"Copernican" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The theory is still, nevertheless, not to be grasped without a resolute effort of reflection. It involves an inversion of our everyday conceptions more radical than that which was demanded by the Copernican theory of astronomy, and we know that that theory—offered to and rejected by mankind before the beginning of the Christian era—had to wait through sixteen or seventeen hundred years before it secured an acceptance, at first grudging and even ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... takes Eudoxus as making the planets move round the sun; he has accordingly compared the geocentric periods of Eudoxus with our heliocentric periods. What greater blunder can be made by a writer on ancient astronomy than giving Eudoxus the Copernican system? If Mercury were a black spot in the middle of the sun it would of course move round the earth in a year, or appear to do so: let it swing a little on one side and the other of the sun, and the average period is still a year, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... morality need religion as much as thought and action require emotion; and beyond the utmost reach of the human mind lie the boundless worlds of mystery where the soul must believe and adore what it can but dimly discern. The Copernican theory of the heavens startled believers at first; but we have long since grown accustomed to the new view which reveals to us a universe infinitely more glorious than aught the ancients ever imagined. We do not rightly see either the things which are always ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Persian had perhaps been the classical languages, and Islamism the religion of Europe; and where we have cathedrals and colleges we might have had mosques and mausoleums; and America and the Cape, the compass and the press, the steam-engine, the telescope, and the Copernican System, might have remained still undiscovered; and but for the accident which turned Hannibal's face from Rome after the battle of Cannae, or that which intercepted his brother Asdrubal's letter, we might ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... is that of Luther: "Salvation is by faith." This seems at first to be a dynamic answer. It breaks in on the distracted world like a new moral trumpet-call to the soul. It comes to men like a fresh Copernican insight which discovers a new religious world-centre. The soul by its own inward vision, by its moral attitude, by the swing of the will, can initiate a new relation with God, and so produce a new inward kingdom. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... ideas of Copernicus, made a number of observations on our near neighbor Mars, to show that Copernicus was wrong. He gave these to Kepler, another great astronomer, enjoining him to explain them in such a way as to overthrow the Copernican ideas. But Kepler behaved like Balaam the son of Beor; for, called on to curse (or at least to denounce) the views of Copernicus, he altogether blessed them three times. First, he found from the motions of Mars that the planets do ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... Bruno completes the Copernican picture of the world by doing away with the motionless circle of fixed stars with which Copernicus, and even Kepler, had thought our solar system surrounded, and by opening up the view into the immeasurability of the world. With this the Aristotelian ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... our dear old mother, if she is old; whether young or old, to take her part against all comers; and to argue through thick and thin, which (sober or not) I always attempt to do, that she is the most respectable member of the Copernican System. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... and to his own inability to control or recover them. "But what we want is consecutiveness. 'T is with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah! could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds!" ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... not by any means be persuaded of the motion of the earth, and the distances and magnitudes of the heavenly bodies, should swallow, without the least hesitation, opinions ten thousand times more improbable. Notwithstanding the mathematical certainty of the truth of the Copernican system of astronomy, I have never yet become extensively acquainted with any community in which I have not found many persons professing a respectable degree of intelligence, and even official members of orthodox churches, who entirely discredit ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... denouncing the Copernican system as being in contradiction to revelation, the ecclesiastical authorities were doubtless deeply moved by inferential considerations. To dethrone the earth from her central dominating position, to give her many equals and not a few superiors, seemed to diminish her ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the matter slumbered, until Galileo upheld the Copernican doctrine as the truth, and proved it to be the truth by his telescope. Immediately the Church condemned the statements of Copernicus and forbade Galileo to teach or discuss them. All books which affirmed the motion of the earth were forbidden, and to read ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... what I have been saying, that a man can have his mind open to the receipt of the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind of man himself. I do not know but the basest and the wickedest man who lives may believe in the Copernican theory, or that two and two make four, yet I cannot help believing that if he were a better and truer man he would believe even those truths, outside of himself, of science and arithmetic, more fully and deeply. Men were not all astray in the first thing that they were seeking after, though ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... of our time had scarcely come into play,—modern literature and modern science. Science knew nothing as yet of chemistry, nothing of electricity, of geology, scarce anything of botany. In astronomy, the Copernican system was just struggling into notice, and far from being universally received. Lord Bacon, I think, was the latest author of note in the library bequeathed by John Harvard; and Lord Bacon rejected the Copernican system. English literature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... it was her duty to change her religion, which is the most important of all subjects, and should be studied with all care, and with all the helps we can get. She knew no more of the Church which she left, and that which she embraced, than she did of the difference between the Copernican and Ptolemaick systems.' MRS. KNOWLES. 'She had the New Testament before her.' JOHNSON. 'Madam, she could not understand the New Testament, the most difficult book in the world, for which the study of a life is required.' MRS. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Victory of the Church over Galileo Publication of his Dialogo Hostility of Pope Urban VIII Galileo's second trial by the Inquisition His abjuration Later persecution of him Measures to complete the destruction of the Copernican theory Persecution of Galileo's memory Protestant hostility to the new ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... labors have enabled me to protect my honor And prove the Copernican Newton Keplar and Gallileo theories false I solicit transportation to your department so that I can come and explain the whole of Nature and so enable you to obtain the true value of the Moon from both ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... converted to the Copernican theory of the revolution of the earth around the sun, and after having improved the telescope of Copernicus, invited his fellow-professors to make these observations with him. They absolutely refused to even look through Gallileo's telescope, and after he had demonstrated ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... intellect, Sir Thomas Brown, who, though he had written a large volume in detection of vulgar errors, yet peremptorily pronounces the motion of the earth round the sun, and consequently the whole of the Copernican system unworthy of any serious confutation, as being manifestly repugnant to common sense; which said common sense, like a miller's scales, used to weigh gold or gasses, may, and often does, become ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the earth has been shaken, and with it the heavens likewise, in that very sense in which the expression is used in the text. Our conceptions of them have been shaken. The Copernican system shook them, when it told men that the earth was but a tiny globular planet revolving round the sun. Geology shook them, when it told men that the earth has endured for countless ages, during which whole continents have been submerged, whole seas ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... . . stands still. This statement of the leading principle of the Copernican system, as a mere rhetorical ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... Answer to Adams Enquiries, was not only proper for the Moral Reason which the Poet assigns, but because it would have been highly absurd to have given the Sanction of an Archangel to any particular System of Philosophy. The chief Points in the Ptolemaick and Copernican Hypothesis are described with great Conciseness and Perspicuity, and at the same time dressed in very pleasing ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... enmity, has always subsisted between fanaticism and atheism is still unbroken. At one time, the cry was,—"If you hold that the earth moves round the sun, you deny the truth of the Bible." Popes, conclaves, and religious orders, rose up against the Copernican heresy. But, as Pascal said, they could not prevent the earth from moving, or themselves from moving along with it. One thing, however, they could do, and they did. They could teach numbers to consider the Bible ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thirty and twelve years to complete a revolution, as indicating power superior to the sun's, whose sphere seemed to revolve once in a single year. Many other considerations might have been urged, before the Copernican theory was established, to show that, possibly, some of the planets exert influences more effective than those of the sun ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... evidence now for the first time herewith produced, it is difficult to decide which of them first invented the telescope, or first by actual observation with that marvellous instrument confirmed the truth of the Copernican System by revealing the spots on the Sun, the orbit of Mars, the horns of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter, the mountains in the Moon, the elliptical orbits of comets, etc. It is manifest, however, that they were both working in the same groove ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... individual, would deserve to be considered as the very greatest ever made; and he adds acutely, in answer to the obvious, but shallow objection to it (viz. its apparent assumption of equal ability for reigning in father and son for ever), that it is like the Copernican system of the heavenly bodies,—contradictory to our sense and first impressions, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... approximations to the truth of men who entertained a radically erroneous conception of the universe. Astronomers who went on the Ptolemaic theory managed to provide a very fair description of the actual phenomena of the heavens; but the solid result of their labors was not lost when the Copernican system took its place; and incalculable advantages followed from casting aside the old cumbrous machinery of cycles and epicycles in favor of the simpler conceptions of the new doctrine. A similar change follows when man is placed at the centre ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... paradox; and my mind was not alive to his paradoxes, just as my ears might have become dead to the boatswain's oaths. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes,[66] an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of the holy Church, and ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... university of Padua, where for eighteen years he enjoyed the high consideration of his countrymen. He returned to Pisa, and at the age of seventy was summoned to Rome by the Inquisition, and required to renounce his doctrines relative to the Copernican system, of which he was a zealous defender, and his life was spared only on condition of his abjuring his opinions. It is said that on rising from his knees, after making the abjuration of his belief ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Difficulties of reconciling old formularies with changed beliefs 198 Cause of some great revolutions of belief.—The Copernican system.—Discovery of Newton 198 The antiquity of the world, of death, and of man 200 The Darwinian theory 201 Comparative mythology.—Biblical criticism.—Scientific habits of thought 201 General incorporation of new ideas into ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Johnson's wrath at what he regarded as an apostasy. "Madam," he said, "she is an odious wench," and he proceeded to denounce her audacity in presuming to choose a religion for herself. "She knew no more of the points of difference," he said, "than of the difference between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems." When Mrs. Knowles said that she had the New Testament before her, he said that it was the "most difficult book in the world," and he proceeded to attack the unlucky proselyte with a fury which shocked the two ladies. Mrs. Knowles ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... made considerable advance, the Copernican system remained but a speculation. A single modern observation on a star has to undergo a careful analysis by the combined aid of various sciences—has to be digested by the organism of the sciences; which have severally ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... mightier than planetary scheme. Metaphysic alone can teach us to read aright the intellectual skies. Psychology regards the universe of thought from the Ptolemaic point of view, making man, as this system made the earth, the centre of the whole: metaphysic regards it from the Copernican point of view, making God, as this scheme makes the sun, the regulating principle of all. The difference is as great between "the science of the human mind" and metaphysic, as it is between the Ptolemaic and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... scientific discoveries are made, and more are promised. Geology once unsettled people about Genesis; but closer study of the Bible and of science has given truer views of both, and thinking people are as little troubled about geology now as about Copernican astronomy. At present heredity and psychology are dominating our minds—or, rather, theories as to both; for though beginnings have been made, the stage has not yet been reached of very wide or certain discovery. There is still a great deal of the soul unexplored and unmapped. No reasonable person ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... philosopher is expected to tell us something about the nature of the universe as a whole, and to give grounds for either optimism or pessimism. Both these expectations seem to me mistaken. I believe the conception of "the universe" to be, as its etymology indicates, a mere relic of pre-Copernican astronomy: and I believe the question of optimism and pessimism to be one which the philosopher will regard as outside his scope, except, possibly, to the extent of maintaining that ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... The Copernican theory, which once and forever "brushed the cobwebs out of the sky," by clearing away the mists of pre-existing error, first completely explained the varying positions of the Shepherd's star, irradiating the first or last watch ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... putting his great book, "Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," on the "Index," the wiser plan was adopted of paying no attention to it. Occasionally, however, the subject was broached by some incautious novitiate, and then the custom was to treat the Copernican Theory as a mere hypothesis, and its author as ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... gradual modification and improvement of inadequate working hypotheses, by the slow substitution of correctness for error. Thus monotheism and the doctrine of the soul may be in no worse case than the Copernican theory, or the theory of the circulation of the blood, or the Darwinian theory; itself the successor of innumerable savage guesses, conjectures of Empedocles, ideas of Cuvier, of the elder Darwin, of Lamarck, and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the life of Chinese officials in this period. Recently, J. Needham has tried to show that Ricci and his followers did not bring much which was not already known in China, but that they actually attempted to prevent the Chinese from learning about the Copernican theory. ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... More's poetry; even the main work to which it supposedly forms a final and conclusive canto provides only the slightest excuse for such a continuation. Certainly, in Psychathanasia, More is excited by the new astronomy; he praises the Copernican system throughout Book III, giving an account of it according to the lessons of his study of Galileo's Dialogo, which he may have been reading even as he wrote.[2] Indeed, More tries to harmonize the two poems—his habit ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... contradictory theory of the solar system was propounded and upheld in the sixteenth century, quite supplanting the Ptolemaic theory in the course of the seventeenth. The new system is called Copernican after its first modern exponent—and its general acceptance went far to annihilate astrology and to place astronomy upon ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... knowledge and point of view were inevitably imperfect. Even in natural science he was not altogether abreast of his time—he refused to accept Harvey's discovery of the manner of the circulation of the blood and the Copernican system of astronomy. Neither was he, as is sometimes supposed, the inventor of the inductive method of observation and reasoning, which in some degree is fundamental in all study. But he did, much more ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... The system of geography and astronomy taught in the second century by Ptolemy of Alexandria; it was accepted till the sixteenth century, when the Copernican system was established. Ptolemy believed that the sun, planets, and stars revolve around the earth; Copernicus taught that the ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... at, who should talk after this manner? I ANSWER, he would so; in such things we ought to THINK WITH THE LEARNED, AND SPEAK WITH THE VULGAR. They who to demonstration are convinced of the truth of the Copernican system do nevertheless say "the sun rises," "the sun sets," or "comes to the meridian"; and if they affected a contrary style in common talk it would without doubt appear very ridiculous. A little reflexion on what is here said will make it manifest that the common ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... prose came our own day. The new light first flushed the modern world in the writings of the philosopher-poets of Germany: Kant and Lessing, Fichte and Schiller, Goethe and Hegel. They brought about the Copernican change. For them this world of the five senses, of space and time and natural cause, instead of being the fixed centre around which all things revolved, was explicable only in its relation to a system ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones |
