in the terrestrial globe, and natural to it; and since there is nothing
external that can shock it, or hinder it by adverse motions, it goes round
without any ill or danger, it advances without being forced, there is
nothing that resists, nothing that by retiring gives way, but all is open.
For while it revolves in a space void of bodies, or in the incorporeal
aether, all the air, the exhalations of land and water, the clouds and
pendent meteors, are impelled along with the globe circularly: that which
is above the exhalations is void of bodies: the finest bodies and those
which are least cohaerent almost void are not impeded, are not dissolved,
while passing through it. Wherefore also the whole terrestrial globe, with
all its adjuncts, moves bodily along, calmly, meeting no resistance.
Wherefore empty and superstitious is the fear that some weak minds have of
a shock of bodies (like Lucius Lactantius, who, in the fashion of the
unlettered rabble and of the most unreasonable men scoffs at an Antipodes
and at the sphaerick ordering of the Earth all round). So for these
reasons, not only probable but manifest, does the diurnal rotation of the
earth seem, {220} since nature always acts through a few rather than
through many; and it is more agreeable to reason that the Earth's one small
body should make a diurnal rotation, than that the whole universe should be
whirled around. I pass over the reasons of the Earth's remaining motions,
for at present the only question is concerning its diurnal movement,
according to which it moves round with respect to the Sun, and creates a
natural day (which we call a nycthemeron[245]). And indeed Nature may be
thought to have granted a motion very suitable to the Earth's shape, which
(being sphaerical) is revolved about the poles assigned it by Nature much
more easily and fittingly than that the whole universe, whose limit is
unknown and unknowable, should be whirled round; and than there could be
imagined an orbit of the _Primum Mobile_, a thing not accepted by the
ancients, which Aristotle even did not devise or accept as in any shape or
form existing beyond the sphaere of the fixed stars; which finally the
sacred scriptures do not recognize any more than they do the revolution of
the firmament.

* * * * *

CHAP. IIII.

That the Earth moves circularly.

If then the philosophers of the common sort, with an unspeakable absurdity,
imagine the whole heave