Next I quote a passage about Galileo (by Milton - LR). It shows that the connection between the silencing of Galileo and the general decline of intellectual life in seventeenth-century Italy was obvious to a contemporary witness:
And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that these arguments of learned men's discouragements at this your order are mere flourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have heard in other countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, for that honor I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; that this was it that damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought.
My last quotation expresses Milton's patriotic pride in the intellectual vitality of seventeenth-century England, a pride that twentieth-century Americans have good reason to share.
Lords and Commoners of England, consider what nation it is of whereof you share, and whereof ye are the governors; a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynian wilderness, not their youth, but their stain men, to learn our language and our theologic arts.
Perhaps, after all, as we struggle to reconcile with the enduring problems of reconciling individual freedom with public safety, the wisdom of a great poet may be a surer guide than the calculations of risk-benefit analysis.
That was the end of my pitch. The debate continued with statements and questions by the audience which I do not remember. No vote was taken to determine who won. The purpose of the debate was not to win but to educate. Bill Joy and I remain friends."
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