Hipparchus Possessed The True Spirit Of Philosophy:
Having resolved to
devote himself to the study of astronomy, his first general
[principal->principle] was to take nothing for granted; but setting aside
all that had been taught by former astronomers, to begin anew, and examine
and judge for himself:
He determined not to admit any results but such as
were grounded either in observations and experiments entirely new, made by
himself or on a new examination of former observations, conducted with the
utmost care and caution. In short, he may justly be regarded as one of the
first philosophers of antiquity who had a slight glimpse of the grand
maxim, which afterwards immortalized Bacon, and which has introduced modern
philosophers to a knowledge of the most secret and most sublime operations
of nature.
One of his first endeavours was, to verify the obliquity of the ecliptic,
as settled by Eratosthenes: he next fixed, as accurately as possible, the
latitude of Alexandria; but it would lead us far from the object of our
work, if we were even briefly to mention his discoveries in the science of
pure astronomy. We must confine ourselves to those parts of his discoveries
which benefitted geography, either directly or indirectly. After having, as
successfully as his means and the state of the science would permit him to
do, fixed the position of the stars, he transferred the method which he had
employed for this purpose to geography: he was the first who determined the
situation of places on the earth, by their latitudes and longitudes, with
any thing like accuracy.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 161 of 1007
Words from 44252 to 44515
of 273188
