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THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
earth (for, say they, if a man's eye were in the firmament, he should not at all discern that great
annual motion of the earth, but it would still appear punctum indivisibile and seem to be fixed in
one place, of the same bigness) that it is quite opposite to reason, to natural philosophy, and all
out as absurd as disproportional (so some will) as prodigious, as that of the sun's swift motion of
heavens. But hoc posito, to grant this their tenet of the earth's motion: if the earth move, it is a
planet, and shines to them in the moon, and to the other planetary inhabitants, as the moon and
they do to us upon the earth: but shine she doth, as Galileo, Kepler, and others prove, and then
per consequens, the rest of the planets are inhabited, as well as the moon, which he grants in his
dissertation with Galileo's Nuncius Sidereus, "that there be Jovial and Saturn inhabitants," &c.,
and those several planets have their several moons about them, as the earth hath hers, as Galileo
hath already evinced by his glasses: four about Jupiter, two about Saturn (though Sitius the
Florentine, Fortunius Licetus, and Jul. Caesar le Galla cavil at it) yet Kepler, the emperor's
mathematician, confirms out of his experience, that he saw as much by the same help, and more
about Mars, Venus, and the rest they hope to find out, peradventure even amongst the fixed stars,
which Brunus and Brutius have already averred. Then (I say) the earth and they be planets alike,
moved about the sun, the common centre of the world alike, and it may be those two green
children which Nubrigensis speaks of in his time, that fell from heaven, came from thence; and
that famous stone that fell from heaven in Aristotle's time, olymp. 84, anno tertio, ad Capuas
Fluenta, recorded by Laertius and others, or Ancile or buckler in Numa's time, recorded by
Festus. We may likewise insert with Campanella and Brunus, that which Pythagoras,
Aristarchus, Samius, Heraclitus, Epicurus, Melissus, Democritus, Leucippus maintained in their
ages, there be infinite worlds, and infinite earths or systems, in infinito æthere, which Eusebius
collects out of their tenets, because infinite stars and planets like unto this of ours, which some
stick not still to maintain and publicly defend, sperabundus expecto innumerabilium mundorum
in æternitate per ambulationem, &c. (Nic. Hill. Londinensis philos. Epicur.) For if the firmament
be of such an incomparable bigness, as these Copernical giants will have it, infinitum, aut infinito
proximum, so vast and full of innumerable stars, as being infinite in extent, one above another,
some higher, some lower, some nearer, some farther off, and so far asunder, and those so huge
and great, insomuch that if the whole sphere of Saturn, and all that is included in it, totum
aggregatum (as Fromundus of Louvain in his tract, de immobilitate terræ argues) evehatur inter
stellas, videri a nobis non poterat, tam immanis est distantia inter tellurem et fixas, sed instar
puncti, &c. If our world be small in respect, why may we not suppose a plurality of worlds, those
infinite stars visible in the firmament to be so many suns, with particular fixed centres; to have
likewise their subordinate planets, as the sun hath his dancing still round him? which Cardinal
Cusanus, Walkarinus, Brunus, and some others have held, and some still maintain, Animæ,
Aristotelismo innutritæ, et minutis speculationibus assuetæ, secus forsan, &c. Though they seem
close to us, they are infinitely distant, and so per consequens, there are infinite habitable worlds:
what hinders? Why should not an infinite cause (as God is) produce infinite effects? as Nic. Hill.
Democrit. philos. disputes: Kepler (I confess) will by no means admit of Brunus's infinite
worlds, or that the fixed stars should be so many suns, with their compassing planets, yet the said
Kepler between jest and earnest in his perspectives, lunar geography, & somnio suo, dissertat.
cum nunc. sider. seems in part to agree with this, and partly to contradict; for the planets, he
yields them to be inhabited, he doubts of the stars; and so doth Tycho in his astronomical
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