have no means
of knowing now whether it was adopted to any extent or not. It may seem
rather surprising that a cardinal should have been the one to make such
a suggestion. Cusanus, however, was very much interested in mathematics
and in the natural sciences, and we have many wonderful suggestions from
his pen. He was the first, for instance, to suggest, more than a century
before Copernicus, that the earth was not the centre of the universe,
and that it would not be absolutely at rest or, as he said, devoid of
all motion. His words are: "_Terra igitur, quae centrum esse nequit, motu
omni carere non potest_." He described very clearly how the earth moved
round its own axis, and then he added, what cannot fail to be a
surprising declaration for those in the modern times who think such an
idea of much later origin, that he considered that the earth itself
cannot be fixed, but moves as do the other stars in the heavens. The
expression is so astonishing at that time in the world's history that it
seems worth the while to give it in its original form, so that it may be
seen clearly that it is not any subsequent far-fetched interpretation
of his opinion, but the actual words themselves, that convey this idea.
He said: "_Consideravi quod terra ista non potest esse fixa, sed movetur
ut aliae stellae._"

How clearly Cusanus anticipated another phase of our modern views may be
judged from what he has to say in "De Docta Ignorantia" with regard to
the constitution of the sun. It is all the more surprising that he
should by some form of intuition reach such a conclusion, for the
ordinary sources of information with regard to the sun would not suggest
such an expression except to a genius, whose intuition outran by far the
knowledge of his time. The Cardinal said: "To a spectator on the surface
of the sun the splendor which appears to us would be invisible, since it
contains, as it were, an earth for its central mass, with a
circumferential envelope of light and heat, and between the two an
atmosphere of water and clouds and of ambient air." After reading that
bit of precious astronomical science announced nearly five centuries
ago, it is easy to understand how Copernicus could have anticipated
other phases of our knowledge, as he did in his declarations that the
figure of the earth is not a sphere, but is somewhat irregular, and that
the orbit of the earth is not circular.

Cusanus was an extremely practical man, and was constantl