"Ptolemaic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... According to the Ptolemaic system, the earth is encompassed by eight celestial zones or heavens; the first or highest, above which is the empyrean, (otherwise called the ninth heaven,) is that of the Moon, the second that of Mercury, the third that of Venus, the fourth ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been added to civilization. In like manner, it is worth while to pause a moment and consider what is implied in the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system. The world, regarded in old times as the center of all things, the apple of God's eye, for the sake of which were created sun and moon and stars, suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... examine, as the more pleasant spectacle of the two, that branch of thought in which some progress was really made, and in which the Ptolemaic schools helped forward the development of men who have become world-famous, and will remain so, I suppose, until the ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... to be required to vote for candidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which all mention of party is rigorously excluded.'[34] One seems to be reading a series of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy. ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... the discovery of the Copernican system, the three laws of Kepler, and Newton's law of gravitation, none of which is due to direct and special experimentation. Copernicus was an astronomer, but the discovery of his system is due chiefly to his study of the complications of the Ptolemaic system. Kepler is a memorable witness of what can be accomplished by skillful and persistent mental labor. "His discoveries were secrets extorted from nature by the most profound and laborious research." The discovery of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... mean, let me compare the advance of knowledge among mankind to the course taken by a planet. The false paths on which humanity usually enters after every important advance are like the epicycles in the Ptolemaic system, and after passing through one of them, the world is just where it was before it entered it. But the great minds, who really bring the race further on its course do not accompany it on the epicycles it makes from time to time. This explains ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the attributes of the Muses, the word "museum" has been adopted in recent times for a building in which collections of works of art and specimens of natural history are housed, and even for the collections themselves—in consequence of the foundation by the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt of a splendid institution at Alexandria to which the name museum (mouseion) was given. It included the great library, apparatus for the study of astronomy, anatomy, and other sciences, and collections of all kinds. The most learned ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... of man. They suddenly caught {xl} a vision of life as it was capable of becoming, and they committed their fortunes to the task of making that possible world real. By a shift of view, as revolutionary as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ—verifiable in experience—who revealed to them, in terms ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Old Sacred Theory of the Universe. The early Church's conviction of the uselessness of astronomy The growth of a sacred theory—Origen, the Gnostics, Philastrius, Cosmas, Isidore The geocentric, or Ptolemaic, theory, its origin, and its acceptance by the Christian world Development of the new sacred system of astronomy—the pseudo-Dionysius, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas Its popularization by Dante Its details Its ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... how stubbornly the Ptolemaic cosmogony still clings to our conceptions, how largely it still dominates—or till recently did dominate—the religious cosmography of the ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... they wished to rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimental religion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul should learn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no more manlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernican star-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine. Order was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive of excellence was what they meant ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... known as the Ptolemaic System, remained the standard authority in astronomy to the end of the Middle Ages, while his geography was accepted until the era of the great discoveries opened in the fifteenth century. Ptolemy is thought to have been born ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... centre of the earth: comp. Par. Lost i. 686, "Men also ... Ransacked the centre"; and Hymn Nat. 162, "The aged Earth ... Shall from the surface to the centre shake." Sometimes the word 'centre' was used of the Earth itself, the fixed centre of the whole universe according to the Ptolemaic system. The idea here conveyed, however, is not that of immovability (as in Par. Reg. iv. 534, "as a centre ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to rotate about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to our longitudinal antipodes. However much ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... of the universe, The Ptolemaic, held by all the schools, May yet be proven false. We yet may find This earth of ours is not the sovran lord Of all those wheeling spheres. Ourselves have marked Movements among the planets that forbid Acceptance ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... Wicksteed makes the following curious remark:—"I am often asked whether the 'Moderns' are Unitarians. The question is rather startling. It is as if one were asked whether the majority of English astronomers had ceased to uphold the Ptolemaic system yet. The best answer I can give is a reference to the chapter on 'God' in a popular work by Dr. Matthes which has run through four editions. In this chapter there is not a word about the Trinity, but at the close occurs this footnote: On the antiquated doctrine of the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... (probably 3500 to 3000 B.C.); (2) the period of the twelfth dynasty, to which belong the remains at Beni-Hassan; (3) the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when Thebes was in its glory, which is attested by the ruins of Luxor and Karnak; and (4) the Ptolemaic period, of which there are the remains at Denderah, Edfou, and Philae. The monuments that remain are almost exclusively tombs and temples. The tombs are, generally speaking, all met with on the east or right ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... day converge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... containing the necessary preliminaries to the study of the Ptolemaic system, gives a Table of Chords in a circle subtended by angles at the centre of ½° increasing by half-degrees to 180°. The circle is divided into 360 μοιραι {moirai}, parts or degrees, and the diameter into ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... he learnt some smattering of the geography of the earth and the heavens after the crude notions of an older day, he could have done no other, at that time, in the most enlightened Universities. Ptolemy's Geographia was still the text-book, and the so-called "Ptolemaic Theory" still the astronomical creed of scholars. Copernicus was, indeed, a man of forty when Holbein was painting this Signboard in 1516. But Copernicus was still interluding the active duties of Frauenburg's highly successful governor, tax-collector, judge, ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... have, as the world progressed in learning, been found unable to account for all of a given class of conditions. They have been replaced, therefore, by other theories, just as the Copernican theory of astronomy has displaced the Ptolemaic theory. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... bodies on the Earth, Moon, Sun, and planets were manifest; and the hypothesis was that their motions might be due to their attracting one another with a force inversely proportional to the squares of the distances between them. In the Ptolemaic Astronomy, again, there was an hypothesis as to the collocation of the heavenly bodies (namely, that our Earth was the centre of the universe, and that Moon, Sun, planets and stars revolved around her): in the early form of the system there was also an ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... history of philosophic thought. We know that in the later Vedic hymns some monotheistic conceptions of great excellence were developed, but these differ in their nature from the absolutism of the Upani@sads as much as the Ptolemaic and the Copernican ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta |
