Nationalism and Culture (82 page)

To this new theory of Copernicus history offers few comparable intellectual achievements; yet with it the proud structure of the heliocentric system of the universe was not quite finished. From the beginning it found a flock of enthusiastic supporters, but still more opponents, so that it was able at first to make its way only gradually. At the outset the new theory met with the best reception in Germany, where the power of the church had been badly shaken by the Reformation. From this we must not conclude that Protestantism was any more favorably inclined to it. That was not at all the case. Luther and Melanchthon were just as uncompre-mending and hostile toward the new doctrine as the pope; but the new church had not yet had time enough to cement its power, and for this reason could not be so dangerous to the daring novelty as the Catholic Church in the Latin countries. In Italy Giordano Bruno, to whom the Copernican system had rendered good service as the basis for his nature philosophy, had to atone for his boldness at the stake (1600); while Galileo, the most brilliant teacher of the new view of the universe, perhaps escaped the same fate only by letting himself be moved to renounce his alleged errors before the Tribunal of the Inquisition.

The theory of Copernicus received a powerful impulse from the German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, the most distinguished pupil of Tycho Brahe, to whom he doubtless owed very much. Kepler developed

in his New Astronomy and in a later work his famous three laws, by which he brought out with astounding cleverness and after long and vain experiment, a mathematical proof of the correctness of the Copernican system. This brilliant thinker, whose intellectual greatness could not protect him from the bitterest misery, showed to his contemporaries that the paths of the planets are not actually circles, but ellipses, which, however, differ very little from true circles. Most important of all, he showed how the distances of the planets from the sun could be calculated from their periods of revolution, and what relation the velocity of their movement at different points in their orbits bears to their distance from the sun. Kepler had already grasped as a presumption that great unity of the cosmic laws which Newton later developed so brilliantly.

Almost at the same time, but independently of Kepler, Galileo Galilei of Pisa achieved a deeper insight into the operation of mechanical forces and established the laws of falling bodies, the motion of the pendulum, and projectiles, which put him in a position to answer all physical objections to the heliocentric system. But even in this field there had been a forerunner. Thus, the Genevan, Michel Varo, had already in 1585 clearly recognized the interrelation of the mechanical laws, and Simon Stevin of Brugge (i 548-1620) had tried, independently of him, to establish practically the principle of those laws. Besides these two, there were still other isolated thinkers who were active with more or less success in the same field. After they began to puzzle out the diaries of Leonardo da Vinci it became clearer and clearer that this genuinely universal intellect had anticipated Galileo and many another in several respects, as, for example, the explanation of the law of falling bodies, the wave theory and a few more.

With the help of the telescope which he constructed Galileo succeeded in making a considerable number of important discoveries in celestial space. Thus, by the discovery of the moons of Jupiter he offered convincing proof that there actually were heavenly bodies which did not revolve about the earth. All in all, the invention of the telescope led to a whole series of similar discoveries, which were made in different countries and quite independently of one another. We need only recall here the observations of the Jesuit Father Christopher Scheiner in Ingolstadt, of Johannes Fabricius in Osteel, Friesland, and of Thomas Harriot in Isleworth, England.-"^

After Kepler had succeeded in establishing the movements in space mathematically by his three fundamental laws, and Galileo had formu-

' The development and perfection of the telescope was advanced by members of all nations. Galileo was by no means the inventor of the astronomical telescope, as has been often asserted; he himself told that he was guided in the setting up of his instrument by a discovery of some Belgian. It is certain that the telescope was invented in

lated the general principles of the force of gravity as these are revealed on the earth, the idea lay ready to hand that the same laws operate not only upon our planet but in the entire universe and that they determine the movements of the heavenly bodies. Francis Bacon (1561-1621), who has been called the father of the inductive method, already dreamed of a time when the human mind would succeed in tracing all events in space to the same uniform physical laws.

It was Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the brilliant English mathematician and natural philosopher, who helped the doctrines of Copernicus and Kepler to a final effective victory by his formulation of the so-called "law of gravitation." Newton established that the force which makes an apple that has been loosened fail to the ground is the same which holds the planets in their orbits in space. He recognized that the force of attraction which resides in every body increases with its mass at such a rate that a body twice as heavy attracts another twice as strongly. Along with this he discovered, too, that the attractive force of a body increases or diminishes with its smaller or greater distance from another body, and that it is inversely proportional to the square of the distance j that, therefore, a body of the size of the earth but twice as far away from the sun, is pulled by the sun only one fourth as forcibly.

Newton reduced this relation to a definite formula. With the aid of the infinitesimal calculus—a mathematical method v/hich makes possible calculation with infinitely small magnitudes, and which the English thinker conceived almost simultaneously with the German philosopher, Leibnitz—he was able to prove the correctness of his discovery. This is set forth in his celebrated work Principia Mathematica. In this he also furnished the best confirmation of the heliocentric system of Copernicus and of the three laws of Kepler. Since then the law which bears Newton's name has been the basis of all astronomical calculations. But, just as Newton's brilliant discovery had its known anticipators, like Edmund Halley, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and others, who had all busied themselves with the problem of gravitation, so the theory was in no way a finality. In its turn, like every other great discovery, it gave the impulse to farther researches and observations. On the results of the Newtonian theory rested the splendid contributions of the famous mathematician, Leonhard Euler of Basel, and of the two Frenchmen, Alexis Clairvault and Jean le Rond d'Alemb^rt. Here, too, we may mention the Danish astronomer, Olaf Romer, who as early as 1675—before the appearance

Holland during the first decade of the seventeenth century, and the two spectacle makers, Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Jansen, were actually named as the inventors. Individual instruments, however, had been constructed before this. The invention was, so to speak, in the air, and its further development was aided by minds of every nation.

of Newton's principal work—on the basis of the Copernican system, had undertaken a measurement of the velocity of light from the occurrence of eclipses of the moons of Jupiter.

Newton's intellectual achievement gave the impulse to numerous new discoveries which smoothed the way for that great theory which the French astronomer, Pierre Laplace (i749-1827), set forth in his two works, Exposition du systeme du monde and Traite de la mecanique celeste, in which he gave an explanation of the origin of our planetary system and traced all events in space to the operation of purely physical forces. But even his theory did not put the capstone on the structure of the new conception of the universe j it was essentially corrected, broadened and extended by men like Friedrich Gauss, J. L. Lagrange, P. A. Hansen, A. L. Cauchy, J. C. Adams, S. Newcomb, H. Dylden, F. Tisserant, and numerous thinkers of all peoples and nations.

Astrophysics, also, which acquired such a splendid impetus during the course of the last century, developed in the same manner. Before the genius of Gustav Kirchhoff had succeeded in establishing the chemical composition of the sun by his discovery of spectrum analysis, a whole troop of thinkers and investigators had preceded him in the various countries; men like W. H. Wollaston, Joseph Fraunhofer, W. A. Miller, L. Foucault, A. J. Angstrom, Balfour Stewart, G. Stokes and many others, on whose results Kirchhoff depended, while he brilliantly extended them and wrought them into a synthetic whole. On the other hand, the discovery of spectrum analysis opened the way for innumerable new inventions and discoveries which because of their abundance cannot even be mentioned here.

It is, therefore, indisputable that in the creation and development of our modern picture of the universe brilliant minds of all countries have contributed, of whom only a few of the best-known names could be mentioned briefly. Further, the relativity theory of Albert Einstein, with the help of which he has succeeded in solving the mystery of the orbit of Mcrcurv in a manner as surprising as it is brilliant, would have been impossible without these countless predecessors. Let the incorrigible race fanatics enjoy themselves in proving from traditional portraits of Copernicus, Galileo or Laplace the membership of these men in the Nordic race; no one will envy them their childish sport. Wherever intellect speaks nationality and race vanish like mist before the wind, and it would be a senseless undertaking to try to judge a social idea, a religion or a scientific theory by its national content or according to the racial characteristics of its leaders,

Wc have seen how Poles, Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Danes, Swedes, Dutchmen, Belgians, Swiss and others have worked for the victory of the heliocentric system. That intellectual structure was

born of their united labor j to its development a whole world contributed j and its character cannot be determined by any political confession of faith nor by special national characteristics. When we are dealing with intellectual phenomena the universal in human thought becomes most clearly apparent and can be dammed in by no national limits j or, as Goethe so strikingly put it: "There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science. Both belong, like every exalted good, to the whole world, and can be fostered only by the general free cooperation of all who live at the same time, with constant regard for what remains known to us from the past "

What has been said here in a few words about the development of the Copernican theory holds good in still greater degree for the modern theory of evolution, which in such an astonishingly short time led to a complete reconstruction of all traditional concepts and hypotheses. Leaving out of consideration the heliocentric system, there is hardly any doctrine which has had such a deep and lasting effect upon the whole of human thought as the idea of a gradual development of all natural forms and manifestations of life under the influence of the environment and the external conditions of life. The new theory led not merely to a complete revolution in all fields of the natural science; it developed also quite new points of view in sociology, history and philosophy. Even the religious leaders, who at first fought the idea of evolution most bitterly, found themselves compelled to make far-reaching concessions to it and, after their fashion, to accommodate themselves to it. In a word, the idea of evolution has taken such complete possession of us and influences our whole thought to such a degree that we can today hardly conceive of any other view.

However, even this idea, which seems to us today so self-evident, did not burst suddenly upon the world, but like all great intellectual achievements only gradually matured and won general acceptance. How far back the first glimmerings of the theory of evolution extend historically will perhaps never be established. It is certain that the idea of a natural development of all things was already fairly widespread among the earliest of the Greek thinkers, and very probably would have guided the whole intellectual life of the European peoples into quite different channels if under the domination of the church the writings of the ancient sages had not remained so long unknown. As it was, they were transmitted only in fragments and in greatly diluted form to the men of a later epoch, who were controlled by quite different ideas.

Already among the Ionian philosophers, and especially in Anaximenes, we find the idea of a primal substance in which there resides a generative and transforming force revealing itself in production and alteration of living beings on the earth. Empedocles appears to have had a very profound grasp of this conception when he expressed the opinion that the

different living forms owe their origin to special combinations of the primal substance. This bold and unique thinker was already explaining the evolution of organic beings through adaptation to their environment, since, according to his view, forms suitably equipped would be able to maintain themselves, while the others would disappear. In Heraclitus and the Greek atomists, as well as among the Epicureans and others, references are found to a gradual evolution and transformation of all manifestations of life. These Lucretius later assembled in his famous didactic poem and they have thus come down to us. Moreover, it is clear from the work of Lucretius that the ancient thinkers were by no means dealing with a vague notion to which later generations have attributed a meaning corresponding to their own way of thinking, but with a clear conception, and while this was very often based on insufficient grounds, its kernel is unmistakable.

It was only by the prevalence of Christian dogmatism, which had committed itself completely to the biblical legend of the creation and would permit no other view, that these brilliant beginnings of a theory of evolution were for fifteen centuries pushed into the background— though the idea itself never completely disappeared. It reappeared in the Middle Ages with the Arabian philosophers, Farabi and Avicenna, although in a very peculiar form strongly influenced by neo-Platonism. It likewise found expression in the noteworthy work, Mekor Chaim, of the Jewish Cabalist, Avicebro (also translated into Latin), reminiscent in some respects of the German mystic, Jacob Bohme, in which the Cabalist, recognizably came close to a premonition of the idea of an eternal development of all things.'* The Scottish scholastic, Duns Scotus, also came very close to the idea of a development of the universe on the basis of definite physical laws.