ing to it. Yet still, as a learned man, he was well acquainted with all that could be said in favour of the Copernican system. And he puts these arguments into the mouth of Adam in the 8th book of ‘Paradise Lost.’ An angel, in reply, reminds Adam—what is, in fact, the case—that neither the motion of the sun nor of the earth can be absolutely proved; and adds that these are matters too high and abstruse for human inquiry. Milton’s mind was “apparently uncertain to the last which of the two systems, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican, was the true one.”[1] Surely, however, if but slowly, the Copernican theory established itself in the mind of Europe; and when once it had been established, then a great gulf was set between Aristotle and the modern world.
We have seen Aristotle an object of reverence to the great scholastic philosophers and the great poet the Middle Ages. But we must not forget that the universities were, so to speak, founded in Aristotle—that for a long time the chief end of their being was to teach Aristotle. Chaucer describes the zeal of the poor Oxford student for this kind of learning in the following terms:—
That unto logik hadde long y go:
As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fast, I undertake;
But looked holwe and thereto soberlye.
Ful threadbare was his overest courtepye.
- ↑ See Professor Masson’s edition of ‘Milton’s Poetical Works’ (Macmillan, 1874), vol. i. p. 92.
