The Anatomy of Melancholy

An arrow shot from a bow would have to go seven times around the earth while a man could say a Hail Mary, if it covered the same distance, or circle the earth 1,884 times in an hour. This is “beyond human thought,” beyond human conception: “swifter than a javelin and than an arrow matching the winds.” A man riding forty miles a day could not cover as much ground in 2,904 years as the firmament travels in twenty-four hours, or as much in 203 years as that same firmament travels in one minute—“which seems incredible.”

And the Pole Star, which to our thinking scarcely moves out of its place, travels in a greater circuit than the sun: the diameter of that circuit is much larger than the diameter of the sun’s heaven. Together with the other fixed stars, it is 20,000 earth radii away from us, as Tycho proves.

To avoid these impossibilities, therefore, they assign a threefold motion to the earth, with the sun immovable at the centre of the whole world and the earth the centre of the moon alone, above Venus and Mercury and below Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Or, as Origanus and others maintain, they give the earth a single motion while it remains at the centre of the world, which is more probable. They give the firmament a single motion, completed in thirty or twenty-six thousand years; and similarly with the planets: Saturn completes its sole and proper motion in thirty years, Jupiter in twelve, Mars in three, and so on. Thus they explain all the appearances better than in any other way.

They calculate all motions—whether in longitude or latitude, direct, stationary, retrograde, ascending or descending—without epicycles, intricate eccentric circles, and so on, “more correctly and conveniently through a single motion of the earth,” says Lansbergen; much more reliably than by those Alfonsine or similar tables founded on the other suppositions.

And it is true, they say, that according to the principles of optics the visible appearances of the planets do indeed correspond to their sizes and orbits in this way, agreeing most closely with mathematical observations and earlier calculations. There is no conflict with physical axioms, because no spheres penetrate one another. But then between Saturn’s sphere and the firmament lies an incredible, vast space or distance—7,000,000 earth radii, as Tycho calculates—empty of stars.

Besides, they so increase the size of the stars and enlarge their circuit to answer the usual objections about parallaxes and retrograde motions of the fixed stars, changes of the poles, differences in elevation from place to place, or the latitude of cities here on earth—for, they say, if a man’s eye were in the firmament, he would not discern the earth’s great annual motion at all: it would still appear “an indivisible point,” seemingly fixed in one place and of the same size—that the result is wholly contrary to reason and natural philosophy; every bit as absurd, as disproportionate, and, some say, as monstrous as that swift motion of the sun and heavens.