"MYS.: You argue subtly indeed, but in truth this argument does not seem necessary to me; for what Aristotle admitted, that, while forsooth all the parts of the firmament changed their places, the firmament as a whole did not, is exceedingly absurd. For either the whole heaven is at rest or the whole heaven is moved. The senses themselves disprove that it is at rest; therefore it is moved. For it does not follow that if a body is not moved away from its place, it is not moved in that place. Furthermore, since we have the most certain proof of the movement of trepidation, not only all the parts of the firmament, but also the eight spheres, must necessarily leave their places and move up and down, forward and back."[202] [Footnote 198: Montaigne: _Essays_: Bk. II, c. 2: _An Apologie of Raymonde Sebonde_ (II, 352).] [Footnote 199: This book, published at Frankfort in 1597, was translated into French by M. Fougerolles and printed in Lyons that same year. It has become extremely rare since its "atheistic atmosphere" (Peignot: _Dictionnaire_) caused the Roman Church to place it upon the Index by decree of 1628, where it has remained to this day.] [Footnote 200: Cromer in History of Poland.] [Footnote 201: Cromer in History of Poland.[A]] [Footnote A: I could not find this reference in either of Martin Kromer's books; _De Origine et Rebus Gestis Polonorum, ad 1511_, or in his _Res Publicæ sive Status Regni Poloniæ_.] [Footnote 202: Bodin: _Univ. Nat. Theatrum_: Bk. V, sec. 2 (end).] This was the opinion of a profound thinker and experienced man of affairs living when Tycho Brahe and Bruno were still alive and Kepler and Galileo were beginning their astronomical investigations. But he was not alone in his views, as we shall see; for at the close of the sixteenth century, the Copernican doctrine had few avowed supporters. The Roman Church was still indifferent; the Protestants clinging to the literal interpretation of the Bible were openly antagonistic; the professors as a whole were too Aristotelian to accept or pay much attention to this novelty, except Kepler and his teacher Mæstlin (though the latter refused to uphold it in his textbook);[203] while astronomers and mathematicians who realized the insuperable objections to the Ptolemaic conception, welcomed the Tychonic system as a _via media_; and the common folk, if they heard of it at all, must have ridiculed it because it was so plainly opposed to what they saw in the heavens every day. In the same way their intellectual superiors exclaimed at the "delirium" of those supporting such a notion.[204] One thinker, however was to see far more in the doctrine than Copernicus himself had conceived, and by Giordano Bruno the Roman Church was to be aroused. [Footnote 203: Delambre: _Astr. Mod._: I, 663.]