onomical controversy, and have
therefore been led by that circumstance to complete the survey of the
entire period from the same, that is, the scientific point of view. Many
different modes of treating it spontaneously present themselves; but so
vast are the subjects to be brought under consideration, so numerous
their connexions, and so limited the space at my disposal, that I must
give the preference to one which, with sufficient copiousness, offers
also precision. Whoever will examine the progress of European
intellectual advancement thus far manifested will find that it has
concerned itself with three great questions: 1. The ascertainment of the
position of the earth in the universe; 2. The history of the earth in
time; 3. The position of man among living beings. Under this last is
ranged all that he has done in scientific discovery, and all those
inventions which are the characteristics of the present industrial age.

What am I? Where am I? we may imagine to have been the first
exclamations of the first man awakening to conscious existence. Here, in
our Age of Reason, we have been dealing with the same thoughts. They are
the same which, as we have seen, occupied Greek intellectual life.

[Sidenote: Roman astronomical ideas.] When Halley's comet appeared in
1456, it was described by those who saw it as an object of "unheard-of
magnitude;" its tail, which shook down "diseases, pestilence, and war"
upon earth, reached over a third part of the heavens. It was considered
as connected with the progress of Mohammed II., who had just then taken
Constantinople. It struck terror into all people. From his seat,
invisible to it, in Italy, the sovereign pontiff, Calixtus III., issued
his ecclesiastical fulminations; but the comet in the heavens, like the
sultan on the earth, pursued its course undeterred. In vain were all the
bells in Europe ordered to be rung to scare it away; in vain was it
anathematized; in vain were prayers put up in all directions to stop it.
True to its time, it punctually returns from the abysses of space,
uninfluenced by anything save agencies of a material kind. A signal
lesson for the meditations of every religious man.

[Sidenote: More correct ideas among some of the clergy.] Among the
clergy there were, however, some who had more correct cosmic ideas than
those of Calixtus. A century before Copernicus, Cardinal de Cusa had
partially adopted the heliocentric theory, as taught in the old times by
Ph