Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 115
An admirable and angelic doctrine, and well in accord with another one,
also Divine, which, while it grants to us the right to argue about the
constitution of the universe (perhaps in order that the working of the
human mind shall not be curtailed or made lazy) adds that we cannot
discover the work of His hands. Let us, then, exercise these activities
permitted to us and ordained by God, that we may recognize and thereby
so much the more admire His greatness, however much less fit we may
find ourselves to penetrate the profound depths of His infinite wisdom. 34
There has been much discussion as to exactly why Galileo himself was
condemned, but it seems clear that this thinly veiled insult to the Pope together with
his open flaunting (in all but the letter) of the injunction to treat the Copernican
system as no more than hypothetical would in themselves have provided ample
reason. In any case he was called before the Inquisition in the following year,
made to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
As we shall see, this did not prevent Galileo from preparing and having
published another book of outstanding importance, but he naturally refrained
from making any statements about the motion of the Earth. And for a while the
events of 1632–3 did put a damper on discussions of the Copernican system,
especially in Catholic countries. Descartes, for instance, had finished his Le
Monde at about this time, but suppressed it because
I learned that people to whom I defer and whose authority over my own
actions can hardly be less than is that of my own reason over my own
thoughts, had disapproved an opinion on physics published a little before
by someone else. 35
But in general the condemnation probably had less lasting effect on the
development than did natural inertia, and in both England and Scotland it was
well into the second half of the seventeenth century before Aristotelian
cosmology was displaced from university teaching. In the eighteenth century the
end of the old cosmology was symbolized by the curt note inserted by the
minimite friars Le Seur and Jacquier in their standard edition of Newton’s
Principia. At the beginning of Book III, they wrote:
In this Third Book Newton assumes the hypothesis of the motion of the
Earth. The author’s propositions could only be explicated by our making
the same hypothesis. Hence we are driven to don an alien persona. For the
rest we promise to obey the decrees borne against the motion of the Earth
by the high pontiffs. 36
And they then proceeded to elucidate the work with no further mention of the
matter.