"Sir,--I have reason to think that many persons have a very inaccurate notion of the _Editorial System_. What I call by this name has grown up in the last _centenary_--a word I may use to signify the hundred years now ending, and to avoid the ambiguity of _century_. It cannot conveniently be explained by editors themselves, and _edited_ journals generally do not like to say much about it. In _your_ paper perhaps, in which editorial duties differ somewhat from those of ordinary journals, the common system may be freely spoken of.
"When a reviewed author, as very often happens, writes to the editor of the reviewing journal to complain of what has been said of him, he frequently--even more often than not--complains of 'your reviewer.' He sometimes presumes that 'you' have, 'through inadvertence' in this instance, 'allowed some incompetent person to lower the character of your usually accurate pages.' Sometimes he talks of 'your scribe,' and, in extreme cases, even of 'your hack.' All this shows perfect ignorance of the journal system, except where it is done under the notion of letting the editor down easy. But the editor never accepts the mercy.
"All that is in a journal, except what is marked as from a correspondent, either by the editor himself or by the correspondent's real or fictitious signature, is published entirely on editorial responsibility, as much as if the editor had written it himself. The editor, therefore, may claim, and does claim and exercise, unlimited right of omission, addition, and alteration. This is so well understood that the editor performs his last function on the last revise without the 'contributor' knowing what is done. The word _contributor_ is the proper one; it implies that he furnishes materials without stating what he furnishes or how much of it is accepted, or whether he be the only contributor. All this applies both to political and literary journals. No editor acknowledges {16} the right of a contributor to withdraw an article, if he should find alterations in the proof sent to him for correction which would make him wish that the article should not appear. If the _demand_ for suppression were made--I say nothing about what might be granted to _request_--the answer would be, 'It is not your article, but mine; I have all the responsibility; if it should contain a libel, I could not give you up, even at your own desire. You have furnished me with materials, on the known and common understanding that I was to use them at my discretion, and you have no right to impede my operations by making the appearance of the article depend on your approbation of my use of your materials.'
"There is something to be said for this system, and something against it--I mean simply on its own merits. But the all-conquering argument in its favor is, that the only practicable alternative is the modern French plan of no articles without the signature of the writers. I need not discuss this plan; there is no collective party in favor of it. Some may think it is not the only alternative; they have not produced any intermediate proposal in which any dozen of persons have concurred. Many will say, Is not all this, though perfectly correct, well known to be matter of form? Is it not practically the course of events that an engaged contributor writes the article, and sends it to the editor, who admits it as written--substantially, at least? And is it not often very well known, by style and in other ways, who it was wrote the article? This system is matter of form just as much as loaded pistols are matter of form so long as the wearer is not assailed; but matter of form takes the form of matter in the pulling of a trigger, so soon as the need arises. Editors and contributors who can work together find each other out by elective affinity, so that the common run of events settles down into most articles appearing much as they are written. And there are two safety-valves; that is, when judicious persons come together. In the first place, the editor himself, when he has selected his contributor, feels that {17} the contributor is likely to know his business better than an editor can teach him; in fact, it is on that principle that the selection is made. But he feels that he is more competent than the writer to judge questions of strength and of tone, especially when the general purpose of the journal is considered, of which the editor is the judge without appeal. An editor who meddles with substantive matter is likely to be wrong, even when he knows the subject; but one who prunes what he deems excess, is likely to be right, even when he does not know the subject. In the second place, a contributor knows that he is supplying an editor, and learns, without suppressing truth or suggesting falsehood, to make the tone of his communications suit the periodical in which they are to appear. Hence it very often arises that a reviewed author, who thinks he knows the name of his reviewer, and proclaims it with expressions of dissatisfaction, is only wrong in supposing that his critic has given all his mind. It has happened to myself more than once, to be announced as the author of articles which I could not have signed, because they did not go far enough to warrant my affixing my name to them as to a sufficient expression of my own opinion.
"There are two other ways in which a reviewed author may be wrong about his critic. An editor frequently makes slight insertions or omissions--I mean slight in quantity of type--as he goes over the last proof; this he does in a comparative hurry, and it may chance that he does not know the full sting of his little alteration. The very bit which the writer of the book most complains of may not have been seen by the person who is called the writer of the article until after the appearance of the journal; nay, if he be one of those--few, I daresay--who do not read their own articles, may never have been seen by him at all. Possibly, the insertion or omission would not have been made if the editor could have had one minute's conversation with his contributor. Sometimes it actually contradicts something which is {18} allowed to remain in another part of the article; and sometimes, especially in the case of omission, it renders other parts of the article unintelligible. These are disadvantages of the system, and a judicious editor is not very free with his _unus et alter pannus_. Next, readers in general, when they see the pages of a journal with the articles so nicely fitting, and so many ending with the page or column, have very little notion of the cutting and carving which goes to the process. At the very last moment arises the necessity of some trimming of this kind; and the editor, who would gladly call the writer to counsel if he could, is obliged to strike out ten or twelve lines. He must do his best, but it may chance that the omission selected would take from the writer the power of owning the article. A few years ago, an able opponent of mine wrote to a journal some criticisms upon an article which he expressly attributed to me. I replied as if I were the writer, which, in a sense, I was. But if any one had required of me an unmodified 'Yes' or 'No' to the question whether I wrote the article, I must, of two falsehoods, have chosen 'No': for certain omissions, dictated by the necessities of space and time, would have amounted, had my signature been affixed, to a silent surrender of points which, in my own character, I must have strongly insisted on, unless I had chosen to admit certain inferences against what I had previously published in my own name. I may here add that the forms of journalism obliged me in this case to remind my opponent that it could not be permitted to me, _in that journal_, either to acknowledge or deny the authorship of the articles. The cautions derived from the above remarks are particularly wanted with reference to the editorial comments upon letters of complaint. There is often no time to send these letters to the contributor, and even when this can be done, an editor is--and very properly--never of so editorial a mind as when he is revising the comments of a contributor upon an assailant of the article. He is then in a better position as to information, and a more {19} critical position as to responsibility. Of course, an editor never meddles, except under notice, with the letter of a correspondent, whether of a complainant, of a casual informant, or of a contributor who sees reason to become a correspondent. Omissions must sometimes be made when a grievance is too highly spiced. It did once happen to me that a waggish editor made an insertion without notice in a letter signed by me with some fiction, which insertion contained the name of a friend of mine, with a satire which I did not believe, and should not have written if I had. To my strong rebuke, he replied--'I know it was very wrong; but human nature could not resist.' But this was the only occasion on which such a thing ever happened to me.
"I daresay what I have written may give some of your readers to understand some of the _pericula et commoda_ of modern journalism. I have known men of deep learning and science as ignorant of the prevailing system as any uneducated reader of a newspaper in a country town. I may perhaps induce some writers not to be too sure about this, that, or the other person. They may detect their reviewer, and they may be safe in attributing to him the general matter and tone of the article. But about one and another point, especially if it be a short and stinging point, they may very easily chance to be wrong. It has happened to myself, and within a few weeks to publication, to be wrong in two ways in reading a past article--to attribute to editorial insertion what was really my own, and to attribute to myself what was really editorial insertion."
What is a man to do who is asked whether he wrote an article? He may, of course, refuse to answer; which is regarded as an admission. He may say, as Swift did to Serjeant Bettesworth, "Sir, when I was a young man, a friend of mine advised me, whenever I was asked whether I had written a certain paper, to deny it; and I accordingly tell that I did _not_ write it." He may say, as I often do, {20} when charged with having invented a joke, story, or epigram, "I want all the credit I can get, and therefore I always acknowledge all that is attributed to me, truly or not; the story, etc. _is_ mine." But for serious earnest, in the matter of imputed criticism, the answer may be, "The article was of my material, but the editor has not let it stand as I gave it; I cannot own it as a whole." He may then refuse to be particular as to the amount of the editor's interference. Of this there are two extreme cases. The editor may have expunged nothing but a qualifying adverb. Or he may have done as follows. We all remember the account of Adam which satirizes woman, but eulogizes her if every second and third line be transposed. As in:
"Adam could find no solid peace When Eve was given him for a mate, Till he beheld a woman's face, Adam was in a happy state."
If this had been the article, and a gallant editor had made the transpositions, the author could not with truth acknowledge. If the alteration were only an omitted adverb, or a few things of the sort, the author could not with truth deny. In all that comes between, every man must be his own casuist. I stared, when I was a boy, to hear grave persons approve of Sir Walter Scott's downright denial that he was the author of Waverley, in answer to the Prince Regent's downright question. If I remember rightly, Samuel Johnson would have approved of the same course.
It is known that, whatever the law gives, it also gives all that is necessary to full possession; thus a man whose land is environed by land of others has a right of way over the land of these others. By analogy, it is argued that when a man has a right to his secret, he has a right to all that is necessary to keep it, and that is not unlawful. If, then, he can only keep his secret by denial, he has a right to denial. This I admit to be an answer against all men except the denier himself; if conscience and self-respect will allow {21} it, no one can impeach it. But the question cannot be solved on a case. That question is, A lie, is it _malum in se_, without reference to meaning and circumstances? This is a question with two sides to it. Cases may be invented in which a lie is the only way of preventing a murder, or in which a lie may otherwise save a life. In these cases it is difficult to acquit, and almost impossible to blame; discretion introduced, the line becomes very hard to draw.
I know but one work which has precisely--as at first appears--the character and object of my Budget. It is the _Review of the Works of the Royal Society of London_, by Sir John Hill, M.D. (1751 and 1780, 4to.). This man offended many: the Royal Society, by his work, the medical profession, by inventing and selling extra-pharmacopoeian doses; Garrick, by resenting the rejection of a play. So Garrick wrote:
"For physic and farces his equal there scarce is; His farces are physic; his physic a farce is."
I have fired at the Royal Society and at the medical profession, but I have given a wide berth to the drama and its wits; so there is no epigram out against me, as yet. He was very able and very eccentric. Dr. Thomson (_Hist. Roy. Soc._) says he has no humor, but Dr. Thomson was a man who never would have discovered humor.
Mr. Weld (_Hist. Roy. Soc._) backs Dr. Thomson, but with a remarkable addition. Having followed his predecessor in observing that the _Transactions_ in Martin Folkes's time have an unusual proportion of trifling and puerile papers, he says that Hill's book is a poor attempt at humor, and glaringly exhibits the feelings of a disappointed man. It is probable, he adds, that the points told with some effect on the Society; for shortly after its publication the _Transactions_ possess a much higher scientific value.
I copy an account which I gave elsewhere.
When the Royal Society was founded, the Fellows set {22} to work to prove all things, that they might hold fast that which was good. They bent themselves to the question whether sprats were young herrings. They made a circle of the powder of a unicorn's horn, and set a spider in the middle of it; "but it immediately ran out." They tried several times, and the spider "once made some stay in the powder." They inquired into Kenelm Digby's sympathetic powder. "Magnetic cures being discoursed of, Sir Gilbert Talbot promised to communicate what he knew of sympathetical cures; and those members who had any of the powder of sympathy, were desired to bring some of it at the next meeting."
June 21, 1661, certain gentlemen were appointed "curators of the proposal of tormenting a man with the sympathetic powder"; I cannot find any record of the result. And so they went on until the time of Sir John Hill's satire, in 1751. This once well-known work is, in my judgment, the greatest compliment the Royal Society ever received. It brought forward a number of what are now feeble and childish researches in the Philosophical Transactions. It showed that the inquirers had actually been inquiring; and that they did not pronounce decision about "natural _knowledge_" by help of "_natural_ knowledge." But for this, Hill would neither have known what to assail, nor how. Matters are now entirely changed. The scientific bodies are far too well established to risk themselves. _Ibit qui zonam perdidit:_
"Let him take castles who has ne'er a groat."
These great institutions are now without any collective purpose, except that of promoting individual energy; they print for their contributors, and guard themselves by a general declaration that they will not be answerable for the things they print. Of course they will not put forward anything for everybody; but a writer of a certain reputation, or matter of a certain look of plausibility and safety, {23} will find admission. This is as it should be; the pasturer of flocks and herds and the hunters of wild beasts are two very different bodies, with very different policies. The scientific academies are what a spiritualist might call "publishing mediums," and _their_ spirits fall occasionally into writing which looks as if minds in the higher state were not always impervious to nonsense.
The following joke is attributed to Sir John Hill. I cannot honestly say I believe it; but it shows that his contemporaries did not believe he had no humor. Good stories are always in some sort of keeping with the characters on which they are fastened. Sir John Hill contrived a communication to the Royal Society from Portsmouth, to the effect that a sailor had broken his leg in a fall from the mast-head; that bandages and a plentiful application of tarwater had made him, in three days, able to use his leg as well as ever. While this communication was under grave discussion--it must be remembered that many then thought tarwater had extraordinary remedial properties--the joker contrived that a second letter should be delivered, which stated that the writer had forgotten, in his previous communication, to mention that the leg was a wooden leg! Horace Walpole told this story, I suppose for the first time; he is good authority for the fact of circulation, but for nothing more.
Sir John Hill's book is droll and cutting satire. Dr. Maty, (Sec. Royal Society) wrote thus of it in the _Journal Britannique_ (Feb. 1751), of which he was editor:
"Il est facheux que cet ingenieux Naturaliste, qui nous a deja donne et qui nous prepare encore des ouvrages plus utiles, emploie a cette odieuse tache une plume qu'il trempe dans le fiel et dans l'absinthe. Il est vrai que plusieurs de ses remarques sont fondees, et qu'a l'erreur qu'il indique, il joint en meme tems la correction. Mais il n'est pas toujours equitable, et ne manque jamais d'insulter. Que peut {24} apres tout prouver son livre, si ce n'est que la quarante-cinquieme partie d'un tres-ample et tres-utile Recueil n'est pas exempte d'erreurs? Devoit-il confondre avec des Ecrivains superficiels, dont la Liberte du Corps ne permet pas de restreindre la fertilite, cette foule de savans du Premier ordre, dont les Ecrits ont orne et ornent encore les Transactions? A-t-il oublie qu'on y a vu frequemment les noms des Boyle, des Newton, des Halley, des De Moivres, des Hans Sloane, etc.? Et qu'on y trouve encore ceux des Ward, des Bradley, des Graham, des Ellicot, des Watson, et d'un Auteur que Mr. Hill prefere a tous les autres, je veux dire de Mr. Hill lui-meme?"[7]
This was the only answer; but it was no answer at all. Hill's object was to expose the absurdities; he therefore collected the absurdities. I feel sure that Hill was a benefactor of the Royal Society; and much more than he would have been if he had softened their errors and enhanced their praises. No reviewer will object to me that I have omitted Young, Laplace, etc. But then my book has a true title. Hill should not have called his a review of the "Works."
It was charged against Sir John Hill that he had tried to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and had failed. This he denied, and challenged the production of the certificate which a candidate always sends in, and which is preserved. {25} But perhaps he could not get so far as a certificate--that is, could not find any one to recommend him; he was a likely man to be in such a predicament. As I have myself run foul of the Society on some little points, I conceive it possible that I may fall under a like suspicion. Whether I could have been a Fellow, I cannot know; as the gentleman said who was asked if he could play the violin, I never tried. I have always had a high opinion of the Society upon its whole history. A person used to historical inquiry learns to look at wholes; the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the College of Physicians, etc. are taken in all their duration. But those who are not historians--I mean not possessed of the habit of history--hold a mass of opinions about current things which lead them into all kinds of confusion when they try to look back. Not to give an instance which will offend any set of existing men--this merely because I can do without it--let us take the country at large. Magna Charta for ever! glorious safeguard of our liberties! _Nullus liber homo capiatur aut imprisonetur ... aut aliquo modo destruatur, nisi per judicium parium_ ....[8] _Liber homo: frank home_; a capital thing for him--but how about the _villeins_? Oh, there are none _now_! But there were. Who cares for villains, or barbarians, or helots? And so England, and Athens, and Sparta, were free States; all the freemen in them were free. Long after Magna Charta, villains were sold with their "chattels and offspring," named in that order. Long after Magna Charta, it was law that "Le Seigniour poit rob, naufrer, et chastiser son villein a son volunt, salve que il ne poit luy maim."[9]
The Royal Society was founded as a co-operative body, and co-operation was its purpose. The early charters, etc. do not contain a trace of the intention to create a _scientific distinction_, a kind of Legion of Honor. It is clear that the {26} qualification was ability and willingness to do good work for the promotion of natural knowledge, no matter in how many persons, nor of what position in society. Charles II gave a smart rebuke for exclusiveness, as elsewhere mentioned. In time arose, almost of course, the idea of distinction attaching to the title; and when I first began to know the Society, it was in this state. Gentlemen of good social position were freely elected if they were really educated men; but the moment a claimant was announced as resting on his science, there was a disposition to inquire whether he was scientific enough. The maxim of the poet was adopted; and the Fellows were practically divided into _Drink-deeps_ and _Taste-nots_.
I was, in early life, much repelled by the tone taken by the Fellows of the Society with respect to their very mixed body. A man high in science--some thirty-seven years ago (about 1830)--gave me some encouragement, as he thought. "We shall have you a Fellow of the Royal Society in time," said he. Umph! thought I: for I had that day heard of some recent elections, the united science of which would not have demonstrated I. 1, nor explained the action of a pump. Truly an elevation to look up at! It came, further, to my knowledge that the Royal Society--if I might judge by the claims made by very influential Fellows--considered itself as entitled to the best of everything: second-best being left for the newer bodies. A secretary, in returning thanks for the Royal at an anniversary of the Astronomical, gave rather a lecture to the company on the positive duty of all present to send the very best to the old body, and the absolute right of the old body to expect it. An old friend of mine, on a similar occasion, stated as a fact that the thing was always done, as well as that it ought to be done.
Of late years this pretension has been made by a President of the Society. In 1855, Lord Rosse presented a confidential memorandum to the Council on the expediency of enlarging their number. He says, "In a Council so small it {27} is impossible to secure a satisfactory representation of the leading scientific Societies, and it is scarcely to be expected that, under such circumstances, they will continue to publish inferior papers while they send the best to our _Transactions_."
And, again, with all the Societies represented on the Council, "even if every Science had its Society, and if they published everything, withholding their best papers [i.e., from the Royal Society], which they would not be likely to do, still there would remain to the Royal Society ...." Lord Rosse seems to imagine that the minor Societies themselves transfer their best papers to the Royal Society; that if, for instance, the Astronomical Society were to receive from A.B. a paper of unusual merit, the Society would transfer it to the Royal Society. This is quite wrong: any preference of the Royal to another Society is the work of the contributor himself. But it shows how well hafted is the Royal Society's claim, that a President should acquire the notion that it is acknowledged and acted upon by the other Societies, in their joint and corporate capacities. To the pretension thus made I never could give any sympathy. When I first heard Mr. Christie, Sec. R. S., set it forth at the anniversary dinner of the Astronomical Society, I remembered the Baron in Walter Scott:
"Of Gilbert the Galliard a heriot he sought, Saying, Give thy best steed as a vassal ought."
And I remembered the answer:
"Lord and Earl though thou be, I trow I can rein Buck's-foot better than thou."
Fully conceding that the Royal Society is entitled to preeminent rank and all the respect due to age and services, I could not, nor can I now, see any more obligation in a contributor to send his best to that Society than he can make out to be due to himself. This pretension, in my mind, was hooked on, by my historical mode of viewing things already mentioned, to my knowledge of the fact that the Royal {28} Society--the chief fault, perhaps, lying with its President, Sir Joseph Banks--had sternly set itself against the formation of other societies; the Geological and Astronomical, for instance, though it must be added that the chief rebels came out of the Society itself. And so a certain not very defined dislike was generated in my mind--an anti-aristocratic affair--to the body which seemed to me a little too uplifted. This would, I daresay, have worn off; but a more formidable objection arose. My views of physical science gradually arranged themselves into a form which would have rendered F.R.S., as attached to my name, a false representation symbol. The Royal Society is the great fortress of general physics: and in the philosophy of our day, as to general physics, there is something which makes the banner of the R.S. one under which I cannot march. Everybody who saw the three letters after my name would infer certain things as to my mode of thought which would not be true inference. It would take much space to explain this in full. I may hereafter, perhaps, write a budget of collected results of the _a priori philosophy_, the nibbling at the small end of omniscience, and the effect it has had on common life, from the family parlor to the jury-box, from the girls'-school to the vestry-meeting. There are in the Society those who would, were there no others, prevent my criticism, be its conclusions true or false, from having any basis; but they are in the minority.
There is no objection to be made to the principles of philosophy in vogue at the Society, when they are stated as principles; but there is an omniscience in daily practice which the principles repudiate. In like manner, the most retaliatory Christians have a perfect form of round words about behavior to those who injure them; none of them are as candid as a little boy I knew, who, to his mother's admonition, You should love your enemies, answered--Catch me at it!
Years ago, a change took place which would alone have {29} put a sufficient difficulty in the way. The co-operative body got tired of getting funds from and lending name to persons who had little or no science, and wanted F.R.S. to be in every case a Fellow Really Scientific. Accordingly, the number of yearly elections was limited to fifteen recommended by the Council, unless the general body should choose to elect more; which it does not do. The election is now a competitive examination: it is no longer--Are you able and willing to promote natural knowledge; it is--Are you one of the upper fifteen of those who make such claim. In the list of candidates--a list rapidly growing in number--each year shows from thirty to forty of those whom Newton and Boyle would have gladly welcomed as fellow-laborers. And though the rejected of one year may be the accepted of the next--or of the next but one, or but two, if self-respect will permit the candidate to hang on--yet the time is clearly coming when many of those who ought to be welcomed will be excluded for life, or else shelved at last, when past work, with a scientific peerage. Coupled with this attempt to create a kind of order of knighthood is an absurdity so glaring that it should always be kept before the general eye. This distinction, this mark set by science upon successful investigation, is of necessity a class-distinction. Rowan Hamilton, one of the greatest names of our day in mathematical science, never could attach F.R.S. to his name--_he could not afford it_. There is a condition precedent--Four Red Sovereigns. It is four pounds a year, or--to those who have contributed to the Transactions--forty pounds down. This is as it should be: the Society must be supported. But it is not as it should be that a kind of title of honor should be forged, that a body should take upon itself to confer distinctions _for science_, when it is in the background--and kept there when the distinction is trumpeted--that the wearer is a man who can spare four pounds a year. I am well aware that in England a person who is not gifted either by nature or art, with this amount of money power, {30} is, with the mass, a very second-rate sort of Newton, whatever he may be in the field of investigation. Even men of science, so called, have this feeling. I know that the _scientific advisers_ of the Admiralty, who, years ago, received 100 pounds a year each for his trouble, were sneered at by a wealthy pretender as "fellows to whom a hundred a year is an object." Dr. Thomas Young was one of them. To a bookish man--I mean a man who can manage to collect books--there is no tax. To myself, for example, 40 pounds worth of books deducted from my shelves, and the life-use of the Society's splendid library instead, would have been a capital exchange. But there may be, and are, men who want books, and cannot pay the Society's price. The Council would be very liberal in allowing books to be consulted. I have no doubt that if a known investigator were to call and ask to look at certain books, the Assistant-Secretary would forthwith seat him with the books before him, absence of F.R.S. not in any wise withstanding. But this is not like having the right to consult any book on any day, and to take it away, if farther wanted.
So much for the Royal Society as concerns myself. I must add that there is not a spark of party feeling against those who wilfully remain outside. The better minds of course know better; and the smaller _savants_ look complacently on the idea of an outer world which makes _elite_ of them. I have done such a thing as serve on a committee of the Society, and report on a paper: they had the sense to ask, and I had the sense to see that none of my opinions were compromised by compliance. And I will be of any use which does not involve the status of _homo trium literarum_; as I have elsewhere explained, I would gladly be _Fautor Realis Scientiae_, but I would not be taken for _Falsae Rationis Sacerdos_.
Nothing worse will ever happen to me than the smile which individuals bestow on a man who does not _groove_. Wisdom, like religion, belongs to majorities; who can {31} wonder that it should be so thought, when it is so clearly pictured in the New Testament from one end to the other?
The counterpart of _paradox_, the isolated opinion of one or of few, is the general opinion held by all the rest; and the counterpart of false and absurd paradox is what is called the "vulgar error," the _pseudodox_. There is one great work on this last subject, the _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_ of Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of the _Religio Medici_; it usually goes by the name of Browne "On Vulgar Errors" (1st ed. 1646; 6th, 1672). A careful analysis of this work would show that vulgar errors are frequently opposed by scientific errors; but good sense is always good sense, and Browne's book has a vast quantity of it.
As an example of bad philosophy brought against bad observation. The Amphisbaena serpent was supposed to have two heads, one at each end; partly from its shape, partly because it runs backwards as well as forwards. On this Sir Thomas Browne makes the following remarks:
"And were there any such species or natural kind of animal, it would be hard to make good those six positions of body which, according to the three dimensions, are ascribed unto every Animal; that is, _infra_, _supra_, _ante_, _retro_, _dextrosum_, _sinistrosum_: for if (as it is determined) that be the anterior and upper part wherein the senses are placed, and that the posterior and lower part which is opposite thereunto, there is no inferior or former part in this Animal; for the senses, being placed at both extreams, doth make both ends anterior, which is impossible; the terms being Relative, which mutually subsist, and are not without each other. And therefore this duplicity was ill contrived to place one head at both extreams, and had been more tolerable to have settled three or four at one. And therefore also Poets have been more reasonable than Philosophers, and _Geryon_ or _Cerberus_ less monstrous than _Amphisbaena_." {32}
There may be paradox upon paradox: and there is a good instance in the eighth century in the case of Virgil, an Irishman, Bishop of Salzburg and afterwards Saint, and his quarrels with Boniface, an Englishman, Archbishop of Mentz, also afterwards Saint. All we know about the matter is, that there exists a letter of 748 from Pope Zachary, citing Virgil--then, it seems, at most a simple priest, though the Pope was not sure even of that--to Rome to answer the charge of maintaining that there is another world (_mundus_) under our earth (_terra_), with another sun and another moon. Nothing more is known: the letter contains threats in the event of the charge being true; and there history drops the matter. Since Virgil was afterwards a Bishop and a Saint, we may fairly conclude that he died in the full flower of his orthodox reputation. It has been supposed--and it seems probable--that Virgil maintained that the earth is peopled all the way round, so that under some spots there are antipodes; that his contemporaries, with very dim ideas about the roundness of the earth, and most of them with none at all, interpreted him as putting another earth under ours--turned the other way, probably, like the second piece of bread-and-butter in a sandwich, with a sun and moon of its own. In the eighth century this would infallibly have led to an underground Gospel, an underground Pope, and an underground Avignon for him to live in. When, in later times, the idea of inhabitants for the planets was started, it was immediately asked whether they had sinned, whether Jesus Christ died for _them_, whether their wine and their water could be lawfully used in the sacraments, etc.
On so small a basis as the above has been constructed a companion case to the persecution of Galileo. On one side the positive assertion, with indignant comment, that Virgil was deposed for antipodal heresy, on the other, serious attempts at justification, palliation, or mystification. Some writers say that Virgil was found guilty; others that he gave satisfactory explanation, and became very good friends with {33} Boniface: for all which see Bayle. Some have maintained that the antipodist was a different person from the canonized bishop: there is a second Virgil, made to order. When your shoes pinch, and will not stretch, always throw them away and get another pair: the same with your facts. Baronius was not up to the plan of a substitute: his commentator Pagi (probably writing about 1690) argues for it in a manner which I think Baronius would not have approved. This Virgil was perhaps a slippery fellow. The Pope says he hears that Virgil pretended licence from him to claim one of some new bishoprics: this he declares is totally false. It is part of the argument that such a man as this could not have been created a Bishop and a Saint: on this point there will be opinions and opinions.[10]
Lactantius, four centuries before, had laughed at the antipodes in a manner which seems to be ridicule thrown on the idea of the earth's roundness. Ptolemy, without reference to the antipodes, describes the extent of the inhabited part of the globe in a way which shows that he could have had no objection to men turned opposite ways. Probably, in the eighth century, the roundness of the earth was matter of thought only to astronomers. It should always be remembered, especially by those who affirm persecution of a true opinion, that but for our knowing from Lactantius that the antipodal notion had been matter of assertion and denial among theologians, we could never have had any great confidence in Virgil really having maintained the simple theory of the existence of antipodes. And even now we are not entitled to affirm it as having historical proof: the evidence {34} goes to Virgil having been charged with very absurd notions, which it seems more likely than not were the absurd constructions which ignorant contemporaries put upon sensible opinions of his.
One curious part of this discussion is that neither side has allowed Pope Zachary to produce evidence to character. He shall have been an Urban, say the astronomers; an Urban he ought to have been, say the theologians. What sort of man was Zachary? He was eminently sensible and conciliatory; he contrived to make northern barbarians hear reason in a way which puts him high among that section of the early popes who had the knack of managing uneducated swordsmen. He kept the peace in Italy to an extent which historians mention with admiration. Even Bale, that Maharajah of pope-haters, allows himself to quote in favor of Zachary, that "multa Papalem dignitatem decentia, eademque praeclara (scilicet) opera confecit."[11] And this, though so willing to find fault that, speaking of Zachary putting a little geographical description of the earth on the portico of the Lateran Church, he insinuates that it was intended to affirm that the Pope was lord of the whole. Nor can he say how long Zachary held the see, except by announcing his death in 752, "cum decem annis pestilentiae sedi praefuisset."[12]
There was another quarrel between Virgil and Boniface which is an illustration. An ignorant priest had baptized "in nomine Patri_a_, et Fili_a_ et Spiritu_a_ Sancta." Boniface declared the rite null and void: Virgil maintained the contrary; and Zachary decided in favor of Virgil, on the ground that the absurd form was only ignorance of Latin, and not heresy. It is hard to believe that this man deposed a priest for asserting the whole globe to be inhabited. To me the little information that we have seems {35} to indicate--but not with certainty--that Virgil maintained the antipodes: that his ignorant contemporaries travestied his theory into that of an underground cosmos; that the Pope cited him to Rome to explain his system, which, as reported, looked like what all would then have affirmed to be heresy; that he gave satisfactory explanations, and was dismissed with honor. It may be that the educated Greek monk, Zachary, knew his Ptolemy well enough to guess what the asserted heretic would say; we have seen that he seems to have patronized geography. The _description_ of the earth, according to historians, was a _map_; this Pope may have been more ready than another to prick up his ears at any rumor of geographical heresy, from hope of information. And Virgil, who may have entered the sacred presence as frightened as Jacquard, when Napoleon I sent for him and said, with a stern voice and threatening gesture, "You are the man who can tie a knot in a stretched string," may have departed as well pleased as Jacquard with the riband and pension which the interview was worth to him.
A word more about Baronius. If he had been pope, as he would have been but for the opposition of the Spaniards, and if he had lived ten years longer than he did, and if Clavius, who would have been his astronomical adviser, had lived five years longer than he did, it is probable, nay almost certain, that the great exhibition, the proceeding against Galileo, would not have furnished a joke against theology in all time to come. For Baronius was sensible and witty enough to say that in the Scriptures the Holy Spirit intended to teach how to go to Heaven, not how Heaven goes; and Clavius, in his last years, confessed that the whole system of the heavens had broken down, and must be mended.
The manner in which the Galileo case, a reality, and the Virgil case, a fiction, have been hawked against the Roman see are enough to show that the Pope and his adherents have not cared much about physical philosophy. In truth, orthodoxy has always had other fish to fry. Physics, which {36} in modern times has almost usurped the name _philosophy_, in England at least, has felt a little disposed to clothe herself with all the honors of persecution which belong to the real owner of the name. But the bishops, etc. of the Middle Ages knew that the contest between nominalism and realism, for instance, had a hundred times more bearing upon orthodoxy than anything in astronomy, etc. A wrong notion about _substance_ might play the mischief with _transubstantiation_.
The question of the earth's motion was the single point in which orthodoxy came into real contact with science. Many students of physics were suspected of magic, many of atheism: but, stupid as the mistake may have been, it was _bona fide_ the magic or the atheism, not the physics, which was assailed. In the astronomical case it was the very doctrine, as a doctrine, independently of consequences, which was the _corpus delicti_: and this because it contradicted the Bible. And so it did; for the stability of the earth is as clearly assumed from one end of the Old Testament to the other as the solidity of iron. Those who take the Bible to be _totidem verbis_ dictated by the God of Truth can refuse to believe it; and they make strange reasons. They undertake, _a priori_, to settle Divine intentions. The Holy Spirit did not _mean_ to teach natural philosophy: this they know beforehand; or else they infer it from finding that the earth does move, and the Bible says it does not. Of course, ignorance apart, every word is truth, or the writer did not mean truth. But this puts the whole book on its trial: for we never can find out what the writer meant, until we otherwise find out what is true. Those who like may, of course, declare for an inspiration over which they are to be viceroys; but common sense will either accept verbal meaning or deny verbal inspiration.
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