Ecco ora un altro giudizio di sir George Cornewall Lewis (Historical survey of the Astronomy of the ancients, pp. 125-128): "The entire system was formed by an unscientific method. The inventor of it proceeded from certain arbitrary principles, and reasoned deductively from these principles, until he had constructed a scheme of the universe. It was assumed that fire is more worthy than earth: that the more worthy place must be given to the more worthy: and that the estremity is more worthy than the intermediate parts etc... The Pythagorean systeme of the universe, as reported by Philolaus, scarcely deserves the name of a philosophical hypothesis, devised for the explanation of observed phenomena. It is rather a work of the imagination, guided and governed by certain mystical abstractions and certain principles as to the virtues of numbers". Ed altrove, p. 189: "A wild and fanciful scheme was devised by Philolaus the Pythagorean, according to which etc.".
      521 In due luoghi della sua opera, Copernico si riferisce alle opinioni degli antichi sul moto della Terra. Il primo è nell'epistola dedicatoria a papa Paolo III, e lo riferiamo qui volontieri per disteso, perchè esso getta qualche luce anche sulla via seguita da Copernico nella sua grande scoperta: "... coepit me taedere, quod nulla certior ratio motuum machinae mundi, qui propter nos ab optimo et regularissimo omnium opifice conditus esset, philosophis constaret, qui alioqui rerum minutissimarum respectu eius orbis, tam exquisite scrutarentur.