THEORIES of the UNIVERSE by Milton Munitz

Author:Milton Munitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE FREE PRESS
Published: 1957-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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From an English translation of Cosmotheoros under the title, The Celestial Worlds Discovered or Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets, London, 1698. The following selection is taken from an edition printed for Robert Urie, Glasgow, 17—(?), pp. 110 ff.

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But that whole mystery is nothing but an idle dream taken from Pythagoras or Plato’s philosophy. And the author himself acknowledges that the proportions do not agree so well as they should, and is fain to invent two or three very silly excuses for it. And he uses yet poorer arguments to prove that the universe is of a spherical figure, and that the number of stars must necessarily be finite, because the magnitude of each of them is so. But what is worst of all is that he settles the space between the sun and the concavity of the sphere of the fixed stars, to be six hundred thousand of the earth’s diameters: for this reason, which he has no foundation for, that as the diameter of the sun is to that of the orbit of Saturn, which he makes to be 1 to 2000, so is this diameter to that of the sphere of the fixed stars. I cannot but wonder how such things as these could fall from so ingenious a man, and so great an astronomer. But I must be of the same opinion with all the greatest philosophers of our age, that the sun is of the same nature with the fixed stars. And this will give us a greater idea of the world, than all those other opinions. For then why may not every one of these stars or suns have as great a retinue as our sun, of planets, with their moons, to wait upon them? Nay, there is a manifest reason why they should. For if we imagine ourselves placed at an equal distance from the sun and fixed stars, we should then perceive no difference between them. For, as for all the planets that we now see attend the sun, we should not have the least glimpse of them, either because their light would be too weak to affect us, or that all the orbs in which they move would make up one lucid point with the sun. In this station we should have not occasion to imagine any difference between the stars, and should make no doubt if we had but the sight, and knew the nature of one of them, to make that the standard of all the rest. We are then placed near one of them, namely, our sun, and so near as to discover six other globes moving round him, some of them having others performing them the same office. Why then may not we make use of the same judgment that we would in that case; and conclude that our star has no better attendance than the others? So that what we allowed the planets, upon the

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