Страница 7

 

Письмо №1 стр. 7

not be made eye-witnesses? The ignorant — unable to grapple with the invisible operators — might some day vent their rage on the visible agents at work; the higher and educated classes would go on disbelieving as ever, tearing you to shreds as before. In common with many, you blame us for our great secrecy. Yet we know something of human nature for the experience of long centuries — aye, ages — has taught us. And, we know, that so long as science has anything to learn, and a shadow of religious dogmatism lingers in the hearts of the multitudes, the world's prejudices have to be conquered step by step, not at a rush. As hoary antiquity had more than one Socrates so the dim Future will give birth to more than one martyr. Enfranchised science contemptuously turned away her face from the Copernican opinion renewing the theories of Aristarchus Samius — who "affirmeth that the earth moveth circularly about her own centre" years before the Church sought to sacrifice Galileo as a holocaust to the Bible. The ablest mathematician at the Court of Edward VI — Robert Recorde — was left to starve in jail by his colleagues, who laughed at his Castle of Knowledge,


Notes: 

Aristarchus of Samos was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathemetician who presented the heliocentric view that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

Robert Recorde was a Welsh physician and mathematiciam who introduced the "+" and "=" signs. He died in a debtors' prison after a distinguished career at court. His Castle of Knowledge was a book about planetary motion.