condemnation of Galileo by the Church made Descartes, who dreaded
nothing so much as a collision with the ecclesiastical authorities
unwilling to insist on it. [Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la
philosophie cartesienne, i. p. 42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the
Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published 1667), does not venture to
affirm the Copernican system; he explains it sympathetically, but
leaves the question open. [Footnote: Masson (Milton's Poetical
Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74) "coincides with
the period of the struggle between the two systems" (p. 90).
Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's
Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as an
unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Masson has some
apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the
thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects
whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was
an event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the
universe, to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.

We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing
what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered
that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and
that we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe
of which the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged
position by our own planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of
view, to insignificance; the necessity of admitting the probability
that there may be many other inhabited worlds--all this had
consequences ranging beyond the field of astronomy. It was as if a
man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or London should awake
to discover that he was really in an obscure island in the Pacific
Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster than he