Free New Lands by Charles Fort Page B

support the theory of a top-shaped earth. In the records of the Society, one may read a report of the discussion that followed. There was no ridiculing. The President of the Society closed the discussion with virtual endorsement, recalling that it was Christopher Columbus who first said that this earth is top-shaped. For other expressions of this revolt against ancient dogmas, see Bull. Soc. Astro. de France, 17-315; 18-143; Pop. Sci. News, 31-234; Eng. Mec., 77-159; Sci. Amer., 100-441.
    As to supposed motions of this earth, axial and orbital, circumstances are the same, despite the popular supposition that the existence of these motions has been established by syntheses of data and by unanswerable logic. All scientists, philosophers, religionists, are today looking back, wondering what could have been the matter with their predecessors to permit them to believe what they did believe. Granted that there will be posterity, we shall be predecessors. Then what is it that is conventionally taught today that will in the future seem as imbecilic as to all present orthodoxies seem the vaporings of preceding systems?
    Well, for instance, that it is this earth that moves, though the sun seems to, by the same illusion by which to passengers on a boat, the shore seems to move, though it is the boat that is moving.
    Apply this reasoning to the moon. The moon seems to move around the earth—but to passengers on a boat, the shore seems to move, whereas it is the boat that is moving—therefore the moon does not move.
    As to the motions of the planets and stars that coordinate with the idea of a moving earth—they coordinate equally well with the idea of a stationary earth.
    In the system that was conceived by Copernicus I find nothing that can be said to resemble foundation: nothing but the appeal of greater simplicity. An earth that rotates and revolves is simpler to conceive of than is a stationary earth with a rigid composition of stars, swinging around it, stars kept apart by some unknown substance, or inter-repulsion. But all those who think that simplification is a standard to judge by are referred to Herbert Spencer’s compilations of data indicating that advancing knowledge complicates, making, then, complexity, and not simplicity, the standard by which to judge the more advanced. My own acceptance is that there are fluxes one way and then the other way: that the Ptolemaic system was complex and was simplified; that, out of what was once a clarification, new complications have arisen, and that again will come flux toward simplification or clarification—that the simplification by Copernicus has now developed into an incubus of unintelligibilities revolving around a farrago of inconsistencies, to which the complexities of Ptolemy are clear geometry: miracles, incredibilities, puerilities; tottering deductions depending upon flimsy agreements; brutalized observations that are slaves to infatuated principles—
    And one clear call that is heard above the rumble of readjusting collapses—the call for a Neo-astronomy—it may not be our Neo-astronomy.
    Prof. Young, for instance, in his Manual of Astronomy, says that there are no common, obvious proofs that the earth moves around the sun, but that there are three abstrusities, all of modern determination. Then, if Copernicus founded the present system, he founded upon nothing. He had nothing to base upon. He either never heard of, or could not detect one of these abstrusities. All his logic is represented in his reasoning upon this earth’s rotundity: that this earth is round, because of a general tendency to sphericity, manifesting, for instance, in fruits and in drops of water—showing that he must have been unaware not only of abstrusities, but of icicles and bananas and oysters. It is not that I am snobbishly deriding the humble and more than questionable ancestry of modern astronomy. I am pointing out that a doctrine came into existence with nothing for a foundation: not a