The Sleepwalkers (168 page)

Wackher
von
Wackenfels
was
twenty
years
older
than
Kepler,
and
devoted
to
him.
Kepler
sponged
on
the
Privy
Counsellor's
excellent
wine,
and
had
dedicated
to
him
his
treatise
on
the
snow
crystals
as
a
New
Year's
gift.
Wackher,
though
a
Catholic
convert,
believed
in
the
plurality
of
worlds;
accordingly,
he
thought
that
Galileo's
discoveries
were
planets
to
other
stars,
outside
our
solar
system.
Kepler
rejected
this
idea;
but
he
equally
refused
to
admit
that
the
new
heavenly
bodies
could
be
revolving
round
the
sun,
on
the
grounds
that
since
there
were
only
five
perfect
solids,
there
could
only
be
six
planets
–
as
he
had
proved
to
his
own
satisfaction
in
the
Cosmic
Mystery
.
He
accordingly
deduced
a
priori
,
that
what
Galileo
had
seen
in
the
sky
could
only
be
secondary
satellites,
which
circled
round
Venus,
Mars,
Jupiter
and
Saturn,
as
the
moon
circled
round
the
earth.
Once
again
he
had
guessed
nearly
right
for
the
wrong
reasons:
Galileo's
discoveries
were
indeed
moons,
but
all
the
four
of
them
were
moons
of
Jupiter.

A
few
days
later,
authentic
news
arrived
in
the
shape
of
Galileo's
short
but
momentous
booklet,
Sidereus
Nuncius
–
The
Messenger
from
the
Stars
.
¹⁴
It
heralded
the
assault
on
the
universe
with
a
new
weapon,
an
optic
battering
ram,
the
telescope.

VIII KEPLER
AND
GALILEO

1.
A Digression on Mythography

IT
was
indeed
a
new
departure.
The
range
and
power
of
the
main
sense
organ
of
homo
sapiens
had
suddenly
started
to
grow
in
leaps
to
thirty
times,
a
hundred
times,
a
thousand
times
its
natural
capacity.
Parallel
leaps
and
bounds
in
the
range
of
other
organs
were
soon
to
transform
the
species
into
a
race
of
giants
in
power
–
without
enlarging
his
moral
stature
by
an
inch.
It
was
a
monstrously
one-sided
mutation
–
as
if
moles
were
growing
to
the
size
of
whales,
but
retaining
the
instincts
of
moles.
The
makers
of
the
scientific
revolution
were
individuals
who
in
this
transformation
of
the
race
played
the
part
of
the
mutating
genes.
Such
genes
are
ipso
facto
unbalanced
and
unstable.
The
personalities
of
these
"mutants"
already
foreshadowed
the
discrepancy
in
the
next
development
of
man:
the
intellectual
giants
of
the
scientific
revolution
were
moral
dwarfs.

They
were,
of
course,
neither
better
nor
worse
than
the
average
of
their
contemporaries.
They
were
moral
dwarfs
only
in
proportion
to
their
intellectual
greatness.
It
may
be
thought
unfair
to
judge
a
man's
character
by
the
standard
of
his
intellectual
achievements,
but
the
great
civilizations
of
the
past
did
precisely
this;
the
divorce
of
moral
from
intellectual
values
is
itself
a
characteristic
development
of
the
last
few
centuries.
It
is
foreshadowed
in
the
philosophy
of
Galileo,
and
became
fully
explicit
in
the
ethical
neutrality
of
modern
determinism.
The
indulgence
with
which
historians
of
science
treat
the
Founding
Fathers
is
based
on
precisely
that
tradition
which
the
Fathers
introduced
–
the
tradition
of
keeping
intellect
and
character
as
strictly
apart
as
Galileo
taught
us
to
separate
the
"primary"
and
"secondary"
qualities
of
objects.
Thus
moral
assessments
are
thought
to
be
essential
in
the
case
of
Cromwell
or
Danton,
but
irrelevant
in
the
case
of
Galileo,
Descartes
or
Newton.
However,
the
scientific
revolution
produced
not
only
discoveries,
but
a
new
attitude
to
life,
a
change
in
the
philosophical
climate.
And
on
that
new
climate,
the
personalities
and
beliefs
of
those
who
initiated
it
had
a
lasting
influence.
The
most
pronounced
of
these
influences,
in
their
different
fields,
were
Galileo's
and
Descartes'.

The
personality
of
Galileo,
as
it
emerges
from
works
of
popular
science,
has
even
less
relation
to
historic
fact
than
Canon
Koppernigk's.
In
his
particular
case,
however,
this
is
not
caused
by
a
benevolent
indifference
towards
the
individual
as
distinct
from
his
achievement,
but
by
more
partisan
motives.
In
works
with
a
theological
bias,
he
appears
as
the
nigger
in
the
woodpile;
in
rationalist
mythography,
as
the
Maid
of
Orleans
of
Science,
the
St.
George
who
slew
the
dragon
of
the
Inquisition.
It
is,
therefore,
hardly
surprising
that
the
fame
of
this
outstanding
genius
rests
mostly
on
discoveries
he
never
made,
and
on
feats
he
never
performed.
Contrary
to
statements
in
even
recent
outlines
of
science,
Galileo
did
not
invent
the
telescope;
nor
the
microscope;
nor
the
thermometer;
nor
the
pendulum
clock.
He
did
not
discover
the
law
of
inertia;
nor
the
parallelogram
of
forces
or
motions;
nor
the
sun
spots.
He
made
no
contribution
to
theoretical
astronomy;
he
did
not
throw
down
weights
from
the
leaning
tower
of
Pisa,
and
did
not
prove
the
truth
of
the
Copernican
system.
He
was
not
tortured
by
the
Inquisition,
did
not
languish
in
its
dungeons,
did
not
say
"
eppur
si
muove
";
and
he
was
not
a
martyr
of
science.