Is it not true that for every person the course of life is along the line of least resistance, and that in this the movement of humanity is like the movement of material bodies?

As a better knowledge of Nature was obtained, the sky was shown to be an illusionBut this did not take place without resistance. At first, the public, and particularly its religious portion, denounced the rising doubts as atheism.

Over events, we may have some control, but over the law of life's progress none.

In early life I had felt a strong desire to devote myself to the experimental study of nature; and, happening to see a glass containing some camphor, portions of which had been caused to condense in very beautiful crystals on the illuminated side, I was induced to read everything I could obtain respecting the chemical and mechanical influences of light, adhesion, and capillary attraction.

As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican-we have only to recall the Inquisition-the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood!

Experimental investigation, to borrow a phrase employed by Kepler respecting the testing of hypotheses, is "a very great thief of time." Sometimes it costs many days to determine a fact that can be stated in a line.

In England Giordano Bruno had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity, the impostures, of his persecutors - that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith.