e frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shook like a coward.

And Shakespeare showed himself dangerously tainted with freethought in
assigning (even to the fiery Hotspur) the reply:

So it would have done
At the same season, if your mother's cat
Had kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born.

In a similar vein Butler, in _Hudibras_ ridiculed the folly of those who
believe in horoscopes and nativities:

As if the planet's first aspect
The tender infant did infect
In soul and body, and instil
All future good and future ill;
Which in their dark fatalities lurking,
At destined periods fall a-working,
And break out, like the hidden seeds
Of long diseases, into deeds,
In friendships, enmities, and strife.
And all th' emergencies of life.

[3] Preface to the _Rudolphine Tables_.

[4] It is commonly stated that Bacon opposed the Copernican theory
because he disliked Gilbert, who had advocated it. 'Bacon,' says one of
his editors, 'was too jealous of Gilbert to entertain one moment any
doctrine that he advanced.' But, apart from the incredible littleness of
mind which this explanation imputes to Bacon, it would also have been an
incredible piece of folly on Bacon's part to advocate an inferior theory
while a rival was left to support a better theory. Bacon saw clearly
enough that men were on their way to the discovery of the true theory,
and, so far as in him lay, he indicated how they should proceed in order
most readily to reach the truth. It must, then, have been from
conviction, not out of mere contradiction, that Bacon declared himself
in favour of the Ptolemaic system. In fact, he speaks of the diurnal
motion of the earth as 'an opinion which we can demonstrate to be most
false;' doubtless having in his thoughts some such arguments as misled
Tycho Brahe.

[5] To Bacon's theological contemporaries this must have seemed a
dreadful heresy, and possibly in our own days the assertion would be
judged scarcely less harshly, seeing that the observance of the
(so-called) Sabbath depends directly upon the belief in quite another
origin of the week. Yet there can be little question that the week
really had its origin in astrological formulae.

[6] In Bohn's edition the word 'defective' is here used, entirely
changing the meaning of the sentence. Bacon registers an _Astrologia
Sana_ amongst the things needed for the advancement of learning, whereas
he is made to say that