Excerpt from On Gravitation and Relativity: Being the Halley Lecture, Delivered on June 12, 1920

The idea of gravity presented little difficulty to the ancients. Each existence was ruled by its peculiar law. Even lifeless things were animated by a power - whether it originated within them or without them - which impelled them to seek the centre of the world. Thought appeared here to run in an easy familiar groove, but the theory of a moving earth upset it. For, why did things seek to reach its centre if the Earth was not the centre of the world, but merely a minor satellite of the Sun? The difficulty called for a new revolution of ideas, it echoed afresh Copernicus's quotation provehimur portu, terraeque urbesque recedunt.

We are swept from our anchorage indeed, the lands we knew, the cities we dwelt in, fade into mist.

Metaphysical juggling with physical matters was at that time a staple of the universities, and Galileo was a master juggler. He gives its proper prominence to the feature I refer to in his Dialogues on the systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus. He uses all his art to expose the illusions and the tricks current among rival professors of his craft. We see the doomed theory as a tottering, impossible, ridiculous edifice. To the seed spread by this book, fostered by the immense notoriety of its author's prosecution, one is perhaps not wrong in tracing the growth, essentially British as it is, of the study of the positive in Natural Science.

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