in commercial rivalries, and the question of the shape of the earth was finally settled by three sailors, Columbus, De Gama, and, above all, by Ferdinand Magellan.
The trade of Eastern Asia has always been a source of immense wealth to the Western nations who in succession have obtained it. In the middle ages it had centred in Upper Italy. It was conducted along two lines–a northern, by way of the Black and Caspian Seas, and camel-caravans beyond–the headquarters of this were at Genoa; and a southern, through the Syrian and Egyptian ports, and by the Arabian Sea, the headquarters of this being at Venice. The merchants engaged in the latter traffic had also made great gains in the transport service of the Crusade-wars.
The Venetians had managed to maintain amicable relations with the Mohammedan powers of Syria and Egypt; they were permitted to have consulates at Alexandria and Damascus, and, notwithstanding the military commotions of which those countries had been the scene, the trade was still maintained in a comparatively flourishing condition. But the northern or Genoese line had been completely broken up by the irruptions of the Tartars and the Turks, and the military and political disturbances of the countries through which it passed. The Eastern trade of Genoa was not merely in a precarious condition–it was on the brink of destruction.
The circular visible horizon and its dip at sea, the gradual appearance and disappearance of ships in the offing, cannot fail to incline intelligent sailors to a belief in the globular figure of the earth. The writings of the Mohammedan astronomers and philosophers had given currency to that doctrine throughout Western Europe, but, as might be expected, it was received with disfavor by theologians. When Genoa was thus on the very brink of ruin, it occurred to some of her mariners that, if this view were correct, her affairs might be re- established. A ship sailing through the straits of Gibraltar westward, across the Atlantic, would not fail to reach the East Indies. There were apparently other great advantages. Heavy cargoes might be transported without tedious and expensive land-carriage, and without breaking bulk.
Among the Genoese sailors who entertained these views was Christopher Columbus.
He tells us that his attention was drawn to this subject by the writings of Averroes, but among his friends he numbered Toscanelli, a Florentine, who had turned his attention to astronomy, and had become a strong advocate of the globular form. In Genoa itself Columbus met with but little encouragement. He then spent many years in trying to interest different princes in his proposed attempt. Its irreligious tendency was pointed out by the Spanish ecclesiastics, and condemned by the Council of Salamanca; its orthodoxy was confuted from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophecies, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the writings of the Fathers–St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St. Basil, St Ambrose.
At length, however, encouraged by the Spanish Queen Isabella, and substantially aided by a wealthy seafaring family, the Pinzons of Palos, some of whom joined him personally, he sailed on August 3, 1492, with three small ships, from Palos, carrying with him a letter from King Ferdinand to the Grand-Khan of Tartary, and also a chart, or map, constructed on the basis of that of Toscanelli. A little before midnight, October 11, 1492, he saw from the forecastle of his ship a moving light at a distance. Two hours subsequently a signal- gun from another of the ships announced that they had descried land. At sunrise Columbus landed in the New World.
On his return to Europe it was universally supposed that he had reached the eastern parts of Asia, and that therefore his voyage bad been theoretically successful. Columbus himself died in that belief. But numerous voyages which were soon undertaken made known the general contour of the American coast-line, and the discovery of the Great South Sea by Balboa revealed at length the true facts of the case, and the mistake into which both Toscanelli and Columbus had fallen, that in a voyage to the West the distance from Europe to Asia could not exceed the distance passed over in a voyage from Italy to the Gulf of Guinea–a voyage that Columbus had repeatedly made.
In his first voyage, at nightfall on September 13, 1492, being then two and a half degrees east of Corvo, one of the Azores, Columbus observed that the compass needles of the ships no longer pointed a little to the east of north, but were varying to the west. The deviation became more and more marked as the expedition advanced. He was not the first to detect the fact of variation, but he was incontestably the first to discover the line of no variation. On the return-voyage the reverse was observed; the variation westward diminished until the meridian in question was reached, when the needles again pointed due north. Thence, as the coast of Europe was approached, the variation was to the east. Columbus, therefore, came to the conclusion that the line of no variation was a fixed geographical line, or boundary, between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. In the bull of May, 1493, Pope Alexander VI. accordingly adopted this line as the perpetual boundary between the possessions of Spain and Portugal, in his settlement of the disputes of those nations. Subsequently, however, it was discovered that the line was moving eastward. It coincided with the meridian of London in 1662.
By the papal bull the Portuguese possessions were limited to the east of the line of no variation. Information derived from certain Egyptian Jews had reached that government, that it was possible to sail round the continent of Africa, there being at its extreme south a cape which could be easily doubled. An expedition of three ships under Vasco de Gama set sail, July 9, 1497; it doubled the cape on November 20th, and reached Calicut, on the coast of India, May 19, 1498. Under the bull, this voyage to the East gave to the Portuguese the right to the India trade.
Until the cape was doubled, the course of De Gama’s ships was in a general manner southward. Very soon, it was noticed that the elevation of the pole-star above the horizon was diminishing, and, soon after the equator was reached, that star had ceased to be visible. Meantime other stars, some of them forming magnificent constellations, had come into view–the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. All this was in conformity to theoretical expectations founded on the admission of the globular form of the earth.
The political consequences that at once ensued placed the Papal Government in a position of great embarrassment. Its traditions and policy forbade it to admit any other than the flat figure of the earth, as revealed in the Scriptures. Concealment of the facts was impossible, sophistry was unavailing. Commercial prosperity now left Venice as well as Genoa. The front of Europe was changed. Maritime power had departed from the Mediterranean countries, and passed to those upon the Atlantic coast.
But the Spanish Government did not submit to the advantage thus gained by its commercial rival without an effort. It listened to the representations of one Ferdinand Magellan, that India and the Spice Islands could be reached by sailing to the west, if only a strait or passage through what had now been recognized as “the American Continent” could be discovered; and, if this should be accomplished, Spain, under the papal bull, would have as good a right to the India trade as Portugal. Under the command of Magellan, an expedition of five ships, carrying two hundred and thirty- seven men, was dispatched from Seville, August 10, 1519.
Magellan at once struck boldly for the South American coast, hoping to find some cleft or passage through the continent by which he might reach the great South Sea. For seventy days he was becalmed on the line; his sailors were appalled by the apprehension that they had drifted into a region where the winds never blew, and that it was impossible for them to escape. Calms, tempests, mutiny, desertion, could not shake his resolution. After more than a year he discovered the strait which now bears his name, and, as Pigafetti, an Italian, who was with him, relates, he shed fears of joy when he found that it had pleased God at length to bring him where he might grapple with the unknown dangers of the South Sea, “the Great and Pacific Ocean.”
Driven by famine to eat scraps of skin and leather with which his rigging was here and there bound, to drink water that had gone putrid, his crew dying of hunger and scurvy, this man, firm in his belief of the globular figure of the earth, steered steadily to the northwest, and for nearly four months never saw inhabited land. He estimated that he had sailed over the Pacific not less than twelve thousand miles. He crossed the equator, saw once more the pole-star, and at length made land–the Ladrones. Here he met with adventurers from Sumatra. Among these islands he was killed, either by the savages or by his own men. His lieutenant, Sebastian d’Elcano, now took command of the ship, directing her course for the Cape of Good Hope, and encountering frightful hardships. He doubled the cape at last, and then for the fourth time crossed the equator. On September 7, 1522, after a voyage of more than three years, he brought his ship, the San Vittoria, to anchor in the port of St. Lucar, near Seville. She had accomplished the greatest achievement in the history of the human race. She had circumnavigated the earth.
The San Vittoria, sailing westward, had come back to her starting-point. Henceforth the theological doctrine of the flatness of the earth was irretrievably overthrown.
Five years after the completion of the voyage of Magellan, was made the first attempt in Christendom to ascertain the size of the earth. This was by Fernel, a French physician, who, having observed the height of the pole at Paris, went thence northward until be came to a place where the height of the pole was exactly one degree more than at that city. He measured the distance between the two stations by the number of revolutions of one of the wheels of his carriage, to which a proper indicator bad been attached, and came to the conclusion that the earth’s circumference is about twenty-four thousand four hundred and eighty Italian miles.
Measures executed more and more carefully were made in many countries: by Snell in Holland; by Norwood between London and York in England; by Picard, under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, in France. Picard’s plan was to connect two points by a series of triangles, and, thus ascertaining the length of the arc of a meridian intercepted between them, to compare it with the difference of latitudes found from celestial observations. The stations were Malvoisine in the vicinity of Paris, and Sourdon near Amiens. The difference of latitudes was determined by observing the zenith-distances, of delta Cassiopeia. There are two points of interest connected with Picard’s operation: it was the first in which instruments furnished with telescopes were employed; and its result, as we shall shortly see, was to Newton the first confirmation of the theory of universal gravitation.
At this time it had become clear from mechanical considerations, more especially such as had been deduced by Newton, that, since the earth is a rotating body, her form cannot be that of a perfect sphere, but must be that of a spheroid, oblate or flattened at the poles. It would follow, from this, that the length of a degree must be greater near the poles than at the equator.
The French Academy resolved to extend Picard’s operation, by prolonging the measures in each direction, and making the result the basis of a more accurate map of France. Delays, however, took place, and it was not until 1718 that the measures, from Dunkirk on the north to the southern extremity of France, were completed. A discussion arose as to the interpretation of these measures, some affirming that they indicated a prolate, others an oblate spheroid; the former figure may be popularly represented by a lemon, the latter by an orange. To settle this, the French Government, aided by the Academy, sent out two expeditions to measure degrees of the meridian–one under the equator, the other as far north as possible; the former went to Peru, the latter to Swedish Lapland. Very great difficulties were encountered by both parties. The Lapland commission, however, completed its observations long before the Peruvian, which consumed not less than nine years. The results of the measures thus obtained confirmed the theoretical expectation of the oblate form. Since that time many extensive and exact repetitions of the observation have been made, among which may be mentioned those of the English in England and in India, and particularly that of the French on the occasion of the introduction of the metric system of weights and measures. It was begun by Delambre and Mechain, from Dunkirk to Barcelona, and thence extended, by Biot and Arago, to the island of Formentera near Minorea. Its length was nearly twelve and a half degrees.
Besides this method of direct measurement, the figure of the earth may be determined from the observed number of oscillations made by a pendulum of invariable length in different latitudes. These, though they confirm the foregoing results, give a somewhat greater ellipticity to the earth than that found by the measurement of degrees. Pendulums vibrate more slowly the nearer they are to the equator. It follows, therefore, that they are there farther from the centre of the earth.
From the most reliable measures that have been made, the dimensions of the earth may be thus stated:
Greater or equatorial diameter …………. 7,925 miles. Less or polar diameter ………………….7,899 ” Difference or polar compression …………. 26 “
Such was the result of the discussion respecting the figure and size of the earth. While it was yet undetermined, another controversy arose, fraught with even more serious consequences. This was the conflict respecting the earth’s position with regard to the sun and the planetary bodies.
Copernicus, a Prussian, about the year 1507, had completed a book “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies.” He had journeyed to Italy in his youth, had devoted his attention to astronomy, and had taught mathematics at Rome. From a profound study of the Ptolemaic and Pythagorean systems, he had come to a conclusion in favor of the latter, the object of his book being to sustain it. Aware that his doctrines were totally opposed to revealed truth, and foreseeing that they would bring upon him the punishments of the Church, be expressed himself in a cautious and apologetic manner, saying that he had only taken the liberty of trying whether, on the supposition of the earth’s motion, it was possible to find better explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial orbs; that in doing this he had only taken the privilege that had been allowed to others, of feigning what hypothesis they chose. The preface was addressed to Pope Paul III.
Full of misgivings as to what might be the result, he refrained from publishing his book for thirty-six years, thinking that “perhaps it might be better to follow the examples of the Pythagoreans and others, who delivered their doctrine only by tradition and to friends.” At the entreaty of Cardinal Schomberg he at length published it in 1543. A copy of it was brought to him on his death-bed. Its fate was such as he had anticipated. The Inquisition condemned it as heretical. In their decree, prohibiting it, the Congregation of the Index denounced his system as “that false Pythagorean doctrine utterly contrary to the Holy Scriptures.”
Astronomers justly affirm that the book of Copernicus, “De Revolutionibus,” changed the face of their science. It incontestably established the heliocentric theory. It showed that the distance of the fixed stars is infinitely great, and that the earth is a mere point in the heavens. Anticipating Newton, Copernicus imputed gravity to the sun, the moon, and heavenly bodies, but he was led astray by assuming that the celestial motions must be circular. Observations on the orbit of Mars, and his different diameters at different times, had led Copernicus to his theory.
In thus denouncing the Copernican system as being in contradiction to revelation, the ecclesiastical authorities were doubtless deeply moved by inferential considerations. To dethrone the earth from her central dominating position, to give her many equals and not a few superiors, seemed to diminish her claims upon the Divine regard. If each of the countless myriads of stars was a sun, surrounded by revolving globes, peopled with responsible beings like ourselves, if we had fallen so easily and had been redeemed at so stupendous a price as the death of the Son of God, how was it with them? Of them were there none who had fallen or might fall like us? Where, then, for them could a Savior be found?
During the year 1608 one Lippershey, a Hollander, discovered that, by looking through two glass lenses, combined in a certain manner together, distant objects were magnified and rendered very plain. He had invented the telescope. In the following year Galileo, a Florentine, greatly distinguished by his mathematical and scientific writings, hearing of the circumstance, but without knowing the particulars of the construction, invented a form of the instrument for himself. Improving it gradually, he succeeded in making one that. could magnify thirty times. Examining the moon, he found that she had valleys like those of the earth, and mountains casting shadows. It had been said in the old times that in the Pleiades there were formerly seven stars, but a legend related that one of them had mysteriously disappeared. On turning his telescope toward them, Galileo found that he could easily count not fewer than forty. In whatever direction he looked, be discovered stars that were totally invisible to the naked eye.
On the night of January 7, 1610, he perceived three small stars in a straight line, adjacent to the planet Jupiter, and, a few evenings later, a fourth. He found that these were revolving in orbits round the body of the planet, and, with transport, recognized that they presented a miniature representation of the Copernican system.
The announcement of these wonders at once attracted universal attention. The spiritual authorities were not slow to detect their tendency, as endangering the doctrine that the universe was made for man. In the creation of myriads of stars, hitherto invisible, there must surely have been some other motive than that of illuminating the nights for him.
It had been objected to the Copernican theory that, if the planets Mercury and Venus move round the sun in orbits interior to that of the earth, they ought to show phases like those of the moon; and that in the case of Venus, which is so brilliant and conspicuous, these phases should be very obvious. Copernicus himself had admitted the force of the objection, and had vainly tried to find an explanation. Galileo, on turning his telescope to the planet, discovered that the expected phases actually exist; now she was a crescent, then half-moon, then gibbous, then full. Previously to Copernicus, it was supposed that the planets shine by their own light, but the phases of Venus and Mars proved that their light is reflected. The Aristotelian notion, that celestial differ from terrestrial bodies in being incorruptible, received a rude shock from the discoveries of Galileo, that there are mountains and valleys in the moon like those of the earth, that the sun is not perfect, but has spots on his face, and that he turns on his axis instead of being in a state of majestic rest. The apparition of new stars had already thrown serious doubts on this theory of incorruptibility.
These and many other beautiful telescopic discoveries tended to the establishment of the truth of the Copernican theory and gave unbounded alarm to the Church. By the low and ignorant ecclesiastics they were denounced as deceptions or frauds. Some affirmed that the telescope might be relied on well enough for terrestrial objects, but with the heavenly bodies it was altogether a different affair. Others declared that its invention was a mere application of Aristotle’s remark that stars could be seen in the daytime from the bottom of a deep well. Galileo was accused of imposture, heresy, blasphemy, atheism. With a view of defending himself, he addressed a letter to the Abbe Castelli, suggesting that the Scriptures were never intended to be a scientific authority, but only a moral guide. This made matters worse. He was summoned before the Holy Inquisition, under an accusation of having taught that the earth moves round the sun, a doctrine “utterly contrary to the Scriptures.” He was ordered to renounce that heresy, on pain of being imprisoned. He was directed to desist from teaching and advocating the Copernican theory, and pledge himself that he would neither publish nor defend it for the future. Knowing well that Truth has no need of martyrs, be assented to the required recantation, and gave the promise demanded.
For sixteen years the Church had rest. But in 1632 Galileo ventured on the publication of his work entitled “The System of the World,” its object being the vindication of the Copernican doctrine. He was again summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, accused of having asserted that the earth moves round the sun. He was declared to have brought upon himself the penalties of heresy. On his knees, with his hand on the Bible, he was compelled to abjure and curse the doctrine of the movement of the earth. What a spectacle! This venerable man, the most illustrious of his age, forced by the threat of death to deny facts which his judges as well as himself knew to be true! He was then committed to prison, treated with remorseless severity during the remaining ten years of his life, and was denied burial in consecrated ground. Must not that be false which requires for its support so much imposture, so much barbarity? The opinions thus defended by the Inquisition are now objects of derision to the whole civilized world.
One of the greatest of modern mathematicians, referring to this subject, says that the point here contested was one which is for mankind of the highest interest, because of the rank it assigns to the globe that we inhabit. If the earth be immovable in the midst of the universe, man has a right to regard himself as the principal object of the care of Nature. But if the earth be only one of the planets revolving round the sun, an insignificant body in the solar system, she will disappear entirely in the immensity of the heavens, in which this system, vast as it may appear to us, is nothing but an insensible point.
The triumphant establishment of the Copernican doctrine dates from the invention of the telescope. Soon there was not to be found in all Europe an astronomer who had not accepted the heliocentric theory with its essential postulate, the double motion of the earth– movement of rotation on her axis, and a movement of revolution round the sun. If additional proof of the latter were needed, it was furnished by Bradley’s great discovery of the aberration of the fixed stars, an aberration depending partly on the progressive motion of light, and partly on the revolution of the earth. Bradley’s discovery ranked in importance with that of the precession of the equinoxes. Roemer’s discovery of the progressive motion of light, though denounced by Fontenelle as a seductive error, and not admitted by Cassini, at length forced its way to universal acceptance.
Next it was necessary to obtain correct ideas of the dimensions of the solar system, or, putting the problem under a more limited form, to determine the distance of the earth from the sun.
In the time of Copernicus it was supposed that the sun’s distance could not exceed five million miles, and indeed there were many who thought that estimate very extravagant. From a review of the observations of Tycho Brahe, Kepler, however, concluded that the error was actually in the opposite direction, and that the estimate must be raised to at least thirteen million. In 1670 Cassini showed that these numbers were altogether inconsistent with the facts, and gave as his conclusion eighty-five million.
The transit of Venus over the face of the sun, June 3, 1769, had been foreseen, and its great value in the solution of this fundamental problem in astronomy appreciated. With commendable alacrity various governments contributed their assistance in making observations, so that in Europe there were fifty stations, in Asia six, in America seventeen. It was for this purpose that the English Government dispatched Captain Cook on his celebrated first voyage. He went to Otaheite. His voyage was crowned with success. The sun rose without a cloud, and the sky continued equally clear throughout the day. The transit at Cook’s station lasted from about half-past nine in the morning until about half-past three in the afternoon, and all the observations were made in a satisfactory manner.
But, on the discussion of the observations made at the different stations, it was found that there was not the accordance that could have been desired–the result varying from eighty-eight to one hundred and nine million. The celebrated mathematician, Encke, therefore reviewed them in 1822-’24, and came to the conclusion that the sun’s horizontal parallax, that is, the angle under which the semi-diameter of the earth is seen from the sun, is 8 576/1000 seconds; this gave as the distance 95,274,000 miles. Subsequently the observations were reconsidered by Hansen, who gave as their result 91,659,000 miles. Still later, Leverrier made it 91,759,000. Airy and Stone, by another method, made it 91,400,000; Stone alone, by a revision of the old observations, 91,730,000; and finally, Foucault and Fizeau, from physical experiments, determining the velocity of light, and therefore in their nature altogether differing from transit observations, 91,400,000. Until the results of the transit of next year (1874) are ascertained, it must therefore be admitted that the distance of the earth from the sun is somewhat less than ninety-two million miles.
This distance once determined, the dimensions of the solar system may be ascertained with ease and precision. It is enough to mention that the distance of Neptune from the sun, the most remote of the planets at present known, is about thirty times that of the earth.
By the aid of these numbers we may begin to gain a just appreciation of the doctrine of the human destiny of the universe–the doctrine that all things were made for man. Seen from the sun, the earth dwindles away to a mere speck, a mere dust-mote glistening in his beams. If the reader wishes a more precise valuation, let him hold a page of this book a couple of feet from his eye; then let him consider one of its dots or full stops; that dot is several hundred times larger in surface than is the earth as seen from the sun!
Of what consequence, then, can such an almost imperceptible particle be? One might think that it could be removed or even annihilated, and yet never be missed. Of what consequence is one of those human monads, of whom more than a thousand millions swarm on the surface of this all but invisible speck, and of a million of whom scarcely one will leave a trace that he has ever existed? Of what consequence is man, his pleasures or his pains?
Among the arguments brought forward against the Copernican system at the time of its promulgation, was one by the great Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, originally urged by Aristarchus against the Pythagorean system, to the effect that, if, as was alleged, the earth moves round the sun, there ought to be a change of the direction in which the fixed stars appear. At one time we are nearer to a particular region of the heavens by a distance equal to the whole diameter of the earth’s orbit than we were six months previously, and hence there ought to be a change in the relative position of the stars; they should seem to separate as we approach them, and to close together as we recede from them; or, to use the astronomical expression, these stars should have a yearly parallax.
The parallax of a star is the angle contained between two lines drawn from it–one to the sun, the other to the earth.
At that time, the earth’s distance from the sun was greatly under-estimated. Had it been known, as it is now, that that distance exceeds ninety million miles, or that the diameter of the orbit is more than one hundred and eighty million, that argument would doubtless have had very great weight.
In reply to Tycho, it was said that, since the parallax of a body diminishes as its distance increases, a star may be so far off that its parallax may be imperceptible. This answer proved to be correct. The detection of the parallax of the stars depended on the improvement of instruments for the measurement of angles.
The parallax of alpha Centauri, a fine double star of the Southern Hemisphere, at present considered to be the nearest of the fixed stars, was first determined by Henderson and Maclear at the Cape of Good Hope in 1832-’33. It is about nine-tenths of a second. Hence this star is almost two hundred and thirty thousand times as far from us as the sun. Seen from it, if the sun were even large enough to fill the whole orbit of the earth, or one hundred and eighty million miles in diameter, he would be a mere point. With its companion, it revolves round their common centre of gravity in eighty-one years, and hence it would seem that their conjoint mass is less than that of the sun.
The star 61 Cygni is of the sixth magnitude. Its parallax was first found by Bessel in 1838, and is about one-third of a second. The distance from us is, therefore, much more than five hundred thousand times that of the sun. With its companion, it revolves round their common centre of gravity in five hundred and twenty years. Their conjoint weight is about one-third that of the sun.
There is reason to believe that the great star Sirius, the brightest in the heavens, is about six times as far off as alpha Centauri. His probable diameter is twelve million miles, and the light he emits two hundred times more brilliant than that of the sun. Yet, even through the telescope, he has no measurable diameter; be looks merely like a very bright spark.
The stars, then, differ not merely in visible magnitude, but also in actual size. As the spectroscope shows, they differ greatly in chemical and physical constitution. That instrument is also revealing to us the duration of the life of a star, through changes in the refrangibility of the emitted light. Though, as we have seen, the nearest to us is at an enormous and all but immeasurable distance, this is but the first step–there are others the rays of which have taken thousands, perhaps millions, of years to reach us! The limits of our own system are far beyond the range of our greatest telescopes; what, then, shall we say of other systems beyond? Worlds are scattered like dust in the abysses in space.
Have these gigantic bodies–myriads of which are placed at so vast a distance that our unassisted eyes cannot perceive them–have these no other purpose than that assigned by theologians, to give light to us? Does not their enormous size demonstrate that, as they are centres of force, so they must be centres of motion– suns for other systems of worlds?
While yet these facts were very imperfectly known–indeed, were rather speculations than facts–Giordano Bruno, an Italian, born seven years after the death of Copernicus, published a work on the “Infinity of the Universe and of Worlds;” he was also the author of “Evening Conversations on Ash-Wednesday,” an apology for the Copernican system, and of “The One Sole Cause of Things.” To these may be added an allegory published in 1584, “The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast.” He had also collected, for the use of future astronomers, all the observations he could find respecting the new star that suddenly appeared in Cassiopeia, A.D. 1572, and increased in brilliancy, until it surpassed all the other stars. It could be plainly seen in the daytime. On a sudden, November 11th, it was as bright as Venus at her brightest. In the following March it was of the first magnitude. It exhibited various hues of color in a few months, and disappeared in March, 1574.
The star that suddenly appeared in Serpentarius, in Kepler’s time (1604), was at first brighter than Venus. It lasted more than a year, and, passing through various tints of purple, yellow, red, became extinguished.
Originally, Bruno was intended for the Church. He had become a Dominican, but was led into doubt by his meditations on the subjects of transubstantiation and the immaculate conception. Not caring to conceal his opinions, he soon fell under the censure of the spiritual authorities, and found it necessary to seek refuge successively in Switzerland, France, England, Germany. The cold-scented sleuth-hounds of the Inquisition followed his track remorselessly, and eventually hunted him back to Italy. He was arrested in Venice, and confined in the Piombi for six years, without books, or paper, or friends.
In England he had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity; the impostures, of his persecutors–that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith.