Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

29. John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion, 1660–1750, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976, page 150.

30. Febvre, Op. cit., page 340.

31. Ibid., page 349.

32. Barnes, Op. cit., page 715. As Febvre showed, a vernacular language such as French lacked both the vocabulary and the syntax for scepticism. Such words as ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, ‘occult’ or ‘sensitive’, or ‘intuition’, were not yet in use. These were all words coined in the eighteenth century. As Lucien Febvre puts it, ‘the sixteenth century was a century that wanted to believe’. Febvre, Op. cit., page 355.

33. Redwood, Op. cit., page 30.

34. Febvre, Op. cit., page 332.

35. Kuhn quotes from a long cosmological poem, published in 1578 and very popular, which depicted Copernicans as

Those clerks who think (think how absurd a jest)

That neither heav’ns nor stars do turn at all,

Nor dance about this great round earthly ball;

But th’earth itself, this massy globe of ours,

Turns round-about once every twice-twelve hours:

And we resemble land-bred novices

New brought aboard to venture on the seas;

Who, at first launching from the shore, suppose

The ship stands still, and that the ground it goes . . .

36. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 190. Despite its views, even this book by Bodin was placed on the Index.

37. Ibid., page 191. Luther’s principal lieutenant, Philip Melanchthon, went further, quoting biblical passages that Copernican theory disagreed with, notably Ecclesiastes 1:4–5, which states that ‘the earth abideth forever’ and that ‘The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.’

38. Ibid., page 191; see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, Op. cit., pages 27ff, for a different detailed discussion of heliocentrism and its reception. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

39. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 193.

40. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London: Penguin, 1971, page 4.

41. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 197.

42. Ibid., page 244.

43. Tycho Brahe did work out an alternative explanation to Copernicus, which kept the earth at the centre of the universe, and the moon and sun in their old Ptolemaic orbits. But even this, the so-called ‘Tychonic’ system, necessitated the sun’s orbit intersecting with that of Venus and Mars. This meant that the traditional idea of the planets and stars orbiting around giant crystal balls could no longer be sustained.

44. Thomas, Op. cit., page 416.

45. Next, the spots on the sun, also revealed by the telescope, conflicted with both the idea of the perfection of the upper realm, while the way the spots appeared and disappeared betrayed yet more the mutability in the heavens. Worse still, the movement of the sun-spots suggested that the sun rotated on its axis in just the same way that Copernicus claimed the earth did. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 222.

46. People tried, of course. Some of Galileo’s opponents refused even to look through a telescope, arguing that if God had meant man to see the heavens in that way he would have endowed him with telescopic eyes.

47. And in the universities, Ptolemaic, Copernican and Tychonic systems of astronomy (see note 43 above) were taught side-by-side, the Ptolemaic and the Tychonic not being dropped until the eighteenth century.

48. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 198.

49. Popkin, Op. cit. Barnes, Op. cit., page 784. People did not, at first, see any conflict between religion and reason. Redwood, Op. cit., pages 214–215.

50. See: Israel, Op. cit., chapter 12, ‘Miracles denied’, pages 218–229, for a fuller discussion of this subject; and Thomas, Op. cit., pages 59–60.

51. Barnes, Op. cit., page 785.

52. Herrick, Op. cit., page 38.

53. The more you think about it, the harder it is to make this distinction.

54. Redwood, Op. cit., page 140. The very concept of revelation took a knock at the end of the seventeenth century as the world of witches, apparitions, magical cures and charms suffered a near-fatal setback in the wake of the discoveries of science, which appeared to suggest an atomistic, determinist universe.

55. Barnes, Op. cit., page 788.

56. Redwood, Op. cit., page 179.

57. Israel, Op. cit., page 519. Israel has a whole section on Collins, pages 614–619.

58. Barnes, Op. cit., page 791.

59. Herrick, Op. cit., page 58.

60. A. C. Giffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant, New York: Scribners, 1915, pages 208ff.

61. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 282.

62. Israel, Op. cit., page 266.