Letter
from Galileo to Kepler
August 19, 1610
“You are the first and almost the only person who,
even
after but a cursory investigation, has, such is your openness of mind
and lofty
genius, given entire credit to my statements…. We will not trouble
ourselves
about the abuse of the multitude, for against Jupiter even giants, to
say
nothing of pigmies, fight in vain. Let
Jupiter stand in the heavens, and let eh sycophants bark at him as they
will….In Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Padua many have seen the
planets;
but all are silent on the subject and undecided, for the greater number
recognize neither Jupiter nor Mars and scarcely the moon as planet. At Venice
one man spoke against me, boasting that he knew for certain that my
satellites
of Jupiter, which he had several times observed, were not planets
because they
were always to be seen with Jupiter, and either all of some them, now
followed
and now preceded him. What is to be
done? Shall we side with Democritus or
Heraclitus? I think, my Kepler, we will laugh at the extraordinary
stupidity of
the multitude. What do you say to the
leading philosophers of the faculty here, to whom I have offered a
thousand
times of my own accord to show my studies, but who with the lazy
obstinacy of a
serpent who has eaten his fill have never consented to look at planets,
nor
moon, nor telescope? Verily, just as
serpents close their ears, so do these men close their eyes to the
light of
truth. These are great matters; yet they
do not occasion any surprise. People of
this sort thin that philosophy is a kind of book like the AEneid or the
Odyssey, and that the truth is to be sought, not in the universe, not
in
nature, but (I use their own words) by
comparing texts! How you would laugh
if you heard what things the first philosopher of the faculty at Pisa
brought against
me in the presence of the Grand Duke, for he tried, now with logical
arguments,
now with magical adjurations, to tear down and argue the new planets
our of
heaven.”
Source: Karl Von Gebler, Galileo Galilei, p. 26
(1879).