The Anatomy of Melancholy

So much so that, if the whole sphere of Saturn and everything contained within it, “the entire aggregate,” as Fromondus of Louvain argues in his treatise On the Immobility of the Earth, “were carried up among the stars, we could not see it except as a point, so immense is the distance between the earth and the fixed stars,” and so on. If our world is small by comparison, why may we not suppose a plurality of worlds? Why may those infinite stars visible in the firmament not be so many suns, each with its own fixed centre and its subordinate planets, just as the sun has his, always dancing around him?

Cardinal Cusanus, Walkarinus, Bruno, and some others have held this, and some still maintain it: “Minds nourished on Aristotelianism and accustomed to minute speculations may perhaps think otherwise,” and so on. Though they seem close to us, they are infinitely distant, and consequently there are infinite habitable worlds. What prevents it? Why should an infinite cause, such as God, not produce infinite effects, as Nicholas Hill argues in his Democritean Philosophy?

Kepler, I confess, will by no means admit Bruno’s infinite worlds, or that the fixed stars are so many suns with planets circling them. Yet that same Kepler, half in jest and half in earnest in his works on optics, his Lunar Geography, his Dream, and his Discussion with the Starry Messenger, seems partly to agree with this and partly to contradict it. He grants that the planets are inhabited; he is doubtful about the stars.

Tycho too, in his Astronomical Letters, is led by reflection on their vastness and magnitude to break into similar remarks. He will never believe that those enormous bodies were made for no other use than the one we perceive: to illuminate the earth, an imperceptible point in comparison with the whole.

But who is to dwell in these vast bodies, earths, worlds, “if they are inhabited? Rational creatures?” as Kepler asks. “Or have they souls to be saved? Or do they inhabit a better part of the world than we do? Are we or they lords of the world? And how are all things made for man?” “It is difficult to untie this knot, because we have not yet explored everything that bears on it”: it is hard to determine. This alone he proves: that we are “in the foremost recess of the world,” in the best place, the best world, nearest the heart of the sun.

Tommaso Campanella, a Calabrian monk, agrees with this view of Kepler’s in book 2, chapter 4 of On the Sense of Things. He certainly supposes that they are inhabited, though he cannot say by what kind of creatures, and labours to prove it by every means; also that there are infinite worlds. He has written a Defence of Galileo and dedicates this doctrine of his to Cardinal Caetani.