[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Ernst Freiherr von Feuchtersleben
(1806-49), an Austrian physician, philosopher, and poet, and a
specialist in medical psychology. The best known of his songs is that
beginning "_Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath_" to which Mendelssohn
composed one of his finest melodies.]
This lamentable death of the critical faculty is not less obvious in
the case of science, as is shown by the tenacious life of false and
disproved theories. If they are once accepted, they may go on bidding
defiance to truth for fifty or even a hundred years and more, as
stable as an iron pier in the midst of the waves. The Ptolemaic system
was still held a century after Copernicus had promulgated his theory.
Bacon, Descartes and Locke made their way extremely slowly and only
after a long time; as the reader may see by d'Alembert's celebrated
Preface to the _Encyclopedia_. Newton was not more successful; and
this is sufficiently proved by the bitterness and contempt with which
Leibnitz attacked his theory of gravitation in the controversy with
Clarke.[1] Although Newton lived for almost forty years after the
appearance of the _Principia_, his teaching was, when he died, only
to some extent accepted in his own country, whilst outside England he
counted scarcely twenty adherents; if we may believe the introductory
note to Voltaire's exposition of his theory.
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