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before Adam, and is happy that they did not incur original sin. If this happened on earth, why should it
not have happened also on the stars?
 Who told you this pack of bull Scheise? Father Caspar shouted in a fury.
 Many speak of it. And an Arab sage said it could be de-duced from a page of the Koran.
 You say me the Koran proved the truth of a thing? Oh, God omnipotens, I implore Thee strike down
this vain, windy, bloated, arrogant, turbulent, rebellious beast of a man, the demon, dog, devil, cursed
infected hound, let him not set foot on this ship!
And Father Caspar lifted and snapped the rope like a whip, first striking Roberto on the face, then letting
go of the line.
Roberto fell back with his head down, groped and gasped, could not pull the rope hard enough to tauten
it, cried for help as he swallowed water, and Father Caspar shouted to him that he wanted to see him
give up the Geist and choke to death so he would sink straight to Hell as befitted the ill-born of his race.
Then, since the Jesuit was a Christian soul, when he con-sidered Roberto sufficiently punished, he pulled
him up. And for that day both the lesson in swimming and that in astron-omy came to an end, and the
two went off to sleep, each in his own direction, without exchanging a word.
They made peace the next day. Roberto admitted that he did not believe in this vortex hypothesis, and
considered, rather, that the infinite worlds were an effect of an eddying of atoms in the Void, and that this
did not in any way exclude the possibility of a provident Divinity commanding these atoms and organizing
them in accord with His decrees, as Roberto had learned from the Canon of Digne. Father Caspar,
however, rejected this idea also, which required a Void in which atoms could move, and Roberto had no
desire to argue further with this generous generalizer who, rather than sever the cord that kept him alive,
gave it all too much play.
After receiving a promise there would be no more threats of death, Roberto resumed his swimming
experiments. Father Caspar tried to persuade him to move in the water, as this is the fundamental
principle of the art of natation, and he sug-gested slow movements of the hands and the legs, but Roberto
preferred to lie idle, floating.
Father Caspar allowed him to linger, and exploited this inaction to rehearse his other arguments against
the move-ment of the earth.In primis, the Argument of the Sun. Which, if it remained motionless and we
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were to look at it precisely at noon from the center of a room through a window, and the earth turned
with the supposed velocity and it would require a great velocity to make a complete revolution in
twenty-four hours then in an instant the sun would vanish from our sight.
The Argument of Hail followed. It falls sometimes for a whole hour but, whether the clouds go to east or
west, north or south, it never covers the countryside for more than twenty or thirty miles. But if the earth
revolved, and the hail clouds were carried by the wind in its course, hail would necessarily fall over at
least three or four hundred miles of countryside.
Then there was the Argument of White Clouds, which drift through the air when the weather is calm, and
seem always to proceed with equal slowness; whereas, if the earth revolves, those that go westward
should advance at immense speed.
He concluded with the Argument of Terrestrial Animals, which by instinct should always move towards
the east, to comply with the movement of the earth that is their master; and they should show great
aversion to westward movement, sensing that this movement is against nature.
Roberto accepted all these arguments for a little while, but then he took a dislike to them, and opposed
all that learning with his own Argument of Desire.
 But finally, he said to the Jesuit,  do not deprive me of the joy of thinking that I could rise in flight and
see in twenty-four hours the earth revolve beneath me, and I would see so many different faces pass by,
white, black, yellow, olive, with caps or with turbans, and cities with spires now pointed, now round,
with the Cross and with the Crescent, and cities with porcelain towers and lands of bells, and the
Iroquois pre-paring to eat alive a prisoner of war, and the women of the land of Tesso busy painting their
lips blue to please the ugliest men of the planet, and those of Camul, whose husbands pass them to the
first newcomer, as Messer Milione tells in his book....
 You see? As I say: when you in the tavern think of your philosophy, it is always thoughts of lust! And if
you did not these thoughts have, you could this voyage make if God granted you the gratia to revolve
yourself around the earth, which is a gratia as gross as leaving you in the sky suspended.
Roberto was unconvinced, but he could think of no fur-ther rebuttal. Then he took a longer way, setting
out from arguments he had heard, which similarly did not seem to him in conflict with the idea of a
provident God, and he asked Caspar if he agreed in considering Nature a grand theater, where we see
only what the Author has put on stage. From our seat we do not see the theater as it really is: the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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