The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1877-05-24
A Philosophers Defeat.

FeThe trial and imprisonment Of Galileo
form the final scene in the death of the
Italian intellect The most eminent
genius of his country, if not Of his age,
almost the founder of modern science,
the peer and contemporary Of Shake.
speare, Bacon, Milton, the successor Of
Michael Angelo, had Galileo obtained an
utterance in Italy for scientific truth, the
spell that rested upon her might have
been broken. There might have bloomed
once more o literature touched by the
free spirit of Dante, political progress
that would have reflected the Puritanic
revolutions of the North. But with Ga
lileo fell the independence of Italian
thought. His abjuration is the saddest
picture in modern intellectual history.
Conscious of the truth, he was condemed
to renounce it and repeat falsehood.
The Newton, the Herschel of his age, he
was forced to abjure the favorite studies
of his life, and pause forever in that path
of scientific discovery which had already
made Italy famous. All the world wit
messed his fall, and he whose eye had first
pierced the mysterious vault above, who
of all his race had first brought back
tidings of new suns and planets in its
sublime abyss, yielded to the terrors Of
torture, the fear Of death; and sacrificed
the integrity of his soul to the menaces
of the Church. With malignant joy the
Jesuits saw the last great Italian perish
within their tolls, and were perhaps satis-
fed with the humiliation. of Galileo."
"When, at the close of his splendid
career, covered with renown, yet shut up
in his villa at Arcetri, the prisoner of the
Inquisition, watched by envious eyes,
threatened, should he murmur or rebel,
with the most dreadful punishment of
the church, Galileo sick and worn with
age and sorrow, lamented in letters to his
friends that he had ever ventured upon
those fatal studies which had served only
to bring upon him persecution and shame,
fair-haired, blue eyed poet from the
cloudy North, who was just entering with
an equal ardor upon the search for truth,
visited the brightest skies of Florence,
saw with astonishment the Imprisonment
of its greatest genius, and heard, perhaps,
from his own lips the unmerited sorrows
that had fallen upon his later years. It
was Milton lamenting for Galileo. In
the cultivated society Of Florence the
young English scholar must often have
remembered the lonely prisoner who,
shut out from all the pleasures of intel
llectual intercourse, was confined in the
distant villa. Milton at Florence wrote
verses, was complimented in graceful
stanzas,. and was not slow to return the
elegant adulation. Yet with all the
more intelligent Florentines he saw typi-
fed in the fate of Galileo the quick ex-
tinction of Italian letters. In his defense
of the freedom of the press, he relates to
the English public how severe Inquisi-
ton had checked at Florence all mental
progress, how the accomplished Floren-
tines lamented that they had not been
born in land like England, where
learning was free, how nothing was now
written in Italy but 'hattery and fustian.'
There he adds, it was that / found and
visited the famous Galileo, grown. old, q
prisoner to the Inquisition.' The specta-
Gle of the great philosopher, silenced,
terrified, contemned, never passed from
his mind. In his youth he had lamented
over him tenderly. In manhood, when
mental tyranny like, that WHICH hung
over Italy seemed about to envelop all
England, and prosecuting Church and
despotic king had nearly subdued its
virtue, Milton, instructed by the fate of
Italian thought, led on the defenders Of
freedom. And when, in his old age, blind
and forsaken like Galileo, he poured
forth in sonorous strains, the treasures of
life of study, one Of his most splendid
SMILES, one of his most touching allu-
sions, is when he paints the Tuscan artist
on the height of Fiesole, and makes the
chief glory of science lend aid to the i'm
mortal grandeur of his song" .t,-, /.