The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Do Roger Bacon and John Dee reason soundly in their aphorisms on the propagation of forms?” Do such images rise in the east with each degree of the zodiac as Aliacensis imagines? “Is there water above heaven?” Is there a crystalline, watery heaven, as Patrizi and the scholastics maintain? This must certainly mean the water in the middle region of the air; otherwise, if the water of Noah’s flood came from there, it must have taken more than a hundred years to fall down to us, as some calculate.

Besides, “Does the earth have a soul?” Some believe this so confidently, with Orpheus, Hermes, and Averroes: from it all other souls—of people, beasts, devils, plants, fishes, and so on—are derived, and into it they return after certain cycles, as Plato in his Timaeus and Plotinus in his Enneads discuss at greater length. See Chalcidius and Beni, commentators on Plato. So too all matter in natural philosophy returns “into prime matter.” Kepler, Patrizi, and some other modern thinkers have partly revived this opinion, and the belief that every star in heaven has a soul, angel, or intelligence to give it life or motion, and so on.

Or let us pass over all the smaller controversies as matters of less importance and examine the great paradox of the earth’s motion, now so much disputed. Aristarchus of Samos and Pythagoras maintained it long ago, as did Democritus and many of their followers. Diego de Zúñiga, Anthony Foscarini, a Carmelite, and some other commentators hold that Job intimates as much in chapter 9, verse 4: “He who moves the earth from its place,” and so on. They maintain that this single passage of Scripture supports the earth’s motion more strongly than all the others oppose it. Pineda refutes them; most contradict them.

However that may be, Copernicus later revived it as a supposition rather than a truth, as he himself confesses in his preface to Pope Nicholas. But it is now seriously maintained by Calcagnini, Telesio, Kepler, Rothmann, Gilbert, Digges, Galileo, Campanella, and especially Lansbergen, as “agreeable to nature, reason, and truth”; also by Origanus and some other followers of his.

For if the earth is the centre of the world and stands still while the heavens move—the most generally accepted opinion, which they call “a disorderly arrangement of heaven,” though Tycho, Ptolemy, and their followers stubbornly maintain it—“what madness is this?” What fury, says Dr Gilbert, “rather boldly,” as Cabeo observes, is to drive the heavens around with such incomprehensible speed in twenty-four hours? Every point of the firmament at the equator must necessarily move 176,660 in one two-hundred-and-forty-sixth of an hour, as Clavius calculates.