every age, recorded the earth as a fixed, immovable body, we
shall see that our surprise should be excited rather by the
thinker who can break away from this view than by the one who
still tends to cling to it.

Moreover, it is useless to attempt to disguise the fact that
something more than a mere vague tradition was supposed to
support the idea of the earth's overshadowing importance in the
cosmical scheme. The sixteenth-century mind was overmastered by
the tenets of ecclesiasticism, and it was a dangerous heresy to
doubt that the Hebrew writings, upon which ecclesiasticism based
its claim, contained the last word regarding matters of science.
But the writers of the Hebrew text had been under the influence
of that Babylonian conception of the universe which accepted the
earth as unqualifiedly central--which, indeed, had never so much
as conceived a contradictory hypothesis; and so the Western
world, which had come to accept these writings as actually
supernatural in origin, lay under the spell of Oriental ideas of
a pre-scientific era. In our own day, no one speaking with
authority thinks of these Hebrew writings as having any
scientific weight whatever. Their interest in this regard is
purely antiquarian; hence from our changed point of view it seems
scarcely credible that Tycho Brahe can have been in earnest when
he quotes the Hebrew traditions as proof that the sun revolves
about the earth. Yet we shall see that for almost three centuries
after the time of Tycho, these same dreamings continued to be
cited in opposition to those scientific advances which new
observations made necessary; and this notwithstanding the fact
that the Oriental phrasing is, for the most part, poetically
ambiguous and susceptible of shifting interpretations, as the