Note 271 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

The stories of his being tortured and blinded, and saying “Still it moves,” are indeed myths.271 The broken-spirited old man was in no mood so to speak; he was, moreover, in all respects save his science, an orthodox Catholic,272 and as such not likely to defy the Church to its face. In reality he was formally in the custody of the Inquisition—and this not in a cell, but in the house of an official—for only twenty-two days. After the sentence he was again formally detained for some seventeen days in the Villa Medici, but was then allowed to return to his own rural home at Acatri,273 on condition that he lived in solitude, receiving no visitors. He was thus much more truly a prisoner than the so-called “prisoner of the Vatican” in our own day. The worst part of the sentence, however, was the placing of all his works, published and unpublished, on the Index Expurgatorius, and the gag thus laid on all utterance of rational scientific thought in Italy—an evil of incalculable influence. “The lack of liberty and speculation,” writes a careful Italian student, “was the cause of the death first of the Accademia dei Lincei, an institution unique in its time; then of the Accademia del Cimento. Thus Italy, after the marvellous period of vigorous native civilization in the thirteenth century, after a second period of civilization less native but still its own, as being Latin, saw itself arrested on the threshold of a third and not less splendid period. Vexations and prohibitions expelled courage, spontaneity, and universality from the national mind; literary style became uncertain, indeterminate; and, forbidden to treat of government, science, or religion, turned to things frivolous and fruitless. For the great academies, instituted to renovate and further the study of natural philosophy, were substituted small ones without any such aim. Intellectual energy, the love of research and of objective truth, greatness of feeling and nobility of character, all suffered. Nothing so injures a people as the compulsion to express or conceal its thought solely from motives of fear. The nation in which those conditions were set up became intellectually inferior to those in which it was possible to pass freely in the vast regions of knowledge. Her culture grew restricted, devoid of originality, vaporous, umbratile; there arose habits of servility and dissimulation; great books, great men, great purposes were denaturalized.”274