Now this blackout shutter operates not only in the minds of the ‘ignorant and superstitious masses’ as Galileo called them, but is even more strikingly evident in Galileo’s own, and in other geniuses like Aristotle, Ptolemy, or Kepler. It looks as if, while part of their spirit was asking for more light, another part had been crying out for more darkness. The History of Science is a relative newcomer on the scene, and the biographers of its Cromwells and Napoleons are as yet little concerned with psychology; their heroes are mostly represented as reasoning-machines on austere marble pedestals,
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