east, like a wheel turning on its axle. Philolaus the
Pythagorean[242] would have the earth to be one of the stars, and believed
that it turned in an oblique circle around fire, just as the sun and moon
have their own courses. He was a distinguished mathematician, and a most
able investigator of nature. But after Philosophy became a subject treated
of by very many and was popularized, theories adapted to the vulgar
intelligence or based on sophistical subtility occupied the minds of most
men, and prevailed like a torrent, the multitude consenting. Thereupon many
valuable discoveries of the ancients were rejected, and were dismissed to
perish in banishment; or at least by not being further cultivated and
developed became obsolete. So that Copernicus[243] (among later
discoverers, a man most deserving of literary honour) is the first who
attempted to illustrate the [Greek: phainomena] of {215} moving bodies by
new hypotheses: and these demonstrations of reasons others either follow or
observe in order that they may more surely discover the phaenomenal harmony
of the movements; being men of the highest attainments in every kind of
learning. Thus supposed and imaginary orbs of Ptolemy and others for
finding the times and periods of the motions are not necessarily to be
admitted to the physical inquiries of philosophers. It is then an ancient
opinion and one that has come down from old times, but is now augmented by
important considerations that the whole earth rotates with a daily
revolution in the space of 24 hours. Well then, since we see the Sun and
Moon and other planets and the glory of all the stars approach and retire
within the space of one natural day, either the Earth herself must needs be
set in motion with a diurnal movement from West to East, or the whole
heaven and the rest of nature from East to West. But, in the first place,
it is not likely that the highest heaven and all those visible splendours
of the fixed stars are impelled along that most rapid and useless course.
Besides, who is the Master who has ever made out that the stars which we
call fixed are in one and the same sphere, or has established by reasoning
that there are any real and, as it were, adamantine sphaeres? No one has
ever proved this as a fact; nor is there a doubt but that just as the
planets are at unequal distances from the earth, [244]so are those vast and
multitudinous lights separated from the Earth by varying and very remote
altitude