om full acceptance of the relatively
simple and, as we now know, correct Copernican doctrine. From our
latter-day point of view, it seems so much more natural to accept
than to reject the Copernican system, that we find it difficult to put
ourselves in the place of a sixteenth-century observer. Yet if we recall
that the traditional view, having warrant of acceptance by nearly all
thinkers of every age, recorded the earth as a fixed, immovable body, we
shall see that our surprise should be excited rather by the thinker who
can break away from this view than by the one who still tends to cling
to it.

Moreover, it is useless to attempt to disguise the fact that something
more than a mere vague tradition was supposed to support the idea of
the earth's overshadowing importance in the cosmical scheme.
The sixteenth-century mind was overmastered by the tenets of
ecclesiasticism, and it was a dangerous heresy to doubt that the Hebrew
writings, upon which ecclesiasticism based its claim, contained the last
word regarding matters of science. But the writers of the Hebrew text
had been under the influence of that Babylonian conception of the
universe which accepted the earth as unqualifiedly central--which,
indeed, had never so much as conceived a contradictory hypothesis;
and so the Western world, which had come to accept these writings as
actually supernatural in origin, lay under the spell of Oriental ideas
of a pre-scientific era. In our own day, no one speaking with authority
thinks of these Hebrew writings as having any scientific weight
whatever. Their interest in this regard is purely antiquarian; hence
from our changed point of view it seems scarcely credible that Tycho
Brahe can have been in earnest when he quotes the Hebrew traditions as
proof that the sun revolves about the earth. Yet we shall see that for
almost three centuries after the time of Tycho, these same dreamings
continued to be cited in opposition to those scientific advances which
new observations made necessary; and this notwithstanding the fact that
the Oriental phrasing is, for the most part, poetically ambiguous and
susceptible of shifting interpretations, as the criticism of successive
generations has amply testified.

As we have said, Tycho Brahe, great observer as he was, could not shake
himself free from the Oriental incubus. He began his objections, then,
to the Copernican system by quoting the adverse testimony of a Hebrew
prophet who lived mo