ificance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater
than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art
of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at this
time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still prevailed.
Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is associated with
the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was slow in producing its
effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the condemnation of Galileo by
the Church made Descartes, who dreaded nothing so much as a collision
with the ecclesiastical authorities unwilling to insist on it.
[Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. p.
42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published
1667), does not venture to affirm the Copernican system; he explains
it sympathetically, but leaves the question open. [Footnote: Masson
(Milton's Poetical Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74)
"coincides with the period of the struggle between the two systems"
(p. 90). Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's
Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as
an unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Masson has some
apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the
thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects
whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was an
event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the universe,
to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.

We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing
what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered
that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and that
we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe of which
the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged position by our own
planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of view, to insignificance;
the necessity of admitting the probability that there may be many other
inhabited worlds--all this had consequences ranging beyond the field of
astronomy. It was as if a man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or
London should awake to discover that he was really in an obscure island
in the Pacific Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster
than he had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts
to the startling illumi