Stagirite as an immense comet incessantly reproducing itself.”
Clearly, Aristotle’s contribution to Natural Philosophy did not consist in suggesting or leading the way to true views as to the nature and arrangement of the heavenly bodies. He not only was not in advance of his age in this respect, but was even behind it, in so far as he refused to adopt theories, which have since turned out to have been anticipations of the results of modern science. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that those theories were incapable of verification at the time, and had no force in themselves to command the attention of the world. They were like the “false dawn” in tropical countries, which appears for a few minutes and then fades way, allowing the darkness again to reign supreme, till the true sunrise takes place. Unconvinced by the speculations of the Pythagorean school and of Aristarchus of Samos, the great Alexandrian astronomer, Ptolemy, in the second century of our era, reaffirmed the Aristotelian views as to the spherical form and motion of the heavens, as to the earth’s position in the centre of the heavens, and as to its being devoid of any motion of translation. And the Ptolemaic system satisfied men’s minds until, with Copernicus and Galileo, modern astronomy began.
We must allow that Aristotle’s cosmical ideas were erroneous and misleading. Still we must take them as constituting a mere fraction of his encyclopædia of philosophy, and we must recollect that they are put forth in works which laid out and constituted new sciences.
