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sumus gerere personam. Cæterum latis a summis Pontificibus contra telluris motum Decretis nos obsequi profitemur. — Tom. iii. Genev. 1742. — Speech, pp. 18, 19, note. No one can be so hoodwinked as not to perceive that, in the view of these learned men, science was under a restraint which could not be resisted, and a restraint so disgraceful as to render hypocrisy necessary; and none but such can avoid seeing, that the restraint is, and was created, by the existing force and operation of the Decree of the Index. But the fact speaks for itself.[1] How is it possible to conceive, that the pope and his cardinal council, should put such importance upon the erasure of three names from his Prohibitory Index, which had stood there, firm as rocks, for three centuries, as to run the high hazard of exposure of the clandestine proceeding, and the disgrace of publicly repealing his own decree without any new or honest reason, unless he were inwardly and sufficiently conscious that the main strength of the existing evidence against him lay in that Index? This is plainly one of the
- ↑ The example of Galileo put some apprehension into Descartes. See Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. iv. pp. 30, 31.
