glove by the hand of Galileo.

It is not pleasant to think of the immediate result of the combat; to
see the champion of science, old, worn, and on his knees before the
Cardinal Inquisitor, signing his name to what he knew to be a lie. And,
no doubt, the Cardinals rubbed their hands as they thought how well they
had silenced and discredited their adversary. But two hundred years have
passed, and however feeble or faulty her soldiers, Physical Science sits
crowned and enthroned as one of the legitimate rulers of the world of
thought. Charity children would be ashamed not to know that the earth
moves; while the Schoolmen are forgotten; and the Cardinals--well, the
Cardinals are at the oecumenical Council, still at their old business
of trying to stop the movement of the world.

As a ship, which having lain becalmed with every stitch of canvas set,
bounds away before the breeze which springs up astern, so the mind of
Descartes, poised in equilibrium of doubt, not only yielded to the full
force of the impulse towards physical science and physical ways of
thought, given by his great contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey, but shot
beyond them; and anticipated, by bold speculation, the conclusions,
which could only be placed upon a secure foundation by the labours of
generations of workers.

Descartes saw that the discoveries of Galileo meant that the remotest
parts of the universe were governed by mechanical laws; while those of
Harvey meant that the same laws presided over the operations of that
portion of the world which is nearest to us, namely, our own bodily
frame. And crossing the interval between the centre and its vast
circumference by one of the great strides of genius, Descartes sought to
resolve all the phaenomena of the universe into matter and motion, or
forces operating according to law.[71] This grand conception, which is
sketched in the "Discours," and more fully developed in the "Principes"
and in the "Traite de l'Homme," he worked out with extraordinary power
and knowledge; and with the effect of arriving, in the last-named essay,
at that purely mechanical view of vital phaenomena towards which modern
physiology is striving.

Let us try to understand how Descartes got into this path, and why it
led him where it did. The mechanism of the circulation of the blood had
evidently taken a great hold of his mind, as he describes it several
times, at much length. After giving a full account of it in the
"Discourse,