Note 26 — INTRODUCTION.
Reading edition
“A man would deceive himself,” says Lalande, “in believing he could be a philosopher, without the study of the natural sciences. To be wise, not by weakness, but by principles, it is necessary that, to be able to reflect and think with vigour, we be freed from those prejudices which deceive the judgment, and which oppose themselves to the development of reason and of genius. PythagorasPythagoras would not have any disciples, who had not studied Mathematics: over his door was to be read, that “no one was to enter, unless he were a geometrician.”—Morals would be less sure, and less attractive for us, if they were to be founded on ignorance or on error.
“Ought we,” he asks, “to consider as of no importance the advantage of being freed from the misfortunes of ignorance? Is it possible to observe, without a feeling of compassion and even of shame, the stupidity of those, who formerly believed, that by making a great vociferation, during an eclipse of the Moon, they furnished relief to the sufferings of that (imagined) goddess; or, that these eclipses were produced by enchantment?”
“Cum frustra resonant æra auxiliaria Lunæ.”
Met. iv. 333.
Reyas, in the dedication of his Commentaries on the Planisphere to the Emperor Charles V. mentions a curious historical fact, in illustration of the effects of that superstition, derived from ignorance, which astronomy has banished from the civilized world. It is thus related by Lalande:—“Christopher Columbus, when commanding the army which Ferdinand, king of Spain, had sent to Jamaica, some short time after the discovery of that island, experienced so great a scarcity of provisions, that no hope remained of saving his army, which he expected to be soon at the mercy of the savages. An approaching eclipse of the moon furnished this able man with the means of extricating himself from his embarrassment: he let the chief of the savages know, that if they should not, in a few hours, send him all he asked for, he would oppress them with the greatest calamities; and that he would begin by depriving the moon of her light. At first, they contemned his menaces; but, when they saw that the moon began, in reality, to disappear, they were seized with terror; they carried all they had to the general, and came themselves to implore forgiveness.”
Comets were formerly, even in civilized nations, another great cause of consternation among the people; and one, also, which a knowledge of astronomy has at length divested of its terrors, by removing the source of those superstitious errors, a grossly mistaken notion of the nature of those phænomena. “We are sorry to find,” says Lalande, “such strange prejudices, not only in Homer [Iliad iv. 75.] but even in the most beautiful poem of the sixteenth century; whereby means are furnished of perpetuating our errors—
“Qual con le chiome sanguinose orrende
Splender Cometa suol per l’aria adusta,
Che i regni muta e i feri morbi adduce,
E ai purpurei tiranni infausta luce.”
Tasso’s Jerus. del.
Which Mr. Hoole has thus translated—
“As, shaking terrors from his blazing hair,
A sanguine Comet gleams through dusky air,
To ruin states, and dire diseases spread,
And baleful light on purpled tyrants shed.”
Further, the progress of genuine astronomy has almost wholly dissipated, in our day, the gross delusions of astrology, with the mischievous portents of its infatuated judicial interpreters; follies engendered by ignorance, which is, ever, the prolific parent of prejudice, of superstition, and of their numerous concomitant evils.