in 1616, there are no letters to him extant. This is the more to be regretted, as the gap occurs at a very interesting juncture. Perhaps after the Copernican doctrines were condemned Galileo may have destroyed this correspondence out of regard for his friends, for it may have contained allusions to very delicate matters.
Meanwhile, after having been repeatedly urged to it by Mgr. Dini,[1] he had completed his great apologetic treatise, in the form of a letter to the Grand Duchess Dowager, Christine. As it accurately defines the standpoint which Galileo desired to take as a natural philosopher and sincere Catholic, with respect to the Church of Rome, it seems necessary to give a sketch of its contents.
Galileo begins with the motive of his Apology. Several years ago he had made many discoveries in the heavens, the novelty of which, and the vast consequences they involve, which are opposed to many of the principles of the modern Aristotelian school, have incensed no small number of professors against him, as if he had placed these phenomena in the heavens with his own hands in order to overturn nature and science. Placing a greater value on their own opinions than on truth, these men had taken upon themselves to deny the existence of these discoveries, whereas if they had only consented to observe them, they would have been convinced. Instead of this, they assailed the new discoveries with empty arguments, and worst mistake of all, interwove them with passages of Scripture which they did not understand. But when the majority of the scientific world was convinced with its own eyes, so that it was impossible any longer to doubt the truth of these phenomena, their opponents tried to consign them to oblivion by obstinate silence; and when that did not avail they took another course. Galileo says that he should pay no more heed to these attacks than to former ones, at which, confident of the final result, he had always laughed, but they seek to cast an aspersion on him which he dreads
- ↑ See his letter to Galileo, May 16th, 1615. (Op. viii. pp. 376, 377.)
